Ignore whether you would personally choose the orange carpet or wood paneling. Ask a more important question: How do they make you feel?

These retro interiors worked because every element reinforced their warmth. Carpet and upholstery absorbed light and sound. Lamps sat below eye level and created small pockets of illumination. Even the darker corners served a purpose. They made the illuminated parts of the room feel safer and more intimate.

Compare that with the modern formula: white walls, gray floors, hard surfaces and bright overhead lighting. Every corner receives equal exposure. The room becomes easy to photograph and difficult to settle into. This is operating room/hospital aesthetic. Why would we ever want to bring that home?

We did not outgrow warmth. Society slowly persuaded us to phase it out of our homes.

Reversing that does not require the orange shag carpet or even the retro vibes of those interiors above. For our own interiors a few changes to color, material and lighting can alter the entire emotional temperature of a space.

Below are some of my favorite personal touches for adding warm lighting options through light bulbs and lamps.

Five Light Bulbs That Will Make Any Room Feel Warmer

Before buying another lamp or repainting a wall, change the light itself. Color temperature, brightness and bulb finish can completely alter how textures and tones look inside a room. These five bulb types create warmth for different moments of the day. I collected shoppable examples of each in my warm lighting collection.

• Everyday lighting: Start around 2700K for a warm but functional glow.

• Evening lighting: Incandescent and halogen bulbs become warmer as they dim.

• Amber accents: Use 2000K to 2200K bulbs for shelves, art and corners.

• Exposed bulbs: Stay between 150 and 400 lumens to prevent harsh glare.

• Nighttime lighting: Keep red bulbs dim, indirect and below eye level.

(Quick tip: Incandescent and halogen bulbs use more energy and produce real heat. Check the fixture’s maximum wattage and keep them away from fabric)

Bring it Home

Remember bulb controls the color temperature of the light. The lamp controls how that light is diffused throughout your space. I’ve also added my favorite table and floor lamps to my warm lighting collection that keep illumination low and diffuse beautifully. Those two factors are the beginning of the recipe that made the 1970s interiors above feel so intimate.

You can begin changing the emotional aura of your home tonight. Turn off the overhead lights. Move one lamp below eye level. Replace those cool bulbs with something warmer. These are small decisions, but I promise your space will feel more welcoming almost immediately.

If you want help seeing the full potential of a room, I offer interior design consulting focused on complete room designs. Email me at hellolussoarchive@gmail.com to talk about your space.

-Christian Gideon/Lusso Archive

About halfway through the first hour of hunting, I knew I was into something special. Moss green, oxide red, quartz cream, wet black.

When I got back home and began organizing the stones for polishing, it hit me.

I was looking at a complete color system.

Below is my four-part method for building palettes with weight, energy, relief, and surprise.

The green establishes the field. Red creates energy. Cream opens the composition. Black controls the contrast.

Color harmony comes from managing relationships across hue, value, temperature, and proportion. Nature handles all five at once.

Collecting these those rocks led me to a four-part system I now use to build palettes from almost any place.

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What if bringing neon signs back is the answer?

Imagine a midsized American city in the middle of winter. The sun has been down since five. Now imagine downtown filled with real neon signs. A red script sign above the Italian restaurant. A glowing bowling ball crashing into ten pins. The hotel on the edge of town welcoming visitors with its soft glow. We took them all for granted. Now most of them exist only in our imagination.

The entire place feels warmer. Maybe even alive.

For much of the twentieth century, this was a normal American street. Neon signs marked pharmacies and motels. They lit up theaters and gas stations. Every sign began as a drawing before a craftsman heated the glass and bent it by hand. A neon sign was a small commissioned work of art. We tend to forget that.

We slowly traded them for plastic boxes and corporate sign packages. The excuses began with maximizing profit and ended with forgetting how to create a vibe. They made our streets look the same.

America lost an art form along with the craftsmen who knew how to create it. Once the local neon shop disappears, that knowledge becomes difficult to recover. This is why I keep returning to the idea that craft is infrastructure.

