I should probably admit that Tuareg mats were not love at first sight.

It took me a while to understand them.

One of the first times I really noticed one was during an Architectural Digest shoot at Seth Meyers’s house, designed by Ashe Leandro. There was a beautiful one in the living room. Around the same time, I was working as a designer for Tom Delavan, who was also a big fan. So they kept showing up in front of me from different directions.

At first, I don’t think I fully got it.

They felt dry. Flat. Almost fragile. They didn’t have the plushness or softness I associated with a great rug, and they certainly weren’t trying very hard to seduce me.

Which, in hindsight, should probably have been the clue.

A lot of the things I end up loving most are not especially interested in being liked right away.

The more I saw Tuareg mats, the more I started to understand what they were doing. There’s something incredibly worldly about them. Not in the “let me tell you exactly where I found this” way. More that they carry another place, another climate, another way of making into the room with them.

They bring history without making the room feel historical.

Traditionally made from reed and leather, they have this wonderful contradiction built into them. The reed gives them an earthy dryness. The leather pattern feels almost drawn across the surface. They can be large, but never feel heavy. There’s structure, but also fragility.

They ground a room without weighing it down.

That’s the thing I finally came to love.

A wool rug tends to soften a room. A Tuareg mat does something drier. It brings line, structure, and a little abrasion.

I especially like them layered under a smaller, plusher rug, almost the way you’d use sisal. The Tuareg mat gives you the broader field and the geometry, then the softer rug creates the more intimate zone. It keeps the room from becoming one big upholstered thought.

That contrast is where they really shine for me. Earthiness underneath, softness on top. Structure and comfort negotiating with each other.

And because they’re visually light, they can sit under serious furniture without everything becoming too much. A beautiful old chair. Something modern. Something very formal. The mat doesn’t compete. It changes the temperature.

The geometry keeps them from feeling rustic to me, too. The leather markings are graphic, but not graphic in that overly designed way where you can feel someone trying very hard to make a pattern happen.

They feel discovered rather than imposed.

Last week I was working with a client and we placed a beautiful Carlo Bugatti cabinet in a corridor. The piece is epic. Strange, ornate, almost otherworldly. The client didn’t understand it.

And instead of feeling offended on behalf of the cabinet, which would have been very easy, I suddenly remembered how many times I had to see Bugatti’s work before I understood it myself.

Some things arrive immediately. Others need repetition.

You see them once and think, absolutely not. Then again and think, maybe. Then a third or fourth time and suddenly you realize your eye has been quietly changing without asking permission.

Tuareg mats were like that for me.

And I think that’s partly why they stayed with me. They taught me that instinct doesn’t always mean immediate certainty. Sometimes instinct is just the feeling that there’s something there worth looking at again.

That happened to me with Dinanderie too. I was using those hammered metal vases long before I knew the proper name for them. The vocabulary came later. The attraction came first.

With Tuareg mats, it was slightly different. I knew they were interesting before I knew why.

Lately, they’ve even followed me off the floor.

On my most recent trip to Marrakech, I found a few in tabletop scale and brought them home. I’ve been using them as placemats around the apartment, which feels like a slightly unhinged but very convincing extension of the idea. Same dryness. Same geometry. Just under a plate instead of a chair.

I love when a material can shift scale like that and still hold onto its character.

And maybe that’s part of why I’m thinking about them again now. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about line, texture, pattern, and what a rug can do beyond simply soften a room.

More on that soon.

For now, I’m happy to keep appreciating Tuareg mats for what they taught me: that not understanding something immediately is not the same as not liking it.

Sometimes your eye just needs a minute.

And sometimes it needs to see the thing six more times.

Anyway, here are a few good ones. Some full scale, some smaller, all worth a second look.

Saharan Mat STU0678 | Altai

Saharan Mat STU0486 | Altai

Saharan Mat STU0513 | Altai

Saharan Mat STU0973 | Altai

Saharan Mat STU0658 | Altai

Saharan Mat STU0563 | Altai

Saharan Mat STU0556 | Altai

Vintage Tuareg Mat Runner, Luminous Bronze with Rich Brown Stripes | Rug & Kilim

Vintage Tuareg Mat, Golden Brown with Bold Tribal Geometric Motifs | Rug & Kilim

Vintage Tuareg Runner with Geometric Designs in Beige and Brown | Rug & Kilim

Vintage Square Tuareg Mat in Red and Beige Tribal Geometric Patterns | Rug & Kilim

Vintage Moroccan Tuareg Mat | John Derian

Mehraban Vintage African Tuareg Mat | 1stDibs

Handwoven Tuareg Mat | Etsy

Love,
Colin

I’m 6’2”, which means there are several places in my apartment where I have to remember to duck.

The Sudare shades hanging in the doorways to my kitchen and living room are the main offenders. I love where they hang. I love what they do to the openings. I also hit my head on them with enough regularity that entering my own kitchen now requires a small plié.

Then there’s the pendant in my den, which hangs very low. The pendant over my bed hangs even lower. Both are beautiful. Both are staying.

Whenever I hit my head, I immediately rub the spot because my grandmother always told me to. I have no idea what this was supposed to accomplish, but I still do it.

None of this has made me want to raise anything.

Which feels worth examining.

I’m starting to think I like a little inconvenience in a room.

There’s so much emphasis in interiors on making things easy. Good flow. Clear sightlines. Furniture that doesn’t interrupt circulation. You should be able to understand a room almost immediately and move through it without thinking too much about how you’re doing it.

All sensible advice.

I’m just not sure I always want to take it.

Some of my favorite rooms make you negotiate with them a little. There’s a chair slightly in the path. A table you have to walk around. A pendant hanging lower than anyone would recommend. You can’t see everything from the doorway. The floor plan takes a minute to understand.

I love a floor plan that takes a minute.

The obvious arrangement is often obvious for a reason. Sofa on the long wall. Chairs opposite. Coffee table between them. Bed centered with two nightstands. Sometimes that’s exactly right.

But I’m always interested in the other version.

What happens if the sofa floats somewhere unexpected? If one chair turns toward the window? If the bed goes against the wall you weren’t supposed to use? If a table lands just far enough into the path that you have to walk around it?

There’s often a moment when something looks wrong on a floor plan and completely right once you’re standing in the room.

I’ve learned to trust that moment.

My entry is probably the clearest example. It’s barely a vestibule. It’s tiny. The practical response would’ve been to keep it open, make it feel larger, and get through it as quickly as possible.

Naturally, I put a table in the middle.

Now it’s a foyer.

You have to move around the table to enter the apartment, which seems mildly absurd considering how little real estate I had to begin with. But it gives the space a center. It makes you arrive. Without it, the entry was something you passed through. With it, it became a room.

I’ve done the same thing with the smallest rooms in the apartment. Rather than trying to make them look larger, I covered them in dark wallpaper and let them get cavernous.

I love the compression of it. You move through this dark, enclosed little space and then into one of the larger rooms flooded with light. The larger room feels even brighter because of where you’ve just been.

If everything is open, bright and expansive, you lose the pleasure of arriving there.

I think rooms need contrast the same way almost everything else does.

I once hung a painting on a door.

Not beside it. On it.

The door still opened. The painting went with it. There was surely a more conventional wall available, but I liked it there. Suddenly the door was part of the composition rather than something the composition politely worked around.

I’ve also put beds directly on the floor. No frame. No headboard. Just a mattress on a Tuareg mat.

People really want the bed frame to be coming.

Sometimes it isn’t coming.

I like what happens when the bed sits low. The walls get taller. The windows feel different. A lamp takes on a different scale. The entire room shifts because one expected piece of furniture never arrived.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The inconvenience has to return something.

The Sudare shades make me duck, but they turn an ordinary opening into a threshold. The low pendant requires a little awareness, but it brings the light down into the room. The table makes my already tiny entry harder to navigate, but now I have an entry. The dark wallpaper makes a small room feel even smaller, but the room after it feels enormous.

If the inconvenience gives you nothing, then yes, it’s just inconvenient.

There’s no great design lesson in bruising your shin on a coffee table you hate.

But I do think we’re so quick to solve awkwardness that sometimes we solve the interesting part too.

I notice it with furniture all the time. We clear the path. Push the chair back. Open the sightline. Make sure you can see the entire room from the doorway.

Sometimes I want to do the opposite.

I want the chair to make me walk around it. I want to see its back when I enter. I want the furniture to create the path instead of simply staying out of it.

Maybe this comes from dance. I spent years thinking about bodies moving through space, and where something sits determines how you approach it. You turn. You pause. You duck. You go around.

A floor plan isn’t just where the furniture goes. It tells your body what to do.

The same is true of sightlines. I don’t always want to see everything at once. I like a chair blocking part of a bookshelf. Furniture in front of a window. A screen that divides a room without closing it off. A glimpse of something through a doorway that only makes sense when you get closer.

I style for photographs every day, so I understand the desire for the wide shot. You want the room to make sense immediately. You want everything to resolve.

But a home isn’t a photograph.

We see the back of the chair. Half the painting from bed. A lamp through a doorway. We enter rooms from strange angles. We experience our homes in fragments, over and over again.

