In my last post, Five things built better now, I marvelled at innovations in products and designs that we’re incorporating into our renovation plan.

And now, my head scratchers: the things populating current design magazine must-have lists that I look at and go, whatever for?

Karate chop pillows

The first is less an item than a style. Apparently, one must “karate chop” one’s pillows these days. If you’ve been blissfully living in a cabin retreat for the last few years, “karate chop pillows” look like this:

During this renovation, we started watching a Netflix series, Dream Home Makeover. In one episode, the series’ designer lead tutors her little daughters on how to artfully dent the couch pillows. If you Google “karate chop pillows,” you’ll discover that manufacturers are now making pillows with V shaped tops to save you the trouble of “hai-yaa!!-ing” around your home. Am I the only person who uses pillows? Like, to support my lower back, rest my head, be comfy?

Pot fillers

Turning to the kitchen, the centre of our renovation, our contractor asked early on if I wanted a pot-filler tap over the stove. What?

Apparently, it’s the height of convenience to be able to fill a pot of water while it sits on your stove, rather than do so at your sink. OK. But. The tricky part is never schlepping a pot of cold water to the stove. What you want to make easy is the trek to the sink from the stove to drain off boiling water from pasta, potatoes, or whatever else you cook that requires a big pot o’ water to begin with. For me, having your sink near your stove is the trick: not another tap.

Touch-activated faucets

“Yeah, I’d never put in one of those at my house.” When a tradesperson says this, as a plumber mentioned to me when I was faucet shopping, you’d be wise to listen. Another “all the rage” kitchen item is touch-activated faucets. As one of the big faucet manufacturers, Delta, describes it, this “enables you to turn your kitchen faucet on and off with just a touch anywhere on the faucet’s body or handle.” These still come with a tap handle but there is a battery-operated gizmo mounted under the faucet and countertop that makes the tap capable of capacitive sensing. As renovation blog Kitchen Infinity explains, “capacitive sensing is based on the fact that the human body is conductive. When a person touches a touch faucet, his or her body completes an electrical circuit, which tells the faucet to turn on.” I guess if you have hands covered in flour or goop, you can boink the tap with your elbow and water will come out.

The faucet we bought for the kitchen comes in a regular and touch-activated model. The latter is twice the price. It’s also twice the headache. These have been around long enough that plumbers are tired of service calls to deal with the finicky things. Also, your tap stops working when the battery dies.

Those with mobility issues may find these a great aid to navigating their kitchen without having to move a faucet handle: touchless faucets — the kind you’ve likely encountered in public washrooms where taps turn on by motion sensor — are likely a better choice. But be warned these in-between touch-activated types are proving to be the problem child of the faucet world.

Light switches in the middle of the wall

OK, maybe this isn’t a trend. But it’s a weird evolution in home electrical wiring.

Used to be, you found switches right by a door frame. Why has this changed? The first time I lived with this was at our Toronto apartment, which had been gutted and rebuilt in 2012. It had switches maddeningly placed in the middle of walls, or at least not near the edge of a wall or near a door frame. This meant hanging art or mirrors in awkward places because the sweet-spot real estate was taken up by a plate of switches. Our contractor, Jerry, is a licensed electrician and one of the first things we discussed was where switches went: As close to door frames as possible, please.

Brass, brass everywhere

I get it. You may love it. I used to love it, too. I had a brass frame bed. Wood-framed mirror painted gold. Brass switch plates. Brass lamps. Even a glass-topped coffee table with brass frame.

But a decade into independent living, I started leaning toward the silver side of things, whether pewter, brushed nickel or chrome. The turning point was finally spray-painting that brass coffee table frame pewter/silver.

As we’ve shopped for accessories to furnish our place at the end of Renovation Road, I discovered that, unbeknownst to me, brass/gold had once again climbed to the top of the trend podium. Chairs with gold legs. Gold faucets. Brass handles. Gold chandeliers.

These days, for me, brass screams 1980s and 1990s as loudly as stiff padded shoulders. And I no more want a house full of brass bits than I want a return to those linebacker-shoulder jackets (or acid-washed jeans).