Imagine giving small businesses modest grants to commission real neon signs. Let a restaurant hire a designer who works with a local glass bender. Put something strange and beautiful above the sidewalk. Then do it again at the bakery and the neighborhood bar.

This is a dream more than a formal proposal. I like the idea of doing something people can actually see happen. A sign can be designed in weeks and installed in an afternoon. More demand creates work. Work creates apprenticeships. One successful storefront makes the next business want to participate.

A town that watches ten storefronts transform over a summer begins to feel differently about what else might be possible. People walk around after dark. They flex for the ’gram in front of the new artwork. A great neon sign can turn an ordinary restaurant into a landmark because it gives the business a face and the street a memory.

Neon signs will not solve every problem facing America. They could give us a small and visible win. Maybe that is how momentum begins.

I spend a lot of time thinking about ideas that sound slightly unreasonable before revealing something larger about culture and design.

If you have a great idea you cannot stop thinking about, email me at hellolussoarchive@gmail.com.

Let’s make some magic.

Christian Gideon | Lusso Archive

Your parents are stoked because they get their own room and a bar by the pool while knowing the kids are safe and entertained (this whole set up would greatly increase modern falling birth rates btw). No one has phones. You don’t know what a sunset in Santorini looks like because you don’t have social media. Dad and Mom are being cool because they have good regional beers on tap in the tiki hut. This is peak Americana.

For a brief period in the ‘90s I got to experience a Holidome. It wasn’t really about the pool or the AstroTurf or the tiki bar. It was the idea that an ordinary place could still feel extraordinary. You didn’t need to fly somewhere beautiful or spend a fortune chasing an experience you had already seen a thousand times online. The Holidome was world in and of itself. You honest to god felt like you were transported somewhere else. The adults had somewhere to be adults. The kids had somewhere to disappear for a few hours. Everyone was together without having to constantly entertain one another. We have nicer hotels now. Better pools. Better restaurants. Better everything, technically. But very few places are willing to be this weird, specific, communal and fun. We should build places like that again. Places that give ordinary families a reason to leave the house in the dead of winter and feel like something is happening. Places our kids will remember thirty years later.

I built Lusso in reverse.

There was no product, inventory, or launch plan. There was only a point of view and the discipline to publish my curated finds every day on X. That was enough to bring 180,000 people into the world before I had anything to sell them.

The world came first. The business plan I saw for that world was already a huge funnel.

I have watched startups and consumer brands with extraordinary product talent treat creative direction as an afterthought. They build something impressive and wait until launch to decide how it should look, sound, and move through the world.

At that point, the brand already feels like an afterthought.

The question nobody seems to be asking

Most early hires are there to answer questions about how.

How do we build it? How do we ship it? How do we keep everything running?

The earliest days hold a more important question: why should this matter at all?

That responsibility belongs to a creative visionary working in lockstep with the product from the beginning.

Every ambitious company begins as a picture in someone’s mind. The product makes that picture tangible. Creative direction gives it meaning, coherence, and emotional weight. One cannot fully succeed without the other.

The best companies develop product and creative direction in parallel. Each sharpens the other in real time.

The right creative visionary sees how the company should enter the world before it exists in it. They understand what it should make people feel, what it should stand for, and which details must remain sacred as it scales. They translate ambition into atmosphere and direction into something people can actually sense.

That is founder level work.

That vision should evolve while the company is still uncertain, shaping the future alongside the product itself.

What I learned from Lusso

Lusso began and still runs without a product attached to it.

Over time, I started tracing specific ideas back to their origins. Who made them, what movements they belonged to, and what decisions shaped them. A design language, if you will. The common theme was that certain objects kept resurfacing across decades because of very specific choices in proportion, material, and intent.

That research gave Lusso an internal dialogue. It turned my taste into something I could articulate and publish. A brand.

People began to notice and bond with the eye behind the work.

Lusso has grown to 180,000 followers on X and 17,000 on Instagram. More than 2,000 people subscribed to the Substack in its first two months.

The following I built was made up of like minded people who recognized the pull of the design language I was speaking. They learned what belonged inside that world and began trusting that the next discovery would belong there too.