I think that’s why I keep putting things slightly where they shouldn’t be.

They make me notice where I am.

I duck under the shade. I walk around the table. I move closer to see what’s behind something. I leave the dark room and notice the light in the next one.

Occasionally, I forget about the pendant.

Then I rub my head.

It’s still not moving.

Love,
Colin

The larger the table, the more people seem to panic.

Give us eight or ten feet of beautiful wood and we immediately begin covering it. A bowl appears. Then candlesticks. Then a stack of books, which no one has ever read at the dining table, with a small object placed on top because apparently even the books need supervision.

Before long, there’s a tray containing several unrelated things and the whole arrangement has developed zoning laws.

I understand the impulse. I’ve participated in it professionally. A large empty surface can feel vaguely accusatory. It sits there, enormous and silent, asking whether you have any ideas. So we keep adding things until it stops asking.

But lately I’ve come to believe the opposite may be true.

The larger the surface, the stronger the case for one object.

Not one timid little bowl sitting dead center like it arrived early to a meeting. One piece with enough presence to hold its own and make all that space around it feel deliberate.

That presence can come from weight, scale, silhouette, material or line. Sometimes it comes from sheer oddness. The object doesn’t have to cover very much of the table. It simply needs to affect more space than it physically occupies.

A long candleholder draws a line through the room. A low marble bowl gives the eye somewhere to land. A reflective plate catches the light and expands beyond its edges. A strange vessel changes the atmosphere simply by sitting there, doing very little, which is frankly the dream.

And then there are vases.

Most vases are recurring obligations disguised as home accessories. You buy one because it looks beautiful, then bring it home and realize you’ve also purchased a weekly reminder that there are no flowers in it. It stands there with its hands on its hips while you walk past carrying groceries, trying not to make eye contact.

So I’m careful with vases. If it can’t survive empty, I don’t want the pressure. A vase should have enough shape, material and presence to function as sculpture first. Flowers can visit. They shouldn’t be required to complete the sentence.

I’ve gathered the pieces I’d trust on a large dining table, kitchen island, console, or generous coffee table. Everything here is in current production and available to source now. No auction alerts. No vague promise that a dealer in Antwerp may have something similar. No call from a warehouse in New Jersey asking whether you own a loading dock.

And one final note before we begin.

Live on the edge and don’t put it directly in the center.

The exact middle can feel less intentional than merely obedient. Move the object toward one end. Let the table stretch out beside it. The empty surface is not going to file a complaint.

You’re decorating a table, not landing a plane.

Read more

It’s been almost a month since I last wrote here, which is both unlike me and, apparently, noticeable. A few of you have sent the sweetest messages asking where I’ve been. One read, “You’ve been MIA. I hope it’s because you’ve actually taken some time off this summer.”

Reader, I wish.

Instead, I’ve spent the last month moving between Morocco, Paris, Connecticut, New Jersey and Southampton, styling houses, shooting campaigns and carrying the kinds of things through airports that make strangers give you a little extra room.

This last trip involved far more time than anyone should spend at Charles de Gaulle. Storms caused me to miss my connection to Marrakech, which left me with a very long layover and, apparently, a sense of purpose. The taxidermy butterflies I’d sourced in New York hadn’t arrived in time, so I sent a production assistant into Paris to Maison Deyrolle to buy replacements and bring them to me at the airport. At the time, this felt not only reasonable but urgent. So there I was, sitting at the gate, waiting for someone to arrive with a box of dead butterflies, as one does when one has made several interesting life choices.

On the way home, I returned through the same airport carrying a stool inside a cardboard box. I had it wrapped in so much plastic that it looked less like furniture and more like evidence. It was my first time using the airport wrapping service. I felt embarrassed for perhaps eleven seconds, then watched the man add another layer and became extremely pleased with myself.

By then, I’d become the sort of person who could wait at an airport for dead butterflies and later pay to have a stool shrink-wrapped without finding either event especially strange. This seemed worth looking into.

I’d also spent the last few weeks getting my apartment ready for a photoshoot, which is a very efficient way to lose faith in every decision you’ve ever made. Styling someone else’s home is wonderfully objective. Styling your own is like trying to give yourself a haircut. You suddenly distrust everything. A lamp you’ve loved for years begins to look overeager. You move the same chair fourteen times, only to discover it belonged exactly where it was. By day three, a bowl you’ve never questioned has become a referendum on your entire character.

And while I was moving everything around, I began noticing how many things in the apartment belonged to categories I’d once dismissed completely. Wallpaper. Decorative pillows. A properly tucked bed. Glass-top tables. Symmetry. Mixed metals. Even an orchid. The place had quietly become an archive of my reversals.

This made me laugh, partly because I’ve spent a career being asked what I like, what I don’t like and what I’d never do. The word never is irresistible when you’re younger. It gives the impression that you have standards, when sometimes what you have is limited information and a very firm tone of voice.

For a long time, I thought developing an eye meant becoming more certain. You’d see enough, learn enough and work enough that eventually your taste would settle into a perfect, recognizable shape. You’d know exactly who you were. You’d stop making mistakes. You might even be able to order a sofa without entering a brief spiritual crisis.

I’m less convinced of that now.

The homes I keep thinking about rarely belong to people who appear to have made one decision about themselves and then defended it forever. They’re full of contradictions. Things bought years apart. An inherited chair beside something strange and new. A beautiful mistake that somehow became essential. They don’t feel inconsistent. They feel alive.

Maybe that’s what a well-loved home becomes over time. Not a museum of certainty, but an archive of everything we’ve been willing to learn, and everything we finally stopped pretending we didn’t like.

For years, I thought orchids belonged in hotel lobbies and corporate reception desks. They always seemed slightly overdressed, surrounded by glossy leaves, decorative moss and enough ceremony to announce themselves before you’d even entered the room. I associated them with places where the flowers were replaced before they had the opportunity to do anything embarrassing.

Then I saw a Grammatophyllum scriptum “Leopard” in one of my chicest clients’ homes in Gramercy. It was spotted and strange and completely arresting, but it wasn’t performing. It was simply there, managing to look both prehistoric and elegant, which is a difficult combination for any of us to pull off.

Around the same time, I kept finding myself using single orchid stems while styling shoots with RW Guild. One stem, one vessel, no elaborate supporting cast. They looked less like arrangements and more like drawings.

I realized I hadn’t disliked orchids at all. I’d disliked what we’d been asking them to do.

I’ve changed my mind about mixing varieties of flowers, too. For years, I was almost doctrinaire about using one kind at a time. One mass of tulips. One branch of quince. One enormous chrysanthemum allowed to carry the entire emotional burden of the room. Mixing varieties felt busy to me, or worse, indecisive. Like the arrangement hadn’t chosen a point of view.

Lately, I’ve found myself wanting flowers to disagree a little. A branch beside something soft. An orchid with a flower that has no business being near an orchid. Different shapes, different gestures, a few things leaning away from one another as though the conversation has become mildly tense. When it works, it feels less like an arrangement and more like something gathered from a garden, where nothing has been told to match and everything somehow belongs.

I still need one thing to lead. I’m not advocating floral anarchy. But I’ve stopped believing that harmony requires sameness. Sometimes the most alive arrangements are the ones where each flower is allowed to remain entirely itself.

This has turned out to be inconveniently true of many things. Sometimes I dismiss the object when what I’m really reacting to is the context. I decide I hate a color because I’ve only seen it used badly. I swear off a fabric because it reminds me of a waiting room. I blame the decorative pillow when the real culprit is the seven decorative pillows behind it, all karate-chopped into submission.

I owe decorative pillows an apology too. There was a period when I thought every sofa should simply fend for itself. Pillows felt fussy and unnecessary, little upholstered errands that had to be moved every time you wanted to sit down. I still don’t think a sofa needs enough cushions to qualify as a ball pit, but one beautiful pillow can change the temperature of a room. It can bring in a fabric you wouldn’t want six yards of, soften something severe or introduce a color that only needs to speak once.

The answer wasn’t no pillows. It was fewer, better pillows, which is annoyingly often the answer.

Morocco loosened something else in me. I’ve always believed in restraint, and I still do, but restraint can become a kind of nervousness if you’re not careful. In Morocco, textiles are layered with a generosity I find deeply moving. Rugs sit over other rugs. Blankets cover cushions. Embroidery meets rough wool, stripes meet checks, and colors that would’ve been separated into entirely different presentations are somehow having dinner together.

Nothing feels accidental, but nothing feels frightened either.

It reminded me that layering doesn’t necessarily mean clutter. Sometimes it means warmth. Sometimes it’s the thing that makes a room feel gathered rather than arranged. There’s an ease to the overlap, as though no one has spent the afternoon anxiously measuring the amount of negative space around a pillow.

I came home wanting to let things touch more.

Travel does this to me. I leave thinking I need a change of scenery and return with my instincts slightly rearranged. Paris has made me want to tuck my bed. Morocco made me want another textile. A client in Gramercy made me reconsider orchids. None of this was on an itinerary, which is probably why any of it worked.

