As Instagram’s most annoying design critic, I’ve been asked by CULTURED to compile a list of some of the egregious things you are doing wrong in your home (although if you’re already reading CULTURED, you’ve seen enough Instagram design reels to know the no-nos). And look, we all know taste is subjective and our preferences are downstream of privilege and conditioned by the cultural hegemony formed by the changing whims of the elite, but the following are just objectively awful.
Some things go beyond dialectical materialism and are simply rules of nature. The biggest takeaway you can get from this is that I want you to make decisions, ones that feel personal and true to you, and not have you cower in fear of doing something wrong. So, let’s get started.
Offense: Too Many Design Icons
Why It’s Wrong: There is such a thing as too much good taste, and that’s when every “thing” in your home is a thing. A Noguchi lamp, an Eames lounge, a Bellini Sofa, a Perriand Nuage Unit, a Barcelona coffee table… each one of these on their own are iconic, impeccable pieces of course, but grouped all together it just feels like you live in a Design Within Reach showroom. This just shows you’ve done the homework, but your home doesn’t really have a soul or a perspective. It isn’t you in any meaningful way, because you haven’t made any decisions, it’s Ctrl-C Ctrl-V good taste, and you’ve just swallowed the design establishment consensus whole-hog.Do this Instead: Start by limiting yourself to one icon per room, and allow yourself to branch out and develop your own taste. Go deeper than just the hits of 20th-century design, go foraging in an estate sale, check out eBay in Europe, freak out on some ’70s Italian experimental lighting, and actually find pieces that you yourself find exciting. Maybe you’ll pick something ugly and weird, something that an AD100 designer would never pick, that totally “clashes” with your armoire, but goddamnit at least it will be you.
Offense: All Beige Everything
Why It’s Wrong: What’s so exhilarating about designing your home is that, even if you have the personality of a floss pick, you’re able to create who you wish you could be through your design choices. It’s play, it’s theater, your home’s a stage. And so given all the choices in the world, the blank canvas on which you’re able to paint the story of your life, you decide to paint the canvas… white? Look, I get it, you want your home to be your sanctuary, your temple, the place you can find refuge in this crazy world. But then you quickly turn around and find yourself living in a med spa, waiting for the nurse to roll out an IV drip. An oatmeal sectional, an ivory tufted ottoman, a taupe chair… this is where they euthanize dementia patients. You owe yourself and your guests more than that.Do this Instead: I’m not saying you have to go full Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, but think about what tones and hues you gravitate to and how incorporating them into your home can enliven your atmosphere. And if you don’t want to go crazy with color, consider mixing in different textures, metals, lacquers, etc. to give some range to the monochrome lifestyle you have chosen to adopt.
Offense: Words in the Home
Why It’s Wrong: We get it: you want your guests to know you’re “Classy Bougie Ratchet” but just because it’s embroidered on a pillow you shoved onto your boucle sofa doesn’t make you Megan Thee Stallion. You went to Duke and live in Murray Hill. Or is it the pillow itself letting us know it’s Classy Bougie and Ratchet, like a character in Beauty and the Beast? Either way, don’t let your home become a wine mom’s Facebook, cluttered with empty clichés that signal not free expression but desperation. Unless it’s a Tracey Emin piece, there should be no, like, neon sign that lets you know you’re in the kitchen. Will you forget that the room with the toaster is for cooking? Are you in nursery school?Do this Instead: Let the home speak for itself. Don’t take the shortcut to expression by borrowing a mass-produced sentiment. Be the “Classy Bougie Ratchet” you want to see in the world.
Offense: Generic Abstract Expressionist Art
Why It’s Wrong: You’ve spent years painstakingly considering every piece of furniture, the wallpaper in every room, the exact incense scent in the guest bathroom, and yet when it comes to the art, you decide to hang some lifeless Marriott Bonvoy-ass abstract painting that looks like it was farted out by Cy Twombly’s corpse. This type of abstract art is meant to communicate your “refined good taste” but it lacks any of the muscularity and passion that you find in a De Kooning or a Krasner. Instead, this is what you’d see in the staging of a luxury penthouse whose foreign buyers are second guessing because they’re terrified of the Mamdani pied-à-terre tax. A painting so banal it makes Damien Hirst dot paintings look like a Kara Walker mural. It dangles delicately between the boundaries of figurative and abstract, committing to neither and numbing you in a swirl of decorative shapes. IT’S BORING!Do this Instead: Burn the “artwork,” and beg for forgiveness. Go to small, independent galleries, take a risk on a work that might offend somebody, might cause your guests to actually feel something instead of just melting into the surroundings like a Cheshire Cat.
Offense: Books Arranged by Color
Why It’s Wrong: A rainbow bookshelf is not just an aesthetic crime, it is an assault on the very nature of civilization. Imagine somebody asks you where Essays One by Lydia Davis is, and you say “Oh, I think in the green section,” as if a book containing depth and beauty can be distilled into a paint sample. At least when the fascists burned books they had the decency to care about their contents. Treating a book as a decorative object, relegating its contents to the posterior of your Skittle-wall, tells your guests that you do not read, and when you do it’s probably a book about elves 69-ing on your kindle.Do this Instead: Over-obsess for the rest of your life about the arrangement of your mammoth library, organizing and reorganizing your books based on a baroque methodology only you understand. Should you place Zadie Smith’s essay collections alongside her fiction, or should they be in the dedicated contemporary literature section? Is there a dedicated short story section that separates Chekhov from his plays? These are the types of questions that should haunt you for the rest of your days and, honestly, are what make a life worth living.
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