Last year, during the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, Dan Medley installed hundreds of new air conditioners in apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
These were not the unglamorous air conditioners that Mr. Medley, 35, a handyman in Manhattan, was familiar with. His wealthier clients seemed to be upgrading to air conditioners that looked like they had undergone cosmetic surgery: Their hard edges softened, their surfaces sculpted and smoothed.
On Park Avenue, he installed an air conditioner starting in July, a start-up that sells gracefully rounded windows with pastel covers. He scoured Home Depots for six curvaceous Midea air conditioners for a single customer on the Upper West Side. Others opted for Windmill, which touts its minimalist unit on Instagram as a “sleek and chic transformation moment.”
Several companies are trying to capitalize on increasingly unbearable summers with a fleet of photogenic window air conditioners, aimed at flush and trendy customers in buildings without central air. Their products are more expensive than the average window—ranging from $340 to nearly $600—and their marketing sometimes misses the point, emphasizing svelte exteriors rather than BTUs.
“These kinds of things, you’re paying for the aesthetics,” Mr. Medley said.
The media coverage of these products is breathtaking, sometimes bordering on erotic. “Help! I’m Sexually Attracted to My New Smart Air Conditioner,” ran a recent headline in Vice magazine’s product recommendations section. The Wall Street Journal called the wave of revamped air conditioners “sexy.”
As air conditioning becomes less of a luxury and more of a necessity, it follows that some customers will shell out for a unit that looks like an iPad or the robotic love interest from “Wall-E.” But there’s something unsettling about how the air conditioner became so coveted through the combined efforts of slick marketing and extreme heat. We are used to it-bags and it-girls; Is there a stranger sign of the climate crisis than the arrival of the computer air conditioner?
Everything except a household appliance
Window air conditioners are a fundamentally annoying part of New York City living. This is mainly because the city’s highly sought-after pre-war buildings were expensive to retrofit with central air conditioning, a more efficient system that cools two-thirds of homes in the United States, according to the Energy Information Administration federal.
“There are at least three episodes of ‘Seinfeld’ that talk about window air conditioners,” said Rodrigo Teixeira, product management manager for home comfort at appliance company Midea America. “These days, you see million-dollar homes, or two-million-dollar apartments, with windows glued to the windows.” (The ultra-wealthy, of course, are more likely to live in newer buildings with central air conditioning and have no use for windows.)
Midea America says it has sold more than 1 million of the U-shaped air conditioning units it introduced in 2020, which allow a window to close into a channel in the center of the unit. The same year, July entered the race with its air conditioner with interchangeable fronts. Another company, Windmill, began selling marshmallow window in 2021.
Nail artist Jess Brush, 31, ditched the two “ugly” windows in her Hudson Valley farmhouse last year. Warmer summers have prompted her to spend more on snazzy air conditioners, which sit outside her window for more and more months each year.
She ordered two Windmill units for $400 each after seeing them on social media. “They would be displayed in beautiful homes that are homes you would want,” she said. “They seemed like an aspirational piece.”
Air conditioners are ubiquitous on social media, in part because the companies behind them sometimes provide free units to influencers who create content focused on home decor and fashion. Anna B. Albury, 28, a Brooklyn rug designer and founder of the newsletter “coolstuff.nyc,” reached out to July last month and received two free air conditioners in exchange for sharing an Instagram Reel with her 10,000 followers.
“You can see who they’re talking to,” she said. “These are young people who live in a city that doesn’t have central air conditioning, but who care about the appearance of their home.”
That customer can now choose from upgraded versions of all sorts of home products: there are televisions framed to look like paintings and refrigerators disguised as cabinets. Air-conditioner manufacturers now seem eager to distance their products from such old-fashioned products as microwaves and ceiling fans.
“We make home decor items that happen to be air devices,” said Michael Mayer, founder and CEO of Windmill.
The new class of sleek air conditioners varies widely in quality, according to Allen St. John, a senior product editor who works on Consumer Reports’ air-conditioner rankings. St. John praised Midea’s U-shaped unit, which he said was energy-efficient and effective in testing.
But he criticized Windmill’s most affordable WhisperTech units, which struggled to cool a room quickly. “It’s the most important test we do, and it performed as poorly as any air conditioner we’ve tested,” St. John said.
Mr. Mayer, Windmill’s chief executive, noted that the product had been reviewed more positively elsewhere, including by Wirecutter, the New York Times’ product-recommendation site, adding that the company had “tens of thousands of satisfied customers who love our WhisperTech models.”
The July air conditioner wasn’t tested by Consumer Reports, but Albert Wong, 46, who lives in Orange County, Calif., said he has mixed feelings about the Wi-Fi-enabled unit he bought last summer for $500. It doesn’t perform noticeably better than other air conditioners he’s owned, he said; it just seems trendy.
A software developer, Mr. Wong was unable to change the device’s remote control app from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
The era of AC “status”
In 2020, a Wall Street Journal article described a group of avant-garde air conditioners, including one from July, as “summer’s most unlikely status symbol” — a phrase the brand has since reused, in bold letters, in its marketing materials.
High-end and fashionable products are frequently slapped with the “status” label. But applying it to air conditioners is an acknowledgement, however unwitting, of the reality that access to fresh air is a matter of wealth and status, and a growing measure of inequality as the world warms.
Muhammad Saigol, founder and chief executive of July, said the descriptor was “nice and catchy” but the company’s goal was to appeal to customers interested in design, without snobbery. “We don’t view it as a status symbol, rather we view it as a reflection of your individual taste and personality,” he said.
Air conditioners are somewhat similar to the stylish air purifiers that took off at the start of Covid, said Ben Varquez, managing director of YMC, a marketing agency geared toward millennials and Gen Z. These, too, offered customers with disposable income an extra layer of comfort in the midst of an overwhelming crisis, in the form of an attractive accessory.
People don’t like to be scared by advertising, he said. “Using climate change as the underlying message, but putting a little lipstick on the pig, will probably be much more successful,” he said. “People want to feel good when they spend money.”
Air conditioning is a climate change trap; it is both a cure and a contributor to rising global temperatures. The companies behind these air conditioners tout their efficiency and environmentally friendly refrigerants, and July and Windmill also purchase carbon offsets, a method of combating emissions that has been criticized by some scientists as ineffective.
“Ultimately, people are going to have to buy air conditioners, and they’re going to have to buy more of them, and they’re going to have to use them more” as temperatures rise, said Mr. Mayer, Windmill’s chief executive. “We want people to buy an air conditioner from a brand that cares about the environment rather than from a big appliance company.”
But in many cases, the most environmentally friendly air conditioner is the one you already own, said Sandra Goldmark, a designer and senior associate dean at Columbia Climate School. “Even if the new unit is more energy efficient, it’s going to take a long time to pay back the embedded carbon” that was used to create your new unit, she said.
Professor Goldmark said she understands why customers want to have a nicer-looking air conditioner in their home (even if it reminds her of Apple devices, which are notoriously difficult to open and repair). She still feels uncomfortable with well-designed window air conditioners, which she says offer a similar appeal to trash cans hidden under marble countertops.
“It erases our impact, in a way; it makes it all very acceptable and beautiful,” she said. “It creates a kind of comfortable illusion that everything is fine.”