Maybe the best trips don’t just fill your suitcase. They quietly give you permission to become less sure of yourself.

Wallpaper surprised me for an entirely different reason. I’d admired it in other people’s homes while maintaining that it wasn’t for me, which is one of the more polished ways we avoid admitting that we’re afraid of commitment. Then I moved into an apartment with flat walls. No trim, no crown molding, no paneling and very little architectural depth. The proportions were lovely, but the walls had the emotional range of printer paper.

I realized I wasn’t craving pattern so much as atmosphere. Wallpaper gave the room a grain, a softness and a sense of depth the architecture didn’t naturally possess. What I’d dismissed as decoration began to feel almost structural. It wasn’t something laid on top of the room. It was helping the room become itself.

Chinoiserie has followed a similar path. I used to find it overly theatrical, as though living with it might require excellent posture and a staff. But one old painted screen, a porcelain bowl or a fragment of pattern can bring an entire imagined world into a room. The problem was never chinoiserie. The problem was when everyone joined in at once.

One piece can feel like history. Twenty can feel like a theme restaurant.

Then there’s making the bed. For years I styled beds with one oversized coverlet and loose, untucked corners. It had an appealing nonchalance, the visual equivalent of saying, “Oh, this old thing?” after spending forty minutes getting dressed. A tightly tucked bed felt stiff to me, too controlled and perhaps a little too pleased with itself.

Then I stayed at a hotel in Paris and became obsessed with the bed. I don’t remember what I ate for breakfast, which is unusual, or what flowers were in the lobby, which is nearly impossible, but I remember those corners. They were crisp without feeling severe. The whole bed looked cared for. Climbing into it felt less like disturbing a display and more like receiving something.

Now I tuck my own bed. I smooth the cover and pull the corners tight, and every morning I experience a tiny, ridiculous sense of accomplishment. It takes about thirty seconds, which means I resisted it for years on what were essentially ideological grounds.

I’d confused casualness with comfort. The hotel reminded me that care can be comforting too.

Glass-top tables may be one of the more surprising reversals. For years, I’d filed them away under office lobbies, bachelor apartments and rooms containing at least one questionable sectional. Then I began placing my new collection for Beni Rugs throughout my home and found myself reluctant to hide the motifs beneath solid furniture.

The glass-top side table in my living room reveals the motif of the rug underneath it. The table is there, but so is everything below it. I’d once thought of transparency as a lack of presence. Now I appreciate the way it can make room for something else. Not every piece needs to announce itself. Sometimes its job is simply not to interrupt.

Separately, I’ve also come to love a pair of Joe D’Urso bedside tables with thick safety-glass tops and solid bases. They don’t disappear at all. They’re grounded and architectural, and the glass feels substantial rather than delicate. Apparently I didn’t have one fixed objection to glass-top tables. I had several smaller objections wearing a trench coat.

Symmetry has softened me in much the same way. For years, asymmetry seemed inherently more sophisticated. It was freer, more artistic, less obvious. But asymmetry isn’t automatically interesting, just as symmetry isn’t automatically dull. Good symmetry can make a room feel calm in your body before your brain understands why. Two lamps, two chairs, two objects holding a space steady. Then perhaps one branch leans too far in one direction, or one stool wanders slightly off course, and the whole thing comes alive.

I used to think the disruption was the interesting part. Now I understand that it only works because something beneath it is holding still.

I’m also less doctrinaire about mixing metals. There was a time when I believed discipline meant choosing one finish and sticking with it. Brass meant brass. Chrome meant chrome. Everyone knew where they stood.

Now that seems a little like insisting every guest at dinner wear the same outfit.

Old brass, aluminum, polished steel, bronze and silver each respond differently to light. They age differently too. A room can become richer when not every surface is speaking with the same accent. It feels less coordinated, perhaps, but more collected, which is increasingly the side I find myself on.

The stool I brought home from Paris taught me something slightly different.

I’d first seen it in March as part of a pair and couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was one of those objects that didn’t seem urgent in the moment but followed me home anyway, without the inconvenience of actually being purchased. It stayed somewhere in the back of my mind while I went on with my life, pretending I was perfectly capable of moving forward without it.

When I returned in July, one of the pair had sold. The other was still there.

This felt both miraculous and mildly accusatory.

So I bought it, found a cardboard box, carried it to the airport and watched a man wrap it in layer after layer of plastic until it looked capable of surviving not only the baggage hold but a minor apocalypse. I checked it with my luggage and spent the flight imagining every possible way the decision could end badly.

It arrived intact.

Sometimes taste isn’t about what catches your eye. It’s about what refuses to leave it. And sometimes changing your mind doesn’t happen in a dramatic flash. Sometimes it happens over four months, while an object quietly remains itself and you become the person willing to carry it through an airport.

That may be what I’ve been thinking about most during this unintended pause. Some of you were waiting for me to catch up with these posts. Meanwhile, I was catching up to a stool in Paris, an orchid in Gramercy, wallpaper, tucked corners, layered textiles and glass-top tables. None of these things became better while I was away. They didn’t reinvent themselves or make a compelling case. I simply met them again as a slightly different person.

Thank you for waiting for me.

I suspect we all have a few opinions we’ve been carrying around long after they’ve stopped being useful. Mine just happen to concern orchids and bed corners. Yours may be more important. Or less important. Possibly olives.

I’ve started to find it comforting that we don’t have to decide everything once and then spend the rest of our lives proving ourselves consistent. We can look again. We can be surprised by the thing we were certain we understood. We can discover that a room, an object or a person has something else to show us, although sometimes, irritatingly, the person is us.

The older I get, the less interested I am in having a signature style and the more interested I am in having a living one. Something that can absorb a contradiction, survive a bad idea and make room for new information. A home that doesn’t require me to remain exactly who I was when I began furnishing it.

I thought having good taste meant becoming more certain. I’m beginning to think it might mean becoming easier to surprise.

Good taste isn’t about collecting convictions. It’s about staying interested enough to keep revising them.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been catching up to.

It’s about becoming someone who’s still willing to be surprised. The things I dismissed ten years ago weren’t waiting to become better. They were waiting for me to catch up.

Love,
Colin

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word piece-y, mostly because I’ve been using it in my own apartment with the frequency of someone trying to diagnose a small but persistent rash.

The room isn’t bad. This is important. The pieces are good. Some of them are very good. Too good, maybe, which is where the trouble begins.

You spend years sourcing. The vintage chair. The lamp. The rug. The side table. The ceramic. The art. The stool. The other stool. The stool that somehow became a side table because nobody stopped it in time.

And then one day you look around and realize you haven’t made a room.

You’ve assembled a very impressive witness lineup.

Everything’s interesting. Nothing’s speaking to each other.

This is the problem with collecting beautiful things one piece at a time. At a certain point, a room can start to feel like a collection of individual achievements. Every object has a résumé. Every object has a backstory. Every object has survived an auction, a shipping company, and several opportunities for you to make better financial decisions.

I found this in Paris. This came from an auction. This came from a dealer with impossible hours. This one arrived in a crate so large it briefly became a piece of furniture itself.

And yet the room feels choppy. Not ugly. Not wrong. Just unsettled. Like everyone arrived at the dinner party looking fantastic but nobody knows each other.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’m finally bringing in some of the last pieces for my apartment. This should feel triumphant. The finish line is in sight. The sourcing’s mostly done. The spreadsheets can finally rest.

Instead, I keep finding myself standing in the middle of the room thinking, Why is this getting louder?

Not visually louder.

Narratively louder.

Every object would like a brief moment to explain itself.

I see this happen in styling too, especially in photographs. There will be little styling moments scattered throughout the frame. A stack of books here. A flower there. A vessel on a cloth. A candle. A bowl. A slightly nervous branch doing its best.

Individually, nothing is offensive.

Together, everything starts raising its hand.

Years ago, I was on set reviewing images with a client. As stylists, we’re often sourcing flowers, props, textiles, and objects weeks before a shoot based on scouting photographs and floor plans. Sometimes you haven’t even stood in the room until the day you’re shooting it, which is a wonderfully efficient way to remain humble.

I had arrived with all sorts of things I thought the room needed. Beautiful objects. Flowers. Textiles. Little interventions I was convinced would help bring the room to life.

Then we started reviewing the images on the monitor.

The client looked at the screen and said, “All I can see is your styling.”

Thankfully, this happened while we were still shooting and not after the magazine had gone to print.

But she was right.

I’d become so focused on the individual moments that I’d stopped paying attention to the picture.

Somewhere along the way, I’d started competing with the room instead of supporting it.

We removed things. Simplified. Stepped back.

The image immediately became stronger.

That lesson has stayed with me because it’s surprisingly easy to mistake activity for atmosphere. A room doesn’t necessarily improve because you’ve added five more interesting things. Sometimes it improves because you’ve finally noticed what’s already there.

The deeply irritating thing is that most rooms don’t have an object problem.

They have a relationship problem.

Now, I realize this may sound rich coming from someone who recently wrote an entire essay about tiny things. I stand by every word. Tiny things matter enormously. The flower. The lamp. The pitcher of water. The chair pulled slightly away from the table. The branch interrupting the mirror.

