Interior designer Lily Walters has a word for anyone looking to have a more interesting, expressive home. Words like “collected” or “silly” feel too tame for her vision. “I want it to be aggressive, in a way, to be bold,” she says. “I want it to be weird.”
In her popular Instagram series, “Your home isn’t weird enough,” Walters highlights a “completely unnecessary and completely iconic” tiger-print pool table, a seashell fireplace, door hinges with snails on them, theatrical faucets, stained glass lamps shaped like traffic cones, secret doors and, for the more weird-cautious, maybe some fish-shaped hardware in the bathroom. “I’m begging you to stop playing it safe,” she says in one video. “Not every detail needs to be serious. … This is the level of nonsense that gives home soul.”
There are descriptors with less fraught connotations that express similar ideas — eclectic, for one, or authentic. But the choice of “weird,” baggage and all, is purposeful. At its core, the push toward “weird design” is about filling your space with items that speak to you, trends and resale value be damned. It’s not a trend so much as an ethos to protect against trends and the related waste when the algorithm inevitably lurches elsewhere.
“The most compelling homes right now are the ones that couldn’t belong to anyone else,” says Shima Toyserkani, principal designer and owner of House of Shima in Montgomery County, Maryland. “People are gravitating towards showing off their personality in spaces. They’ve moved away from choosing this kind of basic, bland formula that will sell, but now it feels empty, generic or emotionally uninspiring.”
Indeed, weird sounds downright divine when contrasted with the now-derided “sad beige” aesthetic that took hold over the past two decades, a shift attributed to the rise in home renovation shows, house flipping and the all-powerful algorithm that guides what we see on our social media feeds. One academic study concluded that home renovation media led homeowners to avoid bolder choices when renovating and decorating to preserve their resale value, even if they had no immediate plans to sell.
“If you are truly that person who just needs a clean, clutter-free, color-free space, you do you. But the fact that it became such a trendy thing, that’s weird,” says Lu Loveless, an interior designer and artist in Dallas. “To me, it’s weird that we lost our personalities along the way.”
So how do we reclaim our weird? Well, as you might expect, there isn’t one definitive answer — that would defeat the whole point.
For Noel Benitez, owner and lead designer at Unparalleled Eye Designs in D.C., she sees the desire playing out in “the unique ways that [clients] make a certain room functional that I just don’t think was happening several years ago,” she says. For instance, dining rooms are often “this big empty space that gets utilized maybe two to four times a year,” she says. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The room can take on a dual purpose: making it into a library/reading space or “even put a little speakeasy vibe on it.”
When it comes to finding items with character, designers say your best bet is shopping secondhand or while traveling. “You just want a house to have something that doesn’t look like you bought it all in the same place,” says Anne Hulcher Tollett, principal designer and creative director at Hanover Avenue in Richmond and a big proponent of weird. Hanover Avenue has trademarked the term “wonderfully weird,” she says.
One Hanover Avenue-designed room includes an ornate cerulean chair popping in a sea of more sedate blues. Another has jibing — though not matchy-matchy — botanical patterns on the ceiling, rug, chair and wall prints. “I want a room to beckon people in and not have it feel like ho-hum, paint by number,” Tollett says. “That also makes the house more gracious and inviting — it makes you want to hang out.”
Often, Tollett finds that she can go shopping in her clients’ closets. “I’m like, ‘Let me get in your cupboards. What do you have in here?’ You can use an old antique teacup as a bud vase,” she says. That way, she can spend more of the budget on well-made furniture or standout art. “We don’t need to spend all this money on accessories, because look how much cool stuff you have.”
Loveless recommends that people take a “collector’s point of view” when it comes to decorating their spaces. “This is a lifelong pursuit of collecting things you love along the way,” she says. “And if you’re truly buying things you love and not just to fill a space or fill a gap on the wall, your house will reflect your style just automatically.”
This perspective takes time, which is part of the point, too. “It’s a revolt against fast everything: fast fashion, fast social media,” fast furniture. Loveless says. She learned this lesson the hard way: “I brought a lot of junk into my home, just because I was like, ‘It needs to be perfect, and I’ve got to fill the space.’”
If you’re nervous about including something quirky, Walters suggests starting small, “something like sculpture, pottery, trinkets,” she says. One idea? “Hiding a trinket in your medicine cabinet or in a place that people don’t often go but as a way to find out if your friends are snooping.”
And a love of neutrals doesn’t preclude your home from being weird, either. “You can still have a room that’s wonderfully weird even if it’s very distilled,” Tollett says. She’s worked on many projects that boast “a very quiet space — it’s super modern and very monochromatic, but we’ll always throw in something that makes people stop.” For instance, a red floral patterned side table draws the eye and prevents neutrals from overwhelming one bathroom she designed.
Benitez is relieved that people have realized that sure, colorful homes can feel playful, but they can also feel tranquil. “We have to weave in that sort of unseriousness with our own lives to make it manageable and not too stressful,” she says.
There’s a difference between the kind of weird that designers are encouraging and pure chaos. “If you want it to be aesthetically pleasing and not give you a jumble headache, there are still ways to find relationships amongst colors,” Benitez says. It’s all about “finding the relationships within the weird.”
Ultimately, the drive toward weird is about ensuring that your home reflects you, not whatever trend was au current when you decided to decorate. “Your home is not a showroom. Your home should be a mixture of old and new. It should feel collected, and it should feel layered,” Toyserkani says. “And it should tell a story. It should tell your story.”
The post Your home is too boring. Let’s get a little weird. appeared first on Washington Post.
