Marcus Chen, 38, is an IP attorney in Chicago’s West Loop. Last spring, he sold a Basquiat print he had owned for six years, a piece he had bought partly because it felt like the right thing to own at a certain income level. The same month, he spent $1,800 installing a modular herb wall in his kitchen. Lemon thyme, shiso, Genovese basil, and two varieties of mint, all lit by a programmable LED panel that adjusts spectrum by season. He told me he thinks about the herbs every morning. He had not thought about the Basquiat in years.
That is not a story about regret. It is a story about what people actually want when they finally have enough money to stop pretending.
The Shift Nobody Named Yet
Something is moving through the upper tier of urban living, and it is not a fad. A 2024 report by the American Society of Landscape Architects found that 68% of residential landscape architects reported increased client requests for edible gardens and indoor growing systems, up from 41% in 2020. The growth is sharpest in households earning over $150,000 annually and concentrated in cities with high-density housing stock: Chicago, New York, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco.
This is not people planting tomatoes because they saw a YouTube video. This is people with real discretionary income choosing to spend it on something that grows, requires attention, and occasionally fails. That last part matters more than you might think.
📊 By the Numbers 68% of residential landscape architects reported increased client demand for edible and indoor growing systems in 2024, per the American Society of Landscape Architects. That number was 41% just four years earlier.
What Is Actually Being Bought
The market has split cleanly into two lanes, and both are growing.
Budget tier ($40 to $300): Aerogarden Harvest units, IKEA VÄXER hydroponic kits, basic window herb kits from Botanical Interests, and countertop grow pods from companies like Back to the Roots. These are starter systems that work, produce real food, and require about fifteen minutes of weekly attention.
Premium tier ($800 and above): Modular living walls from Ambius and Grovery, climate-controlled micro-farms from Babylon Micro-Farms starting around $1,400, and fully designed kitchen installations that can run $3,000 to $8,000 when you factor in custom cabinetry, spectrum lighting, and irrigation. Some designers in Manhattan are now packaging grow walls as part of kitchen renovation quotes the way they once packaged wine fridges.
Here is what nobody tells you about the premium tier: the people buying it are not necessarily plant people. They are people who have optimized everything else and are now optimizing for something that cannot be fully optimized. There is relief in that.
💡 Pro Tip: If you are starting out, skip the aesthetic stuff first. An Aerogarden Harvest ($89 to $119) will tell you within eight weeks whether you actually enjoy tending something. Buy the marble herb crock after you know the answer.
What Does Your Kitchen Counter Say About Who You Think You Are?
That question is not rhetorical. I mean it literally. Walk over and look right now.
The sociology here is real. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that consumers increasingly use domestic food-growing practices as identity signals, particularly in households where professional identity has become abstracted or screen-based. In plain terms: the more your work happens on a laptop in a cloud, the more some part of you needs to watch something root.
Marcus described it this way: “I negotiate contracts about things that don’t physically exist. The herbs are just. there. They need water. They smell like something.” He paused. “That’s embarrassing to say out loud.” It is not embarrassing. It is honest, and it is the most useful thing someone can tell you about why this trend has legs.
I have been in that exact conversation. It is not comfortable to admit you need something tangible when your income depends entirely on the abstract. But that discomfort is the point.
It Is Messier Than the Advice Columns Suggest
Growing anything in a small urban space comes with friction that the glossy content skips over. Gnats. Overwatering. The basil that looks perfect in week two and collapses in week four for no diagnosable reason. Humidity issues that affect your floors if the system is not properly sealed. The smell of wet growing medium in a 700-square-foot apartment is not neutral.
And yet people are staying with it.
A 2024 survey by the National Gardening Association found that 74% of first-time indoor gardeners reported continuing the practice past six months, compared to 52% for other hobby categories tracked in the same survey. The retention rate is unusually high for a new consumer behavior. The researchers attributed it to the sensory feedback loop: you touch it, you smell it, you eat it, and the cycle is short enough to feel real.
⚠️ Warning: Fungus gnats are the single most common reason people abandon indoor herb setups in months one and two. They come from overwatering and poorly draining medium, not from dirty apartments. Buy yellow sticky traps before you need them. They cost $6 and they work.
When did you last grow anything? And I mean actually grow it — from seed or cutting, in your own space, with your own water. If the answer is never, or not since childhood, that gap is worth sitting with.
The Aspiration Has Changed Shape
For roughly two decades, urban wealth signaled itself through subtraction and curation. The empty apartment. The edited closet. The carefully chosen single art object. Minimalism as mastery.
What Marcus represents, and he is not alone, is something different. The aspiration has not abandoned aesthetics. His herb wall is beautiful. But it is also alive, which means it is also sometimes struggling, which means it requires something from him daily. That is the opposite of the minimal object that just sits there looking correct.
A 2025 trend report from WGSN, the global forecasting firm, identified what they called “effortful living” as one of the defining upper-income consumer shifts of the next three years. Not ease. Not frictionlessness. Chosen friction, in specific areas, as a form of meaning-making.
Small-space growing is one of the cleaner expressions of that shift. You choose the difficulty. You control the scale. You eat the result.
✅ Action Step: Identify one surface in your home, a windowsill, a counter section, a wall panel, that gets at least four hours of indirect light. That is your starting point. Not a budget. Not a brand. A surface and a light condition. Start there.
Quick Wins
This week: Buy one potted herb at a farmers market or decent grocery store. Not a supermarket herb pod. A real potted plant with actual soil. Put it where you will see it every morning. Water it when the top inch of soil is dry. Do nothing else for two weeks.
This month: Research one system in your price range. Aerogarden for under $120. A Grovery starter panel for $340. A Babylon unit if the budget allows. Read the one-star reviews first. They tell you what actually breaks.
This quarter: Grow something you will actually eat. Not decorative lavender. Basil for pasta. Mint for your morning water. Shiso if you cook Japanese food at home. Connect the growing to the eating and the habit will survive.
Your Next 3 Steps
Audit your light. Spend one day noticing which surfaces in your home receive consistent indirect or direct light. Photograph them. This takes twenty minutes and replaces hours of guessing later.
Set a budget lane. Under $150 or over $800. Do not shop in the middle. The mid-range systems tend to have the worst retention rates because they are not cheap enough to be disposable and not good enough to be reliable.
Tell someone what you are doing. Not on social media. Tell one person in your life that you are starting this. The mild social commitment increases follow-through by a measurable margin, per a 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology on behavioral intention and verbal commitment. It also just makes the whole thing feel more real.
You deserve to know this: the people who are buying herb walls in West Loop apartments and growing shiso under spectrum lights in Brooklyn lofts are not escaping their lives. They are finally, deliberately, building one that requires them to show up for something that cannot wait until Monday.
The most radical thing you can own in 2025 might be something that dies if you ignore it.