Those are often the things that make a room feel alive.

But lately I’ve been realizing there’s a difference between bringing a room to life and giving it a point of view.

A flower cannot decide what a room is about.

A beautiful ceramic cannot create a point of view.

A stack of books cannot tell your eye where to land.

Trust me, I’ve tried.

Tiny things bring a room to life. But first there has to be a room.

And that’s the distinction I’ve been thinking about lately. The little gestures create atmosphere. They create hospitality. They create evidence of thought. But they can’t answer the larger question.

What is this room trying to say?

Not what is the lamp saying.

Not what is the chair saying.

Not what is the art saying.

What is the room saying?

I’ve started asking myself this question whenever a room feels piece-y, and the answer is often uncomfortable.

Because sometimes the room isn’t saying anything.

It’s just a collection of things I happen to like.

When I was studying dance, one of my teachers used to say, “Colin, don’t come on the audience. Let the audience come to you.”

Which remains some of the best advice I’ve ever received despite sounding deeply inappropriate.

I’ve realized it’s also true of rooms.

A room that feels piece-y is often a room that’s trying too hard. Every chair wants your attention. Every lamp wants your attention. Every object has a fascinating backstory. Every styling moment would like a brief opportunity to explain itself.

Nobody has agreed to play supporting cast.

One of the hardest lessons in styling is that not everything deserves equal emphasis. In fact, most things don’t. A photograph works because your eye knows where to land first. Then it discovers everything else. The image unfolds. It doesn’t introduce itself all at once.

The rooms I remember most work the same way.

They’re not necessarily the rooms with the most beautiful furniture or the rarest objects. They’re the rooms that know what matters. They know where the sentence begins. They know where it ends. And they know which words can stay quiet.

I’ve started thinking about rooms the way I think about puzzles.

Not because they’re frustrating, although they certainly can be.

But because a finished puzzle has a particular quality. Once every piece is in place, nothing can be added and nothing can be removed without changing the whole image.

The pieces become dependent on one another.

Take away one section and the picture no longer works the same way.

I think great rooms operate similarly.

People often assume every object should be able to stand on its own. That every chair should be interesting. Every lamp should have a point of view. Every object should earn its keep independently.

But the rooms I admire most don’t work that way.

The sofa makes the chairs make sense.

The chairs make the table make sense.

The table makes the lamp make sense.

The lamp makes the art make sense.

Change one thing and suddenly you’re having a completely different conversation.

I’ve experienced this in my own apartment more times than I’d care to admit. A mirror changes and suddenly the artwork feels wrong. A chair leaves the room and an entire corner collapses emotionally. An object you’ve never paid much attention to disappears and somehow everything feels slightly off.

The room wasn’t relying on the individual object.

It was relying on the relationship.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize this isn’t just a design problem.

People do this too.

Careers do this.

Instagram feeds do this.

Lives do this.

We accumulate accomplishments, interests, experiences, opinions, goals, ambitions, and possessions until eventually we find ourselves with a very impressive collection of things and only a vague sense of what holds them together.

A room isn’t memorable because every object is special.

A room is memorable because everything feels like it’s participating in the same conversation.

I suppose that’s what I’m after these days. Not another beautiful object. Not another story. Not another thing to add to the pile.

I’m interested in the connective tissue.

The relationship.

The point of view.

The idea holding everything together.

Because every room eventually teaches the same lesson: the most important thing is rarely the thing drawing the most attention.

Not every piece needs to be extraordinary. Some pieces need to be calm. Some need to be useful. Some need to be the friend at dinner who asks good questions and doesn’t immediately tell a story about themselves.

Those are often the things that make the room work.

Not because they’re memorable.

Because they make everything else feel inevitable.

Love,
Colin

I recently found myself at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

I love visiting places like this because they tend to make modern life feel unnecessarily complicated. The rooms are simple. The materials are simple. The thinking is simple. Not simplistic. Simple. There’s a difference.

What always strikes me about Shaker interiors is how little they’re trying to impress you. The rooms are practical. Direct. Useful. Nothing is performing. Nothing is auditioning. The rooms seem entirely unconcerned with whether anyone likes them.

And yet every detail feels deeply considered. The proportions are right. The colors are right. The placement of things feels inevitable. Nothing is overworked. Nothing is ornamental for ornament’s sake. The simplicity isn’t casual; it’s disciplined. Even the milk-painted floors, with their soft, chalky colors, felt surprisingly modern.

In fact, they’re often more beautiful because they’re useful.

The Shakers famously said:

Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.

Which, if we’re being honest, is a fairly devastating piece of advice.

Because most of us spend an extraordinary amount of time separating those two things. Useful over here. Beautiful over there. The Shakers saw no reason they couldn’t be the same thing.

Walking through the village, one of the things I kept noticing was the painted floors.

Not rare floors. Not expensive floors. Not floors selected after six months of requesting samples and comparing undertones. Painted floors.

And they were beautiful.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized painted floors have one of the worst reputations in design. People hear “painted floor” and immediately picture something rustic. Nautical. A beach house. A farmhouse. The sort of place where someone owns multiple striped sweaters and knows how to sail.

Which is unfortunate because painted floors have a much stranger and more interesting history than that.

The thing I find fascinating is that painted floors keep appearing throughout history, usually in the homes and studios of people who had more important things to think about. The Shakers painted floors because they were practical. Artists in 1970s Soho painted floors for reasons that were equally pragmatic. White and pale gray floors reflected light deeper into cavernous industrial spaces. They sealed damaged wood. They hid mismatched repairs. They made paint spills and studio messes easier to live with.

Neither group was trying to create a design statement.

The design statement arrived later.

Which is often how the best ideas work.

Some of the most influential interiors in history were created by people trying to solve a problem, not create a style.

What struck me most about the Shaker rooms was how little energy was spent pretending. Pine looked like pine. Paint looked like paint. Utility wasn’t disguised as luxury. Nothing was trying to be something else. The honesty of the materials is part of what makes the rooms feel so calm.

A few days later I found myself walking through a newly built apartment in Manhattan and thinking about exactly the opposite.

It was one of those developer apartments assembled entirely from expensive materials and excellent intentions. Everything was beautiful. Beautiful stone. Beautiful wood. Beautiful fixtures. Beautiful in the way airport lounges are beautiful. Competent. Expensive. Completely forgettable.

The closer I looked, the more I realized that many of the materials weren’t actually that beautiful at all. They were simply trying very hard to look expensive. Expensive has become its own design language. One that often mistakes complexity for quality.

So much contemporary construction relies on materials performing aspiration. Engineered surfaces pretending to be stone. Veneers pretending to be something older, rarer, or more expensive. The irony is that the more a material tries to convince you of its value, the less convincing it often becomes.

My first thought was: paint the floors.

Not because the floors were bad.

Because they were asking for too much attention.

One of the reasons I love painted floors is that they’re often mistaken for a style when they’re really a strategy. A painted floor doesn’t necessarily make a room feel rustic. Sometimes it does the opposite. It simplifies. It removes information. It turns the floor into a backdrop instead of a performance.

I’ve seen painted floors make old houses feel modern and modern houses feel calm.

One of the reasons painted floors work is that floors have far more power than we give them credit for.

A few months ago we were installing rugs at the BENI apartment and I was reminded of this in real time. The apartment has knotty pine floors full of movement, character, and visual texture. We were laying pieces from our new Oak Lane collection by Michael Bargo, which has a softer, more refined sensibility despite the plaid patterns. On paper, it should have worked immediately.

It didn’t.

For a while the room felt trapped in a conversation we weren’t trying to have. The pine pushed everything toward rusticity. The rugs started reading more country than sophisticated. More cabin than city. More beach house than apartment.

We eventually got there through layering, furniture placement, color, and a fair amount of trial and error. But the experience stayed with me because it reminded me how powerful a floor can be. People often think floors are background. They’re not. They’re weather. Everything else has to live inside the atmosphere they create.

Which is one reason painted floors, large area rugs, wall-to-wall carpet, and even tonal microtopping can be so transformative. They create a calmer visual field. A sea of one thing. Not because uniformity is inherently better, but because it gives the rest of the room more freedom.

A room doesn’t always need more personality. Sometimes it needs less competition.

My first design job was working for Tom Delavan. His Greenwich Village townhouse had painted floors throughout the stair hall and parlor level, and I remember being struck by how contemporary they felt. Not rustic. Not country. Not quaint. Just confident.

At the time I couldn’t fully articulate why I liked them so much. Looking back, I think it was because the floors understood their role. They weren’t trying to be the most interesting thing in the room. They were creating the conditions for everything else to be interesting.

That’s the word I keep coming back to: confidence. Not confidence in the paint color, but confidence in the decision itself. Confident enough to paint over something. Confident enough not to preserve every material simply because it’s there. Confident enough to decide what matters.

Because that’s really what a painted floor does. It decides that the floor isn’t the most important thing in the room. The art matters more. The furniture matters more. The architecture matters more. The people matter more.

A painted floor doesn’t create character. It reveals it.

And that’s where I think painted floors become surprisingly relevant to life outside design.

