Your House Doesn't Need a Theme

At some point, we started asking people what their interior design style was as though it were a blood type. Modern farmhouse, mid-century modern, English country, Scandinavian, traditional, coastal, organic modern. You are apparently meant to pick one, which is useful if you are trying to explain to a stranger why you keep bringing home dark wooden furniture and floral fabric, but slightly less useful when you are trying to make a home.

The trouble with deciding what your house is supposed to look like is that you become very good at rejecting anything that doesn't fit the description. You like the lamp, but it isn't very mid-century. The chair is beautiful, but perhaps too traditional. You find a painting you can't stop looking at, but the colours aren't really part of your palette, so you leave it behind. Then you go home to a room in which everything technically works and wonder why it feels a little flat.

I think we have confused consistency with good taste. There is enormous comfort in knowing that everything goes together. The woods are similar, the furniture belongs roughly to the same period and the colours have been selected from an approved group of six. Nothing is particularly capable of ruining anything else. Unfortunately, nothing is particularly capable of surprising you either.

The rooms I remember rarely behave themselves that well. There is usually something that doesn't quite belong: a severe modern chair beside an old wooden table, a ridiculous lamp in an otherwise sensible room, a very traditional painting above something completely contemporary. Chrome appears where you expected brass. Someone has put red in a room where absolutely nobody asked for red. It is often the thing that technically shouldn't work that makes everything else feel convincing.

Real taste is much harder to categorize than we have made it seem. You can like a nineteenth-century table and a 1970s lamp. You can love chintz and stainless steel. You can put an old pine cupboard in a very modern kitchen without creating some sort of design emergency. None of these things cancel each other out. We are allowed to like things from different places and periods, and our homes are allowed to contain those contradictions too.

In fact, most homes already do. The things we own tend to arrive from completely different parts of our lives. There is something inherited from a grandparent, something bought when we had very little money, something dragged home from a flea market, something expensive we saved for and something our partner inexplicably loves and therefore isn't going anywhere. A home has to absorb all of this, and I think that is partly what makes it feel like one.

The alternative is strangely close to a hotel. Hotels are very good at themes. Every decision supports the same idea. The lighting agrees with the furniture, the furniture agrees with the carpet and the carpet agrees with the little tray holding the tiny bottles of shampoo. Nothing has accidentally survived three moves. Nobody's grandmother gave them the side table. There isn't an object on the shelf that makes absolutely no sense but has been there so long that removing it would feel unsettling. Everything belongs, and perhaps that is precisely why we spend so much time trying to make our houses not feel like hotels.

The most interesting homes have inconsistencies because the people living in them have histories. Taste changes. Money changes. Families change. We discover things, inherit things and occasionally go through regrettable phases involving grey laminate. A house records some of this whether we intend it to or not, and there is something very appealing about allowing it to.

This doesn't mean every object you've ever owned deserves permanent residency. Editing still matters. There is a difference between an interesting contradiction and a room containing seventeen pieces of furniture you don't particularly like. But editing doesn't require a theme. Instead of asking whether something goes with your house, it might be more useful to ask whether you genuinely like it.

That is a surprisingly difficult question. We are remarkably good at liking things because we have seen them enough times, and equally good at distrusting things that feel unfamiliar. This is probably why decorating by category is so seductive. Once you have decided you are an English country person, for example, the internet will happily show you what an English country person buys. There will be paint colours and sofas and striped cushions and pleated lampshades and very persuasive little stools. You could furnish an entire house without making another particularly difficult decision.

But I think the difficult decisions are where your taste is hiding. It is in the strange thing you like despite having no explanation for it, the colour you keep coming back to even though nobody is currently declaring it the colour of the year, the ugly chair you would defend with your life. It is the piece everyone else seems indifferent to that you think is wonderful. Those things tell me far more about someone's taste than knowing the official name for their aesthetic.

Perhaps style isn't something we need to identify before we decorate. Perhaps it is simply the pattern that appears after years of choosing things we genuinely like. Eventually you might notice that you always buy old wood, or paintings of landscapes, or lamps that are slightly too large. Maybe every room somehow ends up with something green in it. That is your taste revealing itself. You didn't need to give it a name first.

It doesn't have to remain consistent forever either. One of the pleasures of a home is that it can change without requiring us to start again. A contemporary chair can arrive beside the antique table. A strange piece of art can disrupt the perfectly respectable living room. Something you would never have considered five years ago can suddenly become your favourite thing in the house.

-Juliette

Your home doesn't need to prove that you understand a particular design style, and it doesn't need to fit neatly into a Pinterest search. It doesn't need a theme at all. If you spend enough time choosing things you genuinely love, eventually the thing holding it all together is you.

-Juliette