Everyone assumes the paint is the risky part. It’s not. The risky part is realizing that most decisions aren’t nearly as permanent as we pretend they are. Paint can be repainted. Rooms can change. Furniture can move. Most decisions turn out to be far less permanent than we imagine.

Which may be why I trust painted floors. They’re practical. They’re beautiful. They’re affordable. They’re forgiving. More importantly, they remind us that confidence rarely arrives before the decision. Usually it arrives afterward.

The older I get, the more I suspect that the best rooms are built by people who know what deserves attention and what doesn’t.

The artists in Soho painted floors because they needed better light, cleaner studios, and practical solutions to imperfect spaces. The Shakers painted floors because practicality mattered. Different motivations, similar result. Neither group was particularly interested in worshipping the floor.

And that’s probably what I admire most.

Not the painted floors themselves, but the clarity. A floor was a floor. A room was a room. The point was the life happening on top of it.

Which feels obvious until you realize how much time we spend doing the opposite.

Meanwhile, some of the most beautiful rooms ever made were created by people who simply got on with it.

Love,
Colin

Earlier this week, I was at the Sotheby’s Design sale, looking at pieces for clients and doing the mental gymnastics that always accompany these things.

Is it rare? Is it important? Is the estimate reasonable? What’s the condition report? Will it work in the project? Can I stop thinking about it?

The last question is usually the most revealing.

This particular train of thought began with Serge Roche’s Palm Tree floor lamp. Standing there, I found myself thinking about his shell sconces, which then sent me to Rose Uniacke’s shell uplighters at San Vicente West Village, CH Herrero’s extraordinary nautilus-inspired lighting, and the Tavares1922 presentation at Matter and Shape in Paris, where I spent an unreasonable amount of time staring at shell objects and convincing myself it qualified as research.

Then, as these things tend to go, I found myself thinking about seventeenth-century nautilus cups, Dutch still lifes, Tiffany’s famous Nautilus lamp, Edward Weston’s photograph of the same name, and the coral and shell jewelry of Federico de Vera.

Within the span of about fifteen minutes, an auction preview had somehow turned into a meditation on why humanity appears incapable of leaving shells alone.

This was not my first shell-related lapse in judgment.

A few months ago, I bought a mother-of-pearl table at auction and spent approximately twenty-four hours feeling extremely clever before discovering that transporting it from Europe required enough licenses, paperwork, and administrative negotiation to suggest I was attempting to export a national treasure.

It slowly became apparent that getting this table home would require the sort of diplomacy usually associated with relocating a minor royal.

Eventually I put it back into auction and cut my losses.

The table won.

I lost.

I still think about it regularly.

Which is perhaps another clue that shells occupy a category all their own.

Because once you start looking, they seem to appear everywhere.

Not just in decorative arts, but in visual culture more broadly. Renaissance wunderkammern displayed shells beside gemstones, fossils, scientific instruments, and religious relics. Dutch still lifes tucked them among silver vessels, peeled lemons, flowers, fruit, and extravagant nautilus cups. Venetian grottos turned them into architecture. Tiffany transformed them into lamps. Cocteau drew them. Mongiardino decorated with them. Federico de Vera continues to build entire worlds around them.

And now they’re showing up again.

In shell sconces. In coral forms. In mother-of-pearl surfaces. In seaweed silhouettes. In contemporary lighting. In objects that feel less designed than discovered.

The interesting thing is that none of this feels nostalgic.

It feels inevitable.

Renaissance collectors didn’t treat shells as decoration. They treated them as marvels. The great nautilus cups were never really attempts to improve upon nature. If anything, they were admissions of defeat. Goldsmiths took an already extraordinary object and simply built a frame around it.

I think about that often when styling.

Some objects require intervention.

Others require restraint.

What fascinates me is that shells appear in still lifes with remarkable consistency. Again and again, among silver vessels, flowers, fruit, goblets, and elaborate nautilus cups, a shell appears. Not because it belongs logically, but because it changes the composition. I know this because I’ve done exactly the same thing myself. Looking back through years of styling projects, I keep finding shells tucked into arrangements. On tables. Beside vessels. Nestled among flowers. Interrupting otherwise orderly compositions. I never consciously set out to make shells a recurring theme. They simply kept finding their way into the frame.

A shell introduces wonder. Not manufactured wonder. Not styled wonder. The genuine article. And unlike many objects, it doesn’t require much help from us. The shell arrives carrying its own atmosphere.

Which may explain why artists, collectors, decorators, photographers, and designers keep returning to it. The shell itself is rarely the point. What interests me is how often its geometry reappears. In the extraordinary nautilus cups of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Tiffany’s Nautilus lamp. In CH Herrero’s lighting. In the shell-inspired works of Tavares1922. In Edward Weston’s photograph, where the shell becomes less an object than a study of proportion, shadow, light, and form.

The nautilus itself is an ancient marine mollusk whose chambered shell has remained largely unchanged for roughly 500 million years. Five hundred million years, which is an intimidating amount of time to be correct about anything. Entire civilizations have come and gone. Design movements have risen and collapsed. People have spent decades arguing about minimalism. Meanwhile, the nautilus has simply continued making the same spiral.

Perhaps that’s why it moves so effortlessly between disciplines. The shell already possesses many of the qualities we’re all looking for: rhythm, scale, movement, mystery, and a sense of inevitability. I’ve spent much of my career arranging objects, moving them, grouping them, giving them company, taking it away, trying to create relationships between things. Yet some objects seem to arrive having already solved the problem. They feel complete before we touch them.

One of the reasons I continue to return to shells, coral, stones, fragments, branches, and other natural forms is that they resist authorship. Nobody designed them. Nobody optimized them. Nobody held a meeting about their market positioning. They arrived complete.

And I wonder if that’s part of what people are responding to right now.

For years, interiors have been getting more disciplined, more edited, more sophisticated. Objects increasingly felt as though they needed to justify their presence. Everything needed a function. A purpose. A reason.

The shell is fundamentally uninterested in any of this.

A shell has no practical purpose once the creature has moved out. Its only job is to be astonishing.

Collectors understand this instinctively. A collector doesn’t acquire a shell because it completes a room. A collector acquires a shell because they can’t stop looking at it.

The longer I do this work, the more I find myself trusting that impulse.

Not everything needs a function. Not everything needs a justification. Some objects earn their place simply because they inspire fascination.

Perhaps that’s why shells continue to survive every cycle of taste. They transcend trends because they’re not really decorative objects at all. They’re reminders that beauty can exist without our involvement, that nature remains a better designer than most of us, and that sophistication and enchantment are not the same thing.

If I had to choose between them, I’d take enchantment.

Every time.

The shell has been making that argument for several hundred years now.

Which is a pretty good run for a former mollusk.

"Nautilus" Table Lamp by Tiffany Studios | Sotheby’s

Plaster Shell Uplighter | Rose Uniacke

Scallop Shell Wall Plinth | Rose Uniacke

Nautilus Shell Torchiere | Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Shell Fountain | Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Nautilus Shell Lamp | Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Nautilus Swivel Chairs & Ottoman by Vladimir Kagan | 1stDibs

“Limnea” Nautilus Lamp by Marika Carniti Bollea | 1stDibs

Shell Letter Opener | Tavares

Small Pavão | Tavares

White Pisco Candle Holder | Tavares

Caviar Bowl | Tavares

Nautilus Shell Gravy Boat | Tavares

Small Jade Shell Snail | Tavares

1S Shell Photograph by Edward Weston | 1stDibs

Dahlias by Alana Burns | The Future Perfect

Salad Spoon by Alana Burns | The Future Perfect

Pair of Plaster Wall Lights attributed to Serge Roche | Danke Galerie

Vintage Cast Bronze Sea Shell Sconces | InCollect

Cornucopia of Nautilus Shell and Lizard Object d’Art | InCollect

Coral and Emerald Bracelet | De Vera

Coral Branch Pendant | De Vera

Federico de Vera Objects| De Vera

Pair of Silvered Shells | McGrath

Pair of Starfish and Conch Shell Lamps | Maison Gerard

Grotto Armchair by Pauly et Cie | Maison Gerard

Love,
Colin

I was with a friend recently who is one of those infuriatingly talented people who can think about furniture, lighting, interiors, and architecture all at once without appearing to break a sweat. I was showing her a scouting presentation on my phone for a project that was still very much in progress. Art leaning on the floor. Objects migrating from one surface to another. Lamps wandering around looking for purpose. My poor bedroom chair had already traveled through three rooms that week and was showing no signs of settling down. The design equivalent of trying on outfits before dinner and rejecting all of them.

She looked around for a moment and said, “You’re such a good stylist.”

What made me laugh was that the room wasn’t finished. If anything, it felt halfway between an idea and a room.

But I knew exactly what she meant.

She wasn’t responding to the objects themselves. She was responding to the relationships between them.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since because most people assume styling is about knowing what to buy. A better lamp. A more interesting bowl. A vintage object from a flea market in Belgium that somehow promises to solve all of your emotional problems.

I wish this were true. It would make my job considerably easier.

The longer I do this work, the less I think styling is about acquiring beautiful things and the more I think it’s about assigning importance. A room is full of negotiations. What deserves attention. What deserves space. What needs company. What needs restraint. What belongs together. What doesn’t.

After eight years of styling professionally, and considerably longer rearranging my own furniture instead of addressing more pressing matters, I’ve accumulated a collection of habits that sound increasingly irrational when described out loud.

The strange thing is that they work.

One of them is placing a textile underneath objects that have absolutely no practical need for a textile. Not folded. Just laid flat. More like a mat than a napkin. A bowl. A lamp. A stone. A box. A weird egg. Sometimes a shell, a leaf, a branch, or some other piece of ephemera if I’ve really committed to the storyline.

I started doing this years ago and couldn’t fully explain why. I just knew I liked what happened. It’s similar to what happens in a beautiful hotel bathroom when all of your toiletries are arranged neatly on a small towel beside the sink. Nothing about the toothpaste has improved. The towel has simply convinced you that your toothpaste deserves dignity.

The textile creates a small ceremony. Suddenly the object feels acknowledged. The surface feels acknowledged too. A relationship appears where there wasn’t one before. The bowl isn’t simply sitting on a table anymore. The table isn’t merely supporting the bowl. They’re participating in the same idea.

I realize this sounds like the sort of conclusion a person arrives at after spending too much time alone with decorative objects. That is because it is.

But I also think it’s true.

The object itself hasn’t changed. It’s still the same bowl. The same lamp. The same stone I picked up somewhere and have now assigned far more emotional significance than is reasonable. Yet the room changes completely. It feels more intentional. More settled. Less like storage and more like a decision.

I’ve become equally attached to leaving a pitcher of water and a few glasses out before guests arrive. Not because I imagine everyone entering my apartment desperately dehydrated. The water itself is almost beside the point. What I love is what it communicates. That somebody was expected. That another person was considered before they arrived.

It’s also a wonderful excuse to buy that vintage Murano pitcher you found in Venice. A carafe is one of the easiest ways to introduce color and personality into a room without making a huge commitment. It can live on a bedside table, a coffee table, a console, or a bar cart. It can be there for guests or for you.

Hospitality doesn’t always need an audience.

Hospitality, at least the version I respond to most, isn’t really about impressing people. It’s about creating evidence of thought. A room changes when it appears to have anticipated company. Even if nobody touches the water all evening, it has already done its job.

Flowers are another area where I consistently ignore common sense. I almost always put them in vessels that are slightly too small.

I know.

Somewhere a florist is reading this and taking a long, steadying breath.

But flowers that are a little crowded feel gathered to me. They feel connected. Like they arrived together and have something to discuss. Flowers in oversized vases sometimes feel like strangers standing too far apart at a dinner party, politely waiting for someone to introduce them.

The opposite is true too. Flowers can be too small for a vase. Too tall. Too short. The relationship matters more than the flower itself. Styling is often less about the object than the conversation it’s having with its container.

I also love when objects partially obscure other objects. A lamp in front of a painting. A branch crossing a mirror. A chair interrupting a curtain.

We spend so much time trying to make everything visible. But visibility and interest are not the same thing.

When everything is perfectly visible, perfectly centered, perfectly presented, a room can start to feel oddly self-conscious. Like it’s aware it’s being watched. The most memorable homes I’ve ever been in always contain a little interference. A little friction. A few visual conversations happening at once. Nothing feels overly resolved because real life rarely is.

Sometimes mystery is more engaging than clarity.

When people come over, I often joke, “Move slowly. Everything is a booby trap.”

And what I mean by that is that many of the arrangements have become codependent.

A ceramic vessel might be hiding the chip that came off it. A piece of art may be concealing a cord I’ve chosen to stop seeing. A lampshade might be balanced on a harp that’s technically the wrong size but emotionally the right one.

Objects are often helping each other out.

Which, now that I think about it, is another reason I like them.

Not every styling decision is philosophical. Sometimes it’s witness protection. But I do think rooms become more interesting when not everything reveals itself immediately.

Most lighting plans solve visibility.

Table lamps solve atmosphere.

And atmosphere, unfortunately, is what we’re all actually looking for.

The same principle applies to furniture. I often pull a chair slightly away from the table. Let a stool float. Move a piece away from the wall. Not enough to look intentional. Just enough.

A perfectly tucked dining chair feels like nobody has arrived yet. One chair sitting slightly askew feels like a life has occurred. Someone sat there. Someone got up. Someone may come back.

Good rooms often tell you what to do before you think about it. You know where to sit. Where to place your drink. Where to pause. Rooms become more welcoming when they stop standing at attention.

I use trays with a similar enthusiasm. Three unrelated objects sitting on a table look accidental. Three unrelated objects sitting on a tray suddenly look like they share a common purpose. This is one of styling’s oldest tricks and one of its best. A tray is essentially a very polite way of saying, “These belong together now.”

Whether they agree or not.

I’ve also become increasingly attached to leaving one surface empty.

Completely empty.

Nothing feels luxurious anymore because every surface is trying to contribute. Every shelf has a vignette. Every table has a point of view. Every corner is participating in the conversation, and frankly some of them need to learn to listen.

Sometimes the most generous thing a room can offer is relief. A place for the eye to rest. A pause.

And finally, I like one thing in every room to be mildly inconvenient.

A stool that’s there because it’s beautiful. A sculpture where a side table could go. A giant branch occupying valuable square footage.

Not enough inconvenience to ruin your day.

Just enough to suggest that beauty occasionally won the argument.

I’ve come to realize that most of these habits have very little to do with decoration. They’re really small acts of acknowledgment. The textile acknowledges the object. The pitcher acknowledges the guest. The lamp acknowledges the room. The chair acknowledges the life being lived there. Even the empty surface acknowledges something important: that not every corner needs to contribute.

Sometimes the most generous thing a room can offer is relief.

None of these gestures are expensive. Most are barely noticeable.

Which is exactly why they work.

The last layer rarely announces itself. It’s usually just a collection of small decisions that tell a room what matters.

And maybe that’s what my friend was seeing that day.

Not styling, exactly.

Just attention.

The accumulated effect of hundreds of tiny decisions made over time. A lamp moved six inches. A chair pulled slightly away from the table. A piece of fabric placed beneath an object because, for reasons that remain difficult to defend, it suddenly felt better there.

People often ask what makes a room feel finished.

I don’t think rooms ever really get finished.

I think they get noticed.

And then noticed again.

The homes I remember most aren’t the ones with the best furniture or the most expensive objects. They’re the ones where it felt like someone had been paying attention for a very long time.

A room feels alive when the people living in it have stopped asking, “What else do I need?”

And started asking, “What deserves a little more importance?”

That’s usually where the magic is.

And it’s almost always cheaper than another chair.

Love,
Colin

There was a time when a bowl was just a bowl.

It held lemons. Keys. Maybe soup if things were going especially well.

Now the decorative bowl has aspirations.

It no longer wants to contain objects. It wants to communicate values. It wants to imply that the person living there has excellent restraint, owns linen trousers, and probably says things like “we’ve been really into anchovies lately.”

And listen, I’m not above this. I built an entire career out of moving objects three inches to the left and then staring at them like they had personally disappointed me. I used to joke that any surface could be fixed with a bowl, a book, and a branch. Which, to be fair, is still occasionally true. A good branch has saved many situations.

But I’ve started noticing something lately, both in my own work and in the larger styling culture we’re all marinating in.

The objects are becoming the personality.

Not in a soulful, layered, collector kind of way. In a slightly haunted, algorithmic way. Like the room has developed a vague understanding of what “good taste” is and is now trying to perform it back to us using travertine.

You know the bowl I mean.

Large but somehow shallow. Matte, but aggressively matte. Empty in a very intentional way. Usually placed beside three art books and a chair no one sits in correctly. It never actually holds anything because utility would interrupt the narrative. But also because the moment you place something real inside it, keys, mail, a half-dead clementine, the object stops communicating taste and starts communicating a person.

And increasingly, I think that’s the part many of us are trying to avoid. The moment an object stops implying taste and starts revealing an actual life.

I think decorative objects have become so emotionally loaded because our homes are now expected to explain us almost immediately.

A room has about four seconds to establish:
taste,
worldview,
economic literacy,
relationship to Europe,
and whether or not you own a subscription to Cabana magazine.

This is a lot to ask from a side table.

So objects have started over-functioning emotionally. Every vessel is trying to tell a story. Every stool is quietly auditioning. Every surface seems to be working very hard to imply a person.

And somewhere along the way, styling became less about living with objects and more about signaling fluency through them.

We started styling our homes like personal brands.

That’s when the bowl became sentient.

You can feel it evaluating you.

I realized this recently while styling my own shelves, which is always humbling because nothing exposes your psychological patterns faster than repeatedly moving the same stone object around for forty minutes while insisting you’re “almost there.”

At some point I stepped back and realized the room looked deeply informed and not remotely alive.

Everything was beautiful.
Nothing had pulse.

There were objects everywhere implying a person instead of revealing one.

And I think that’s the danger of styling culture when it becomes too optimized. You stop choosing objects because they genuinely fascinate or comfort or surprise you. You start choosing them because they already belong to a visual language everyone agrees reads as tasteful.

The bowl stops supporting the personality and starts standing in for it.

Which is unfortunate because decorative bowls, when they’re good, are actually incredible.

A monumental ceramic bowl can anchor an entire dining table. A shallow bronze bowl can make a room feel quieter somehow. A hand-carved wooden bowl filled with absolutely nothing can still create warmth because the object itself carries evidence of touch, time, material, humanity.

The best bowls don’t just accessorize a room.

They create pause.

And maybe that’s the distinction.

A good decorative object deepens a room.
A bad one just reassures it.

Lately, I’ve been trying a small experiment at home.

If an object feels like it’s only communicating taste, but not actually revealing anything about me, I remove it for a few days. Not forever. Just long enough to see whether the room actually misses it.

Sometimes it does. Sometimes the object was creating structure or softness or rhythm in a way I hadn’t fully appreciated.

But sometimes removing it reveals something else entirely. That I’d been using the object like a placeholder personality. Filling space visually without contributing any real emotional weight.

Those are usually the pieces I chose because they looked correct instead of because I actually loved them.

And weirdly, the room almost always improves afterward. Not because it becomes emptier. Because it becomes more specific.

I think people underestimate how much warmth comes from evidence of actual use. A bowl filled with lemons from the corner store is usually more compelling than a perfect empty vessel trying very hard to imply restraint. A stack of books someone is genuinely reading has a completely different energy than books arranged spine-first like they’re entering witness protection.

The objects that make a home feel alive are rarely the ones trying hardest to look tasteful.

They’re the ones accidentally revealing a life.

I think about collectors a lot in this context because true collectors don’t acquire objects to complete an image. They acquire them because they become slightly obsessed. The objects carry emotional residue, curiosity, compulsion. A collector’s home feels different because the objects are not auditioning for approval. They’ve already been chosen for reasons that often don’t translate immediately.

That’s why those homes stay with you.

Not because every object is beautiful. But because every object feels believed in.

I’m starting to think slight irrationality is actually an important design principle. The objects that stay with me are rarely the most perfect ones. They’re the ones carrying a little emotional residue.

Which is not me declaring war on bowls, to be clear. I love bowls deeply. Spiritually even. I have absolutely centered an entire room around a ceramic vessel and behaved as though I had solved infrastructure.

But the best decorative objects still retain some relationship to humanity. They feel touched. Specific. Slightly irrational.

Not like they were generated by some collective fantasy about what a “tasteful” person’s home is supposed to look like.

That’s the difference people feel immediately, even if they can’t explain it.

One room says:
“This is who I think I’m supposed to be.”

The other says:
“This is what I actually love.”

And increasingly, I think people are hungry for the second one.

Not perfection. Not performance. Just evidence of a real mind making real choices over time.

Even if one of those choices is, occasionally, an extremely judgmental bowl.

Love,
Colin

I’ve become deeply suspicious of rooms that reveal themselves immediately.

You know the kind. You walk in and within seven seconds you understand the entire thesis. The kitchen says hello before you’ve even taken your shoes off. Every surface is visible. Every chair is participating. Nothing is withheld. It’s all very clear and very impressive and somehow slightly exhausting, like meeting someone who tells you their childhood trauma before the appetizers arrive.

A screen would help.

This is what I’ve started thinking recently, perhaps too often, because once you notice screens, you realize they’re quietly solving problems everywhere while asking for almost no credit.

And historically, they’ve always done this.

We tend to think of folding screens as slightly eccentric decorative extras. Something belonging either to a glamorous aunt with too many caftans or a mildly theatrical hotel lobby. But screens were originally incredibly functional. In China and Japan they were used to direct movement, block drafts, create privacy, tell stories, soften architecture, divide rooms, and establish ceremony. European decorators later adopted them because wealthy people, much like the rest of us, also wanted elegant ways to hide things they didn’t want anyone looking at.

Humanity, at its core, has always wanted somewhere to put the ugly lamp.

And honestly, I think we lost something when rooms stopped having mystery. Open concept living really did a number on all of us. We were promised freedom and flow and togetherness, and instead many of us now eat dinner while staring directly at an air fryer and twelve charging cables.

A screen restores editing.

It lets a room unfold slowly instead of announcing itself all at once. Which is what all the best rooms do, and honestly, all the best people too.

The thing I love most about screens is that they’re almost impossible to use incorrectly. The moment you stop treating them like formal “room dividers” and start treating them like movable architecture, they become wildly interesting.

Artists have understood this for centuries. Francis Bacon made screens. So did Man Ray. Claude Lalanne too. Not because they needed somewhere to change clothes dramatically behind, but because screens occupy this strange and beautiful territory between painting, sculpture, furniture, and architecture. They hold imagery, shape space, manipulate movement, and alter atmosphere all at once.

A screen is functional, yes, but it’s also theatrical. Spatial. Emotional.

Which is why some of the most compelling screens aren’t dividing anything at all. They’re mounted flat like paintings. Wrapped around corners like improvised architecture. Used behind beds, beside dining tables, at the ends of hallways where they create shadow, rhythm, and a slight feeling that something more interesting might be happening just out of view.

A screen changes not only what you see, but how you move through a room. It slows the eye down. Interrupts the immediate read of a space. And increasingly, I think that’s what people are actually craving now. Not more perfection. More intrigue.

A screen behind a bed suddenly makes the room feel collected instead of purchased. A screen used as art feels more alive than most actual art because it carries shape and shadow and movement. A screen tucked awkwardly into a corner somehow makes the awkwardness feel intentional. Which frankly is a skill I aspire to personally.

I especially love screens as headboards because traditional headboards can start to feel a little emotionally available to me. Just large upholstered rectangles trying very hard to reassure everyone. A screen has tension. Presence. It creates height without heaviness. It gives the bed a backdrop without locking the room into one permanent idea.

And there’s something psychologically important about that slight impermanence.

Rooms should never feel too finished. The fully finished room is usually where creativity goes to die quietly under a decorative bowl.

Some of the most interesting uses of screens are barely functional at all. A massive Coromandel screen behind a tiny drinks table. A wicker screen hiding absolutely nothing. A painted screen mounted flat on a wall and never folded again for the rest of its life. I once saw a screen positioned beside a bathtub for no practical reason whatsoever except that it made the whole room feel vaguely cinematic and emotionally reparative.

Perfect.

Because screens don’t just divide space. They create atmosphere. The folds catch light differently throughout the day. They create rhythm and shadow and softness without needing clutter. They break up hard edges. And God knows we need help with that right now.

Everything lately is rectangles. Rectangular islands, rectangular sofas, giant black televisions, square coffee tables, hard architectural lines everywhere. Half the rooms I see now look like they’re waiting for a software update.

Then someone places a slightly crooked screen in the corner and suddenly the room exhales.

That’s the thing no one tells you about decorating. Sometimes one object changes not just the look of the room, but its emotional posture.

And screens are very good at this because they operate somewhere between furniture and fantasy. They imply another space beyond them. Another layer. Another possibility. Even when there’s absolutely nothing back there except a vacuum cleaner and mild personal disappointment.

Especially then, honestly.

I also think screens solve a very modern problem, which is that we’ve become addicted to visibility. Everything now has to be optimized, exposed, fully seen. Open shelving. Open floor plans. Open kitchens. Entire apartments arranged like they’re permanently waiting for a photographer to arrive.

Screens gently reject that.

They remind us that not everything needs to be visible all the time to still belong in the room.

And maybe that’s why I love them so much. They create discretion without rigidity. They soften without disappearing. They allow a space to hold a little mystery, which feels increasingly rare and increasingly necessary.

A good room should not explain itself immediately.

It should flirt a little first.

And because I’ve clearly reached the stage of adulthood where I now have strong opinions about screens, here are a few that have permanently rearranged my brain chemistry.

Not necessarily the most famous. Not necessarily the most expensive. Just the ones I return to over and over because they understand that a screen is never just a screen.

It’s architecture pretending to be decoration.

‘L ‘Envol des Canards Sauvages’ Wood Panel by Bernard Dunand | Galerie Marcilhac

‘Two Figures’ Folding Screen by Jean Dunand | Galerie Marcilhac

Set of Two Folding Screens by Jean Dunand | Christie’s

‘Rhinoceros’ Five-Panel Screen by François-Xavier Lalanne & Kazuhide Takahama | Christie’s

Three-Leaves Folding Screen by Jean Royère | Galerie Jacques Lacoste

Five-Panel Screen, ‘Cachan’ Model by Jean Prouvé | Galerie Jacques Lacoste

Screen with Hosoo Fabric by Osanna Visconti | Maison Gerard

Four-Panel Screen by André Sornay | Galerie Jacques Lacoste

Screen Bambù by Osanna Visconti | Nilufar

Développé Screen by Colin King | The Future Perfect

Screen Palindromo by Nilufar Edition | Nilufar

Twelve-Panel Chinese Coromandel Lacquer Floor Screen | Andrew Jones Auctions

Oakwood, Woven Rattan, & Mirror Six-Panel Folding Screen | Artcurial

Twelve-Panel Chinese Brown Coromandel Lacquer Floor Screen | Andrew Jones Auctions

Set of Ten Continental Painted Leather Panels | Andrew Jones Auctions

Gstaad Eight-Panel Eglomisé Glass Screen by Miriam Ellner | Maison Gerard

Contemporary Four-Panel Screen by Marc Bankowsky | Maison Gerard

I think the reason I keep returning to screens is because they resist certainty. They divide space without fully closing it off. They create privacy without isolation. They soften architecture without disappearing into it.

They let a room keep a little secret.

And increasingly, I think that’s what people are craving. Not bigger spaces. Not emptier spaces. Just spaces with a little more intrigue. A little more atmosphere. A little less immediate self-disclosure.

A room doesn’t need to tell you everything all at once.

It just needs to give you a reason to stay curious.

Love,
Colin

Outdoor furniture is deeply aspirational.

That’s the first thing to understand.

No one shops for it in the state they’ll actually be using it. You shop for outdoor furniture in February. Emotionally. Spiritually. You imagine long lunches and linen shirts and people casually saying things like, let’s eat outside.

Then July arrives and everything is covered in pollen.

Or too hot to touch.

Or mysteriously damp.

And suddenly the chair you once described as “beautifully minimal” is just uncomfortable in direct sunlight.

Outdoor furniture is where design fantasy collides headfirst with weather. Which is humbling for everyone involved.

I think this is why people dread buying it. There are too many variables and almost all of them are outside your control. Sun. Rain. Wind. Salt air. Tree sap. Mildew. The very specific sadness of a forgotten cushion during a thunderstorm.

You’re not just buying furniture.

You’re entering a long-term relationship with maintenance.

And yet, when outdoor furniture is right, it changes everything. A terrace becomes a room. A tiny patch of concrete starts to feel intentional. You suddenly become someone who drinks coffee outside in the morning, which feels suspiciously well adjusted.

The mistake people make is thinking outdoor furniture should feel overly “outdoorsy.” Too much teak. Too much rope. Too many references to a resort you once visited and can’t afford emotionally anymore.

The pieces I always respond to feel calmer than that.

Less vacation fantasy. More real life.

I want outdoor furniture to feel like indoor furniture that’s emotionally resilient. The proportions still matter. The silhouettes still matter. I don’t want everything overbuilt and aggressively practical, as though the furniture is preparing for combat.

And comfort matters more outside than inside, which feels unfair but true. You notice everything outdoors. The pitch of a chair. The temperature of metal. Whether an armrest exists when you suddenly need one. Whether a cushion dries in thirty minutes or remains vaguely suspicious for three business days.

Then there’s scale, which becomes very strange outside. Furniture can disappear quickly against open space. What felt generous in a showroom suddenly looks tiny on a terrace. Like it lost confidence on the drive over.

And nobody talks enough about sound. A bad outdoor chair scrapes across stone like it’s furious with you personally.

There’s also the emotional reality that most outdoor spaces are asked to do too much. Dining area. Lounge area. Reading nook. Occasional hosting fantasy. Sometimes all on a balcony roughly the size of a yoga mat.

Which is why restraint matters.

A good outdoor space usually needs less than you think. Fewer pieces. Better proportions. One thing with presence instead of six things apologizing for being there.

What I’ve learned is that outdoor furniture works best when it stops trying to convince you you’re on vacation.

You’re not on vacation.

You’re at home. Which is actually the goal.

You want somewhere you’ll genuinely sit at the end of the day. Somewhere slightly forgiving. Somewhere that looks better as the light changes. Somewhere that doesn’t require a tarp and an emotional support cover every time the forecast shifts.

And yes, eventually you will become the person checking weather apps because of furniture.

This is adulthood.

What I’ve come to rely on are a handful of brands and pieces that understand outdoor furniture should age into a space, not fight against it.

Bonacina understands restraint better than almost anyone. Unopiù has that very particular Italian elegance that somehow feels both relaxed and deeply considered. James Perse outdoor furniture looks exactly like the kind of person you hope you become in the summer. Sutherland remains one of the best at making performance feel refined instead of overly technical. And vintage, always vintage, especially when something’s already proven it can survive outdoors for thirty years without becoming emotionally dramatic about it.

The rest of this post, including the outdoor furniture sources I actually return to again and again, continues for paid subscribers. These are the pieces and brands I trust when a terrace, garden, or tiny city balcony needs to feel calm, lived in, and capable of surviving both weather and human behavior.

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Counter stools are one of those things you don’t think about until you absolutely have to.

And then, for a brief and slightly humbling stretch of time, they become your entire personality.

You’re standing in your kitchen, looking at the counter, looking at the empty space beneath it, and realizing this is no longer theoretical. People are going to sit here. Or try to. Or politely avoid it, depending on what you choose.

It feels like a small decision.

It’s not.

This is where you find out what you actually believe about how you live.

Back or no back is the first question, and it’s more revealing than it should be. A stool with a back says, stay. We’re talking. There’s a generosity to it. A stool without a back says, this is transitional. You’re passing through. You can sit, but let’s not get carried away.

I’ve chosen both. Sometimes confidently. Sometimes… less so.

There’s also this quiet tension between how you imagine your kitchen functioning and how it actually does. A row of stools can start to feel slightly… hospitality. Like people are meant to rotate in and out, perch briefly, keep things moving.

And yet, that’s almost never what happens.

People gather in the kitchen and then don’t leave. They linger longer than anyone planned. They sit sideways. They turn toward each other. What was supposed to be a quick moment becomes the entire evening.

Which means the stool ends up doing a lot more than it signed up for.

Then there’s weight, which sounds technical but isn’t. A heavier stool feels grounded. It stays where you put it, which is comforting until you want to move it and realize you’ve made a commitment. A lighter stool moves easily, which sounds ideal until it’s being moved constantly, often by people who are not you and have very different ideas about where things belong.

And then comfort, which is where things get a little more personal than expected.

Not just how long someone stays, but how it actually feels to be there. Whether you settle in or hover slightly forward like you’re waiting for permission. Whether you lean back or keep one foot mentally out the door.

Cushion or no cushion becomes its own quiet standoff. Upholstery feels generous, forgiving, slightly more inviting. It also feels like a decision you’re going to live with very literally. Especially if your eyeline happens to match that of a smaller person with questionable hands and excellent reach.

People have strong feelings about this.

Some want something they can wipe down without thinking. Others are willing to take the risk in exchange for comfort. You usually know which camp someone’s in within about thirty seconds.

A stool can look perfect and still feel like something you’re enduring. And that becomes clear quickly. A shift. Another shift. A subtle lean. And then, without ceremony, someone relocates.

You think you’re choosing a stool.

You’re deciding how it feels to sit in your own kitchen.

There’s also real life, which tends to show up whether you’ve planned for it or not. If there are children involved, even loosely, everything becomes a little more active. A stool isn’t just something to sit on. It’s something to climb, to spin, to test. Even if you don’t have children, you start thinking like someone who might, which feels like a turning point.

None of this is particularly glamorous.

And yet, when it’s right, you feel it immediately. The stools tuck in. They don’t argue with the counter. People sit without adjusting. Conversations happen where they’re supposed to. The kitchen becomes the place people stay, not just pass through.

You stop noticing them.

Which is exactly the point.

What I’ve come to rely on isn’t a rule, it’s a return.

Certain stools I find myself specifying again and again. In different homes. For different people. In kitchens that have nothing in common except the fact that someone lives there.

They don’t all look the same, but they share something. They feel intentional without being fussy. Familiar without being boring. Like they already know how to be there.

The rest of this post, including the counter stools I always come back to, continues for paid subscribers. These are the ones I trust. The ones that have held up in real life, not just in photographs.

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I’ve been thinking about taste recently. Not in the way people usually talk about it, as something to refine or improve or get right, but as something you start to notice when it begins to look the same everywhere you go.

There’s a very specific kind of “good” right now that everyone seems to agree on. It’s calm. It’s neutral. It’s extremely well considered. Nothing is offensive, nothing is out of place, everything works exactly as it should. You walk in, you understand it immediately, you nod, you think, yes, this is nice.

And then you forget it almost as quickly.

I understand the appeal. I’ve done it myself. I’ve built rooms that made perfect sense, that referenced the right things, held together visually, photographed beautifully, and could survive a polite amount of scrutiny from people who care about these things.

But lately I’ve started to feel a little restless around that kind of good. Because everything is beautiful, and nothing is that interesting.

I felt that shift very clearly after spending two nights at Domaine de la Cavalerie, with Cosima and Austin, who are, somewhat inconveniently, as charismatic and magnetic as the place they’ve built. The kind of people who make you feel like you’ve arrived somewhere slightly more interesting than you intended, and then somehow keep raising the bar without making it feel like effort.

There’s an ease to them, but also a clarity. You can feel that they’re not just running a place, they’re building something. Around people, around experience, around a shared sense of curiosity that doesn’t feel forced or overly explained.