The Lusso brand was established with no product anywhere in sight.

The advantage of a point of view

Markets change quickly. Products lose relevance. What was once a niche becomes a crowded industry.

A recognizable design language gives a company somewhere to go next. A space to evolve.

When people understand the taste and story behind a brand, new ideas arrive with a sense of belonging. The audience already recognizes the judgment connecting each decision. That familiarity creates room to explore new products, formats, and categories without having to introduce the company again.

The identity becomes larger than any single offering.

That freedom is one of the most valuable assets a company can build. It gives the team a clear standard while giving the business room to evolve.

Creative vision creates continuity.

Make the future visible

A brand or startup’s visual identity is built from day one.

People become invested through repeated evidence. They learn the values you project. They see what you hold sacred and what you care enough to let them be part of. Each decision reveals another piece of the world you are building.

My mission is to become the most trusted tastemaker on X. I rarely need to announce it because the work makes the claim every day.

Every post is a small piece of the same world.

Over time, the work becomes proof. The audience begins trusting your judgment before they know what you will make next.

The strongest brands start earning that trust long before they need it.

Founders spend years bringing something new into the world. The company deserves a vision capable of carrying it.

The work

This is what I do as a creative director.

I aim to help startup founders and consumer brands define the idea that makes everything else cohere. I build the positioning, visual direction, reference system, and publishing rhythm around it.

I built Lusso by giving people a world to enter before there was anything to buy. I want to help founders do the same.

If you’re building something ambitious and want to explore working together, my email is hellolussoarchive@gmail.com.

The gap between creatives who are stuck and creatives who are prolific is rarely talent. One group starts every project from zero, rebuilding a reference pool they already had once. The other opens a collection they’ve been compounding for years and starts working immediately.

Below is the exact system that turned years of saving inspiration into the eye behind Lusso Archive.

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In August of 2022 I was sitting in my truck before work feeling completely disconnected from the creative side of myself. If you’ve ever felt that particular kind of quiet, you already know how heavy it carries.

I have always been someone who notices beauty in ordinary things most people walk right past. My days back then were long and full of responsibi…

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I posted a photograph this week of the WallyPower 118, a yacht designed by Lazzarini Pickering Architetti back in 2003, and called it possibly the most beautiful yacht ever built. Yeah, I know that’s a bit sensational, but we gotta get the clicks somehow. The replies followed a pattern I see constantly on Lusso. I post something remarkable from decades ago and the comments fill up with people saying it looks just like whatever came out last year, almost as if design from the past couldn’t possibly have influenced what we’re building now. This time it was the Cybertruck. Next time it will be something else. The instinct underneath it never changes.

That is not a failure of your taste. It is a failure of memory, and it is not really your fault.

You are living through the first era where visual culture arrives through a feed with no sense of chronology. A render from three weeks ago and a photograph from 1974 land in the same scroll, stripped of the context that would tell you which one came first. The algorithm does not care about lineage. It cares about engagement. So the older piece gets read as an homage to the newer one, because the newer one is what actually lives in your memory.

The friction argument and the fix are below, for paid subscribers.

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I know that sounds backwards in a moment when everyone is anxious about machines taking over the creative world. This is something I have been sitting with for a while now. Creative differentiation is becoming less about the execution and more about the judgment behind it. The making of the thing is no longer the interesting part. What matters is whether there is a genuinely unique perspective sitting underneath it. The more I turn it over the more it opens up rather than closes down, because it points straight at where the real opportunity is hiding.

We are watching execution collapse into something anyone can access. Creative types can now generate unlimited iterations of their vision in minutes. Every new look gets discovered and copied and burned out in a matter of days, and the trend that felt fresh on Monday is everywhere by Friday. It all looks tasteful now. That sounds like a loss until you realize what it actually clears away. The thing that used to separate people was the ability to make it look good and that thing just became free for everyone. What is left is the only thing that was ever really yours.

This is how you develop taste as your ultimate tool to level up. Before Lusso was anything I spent years just looking at my favorite design genres and asking why they worked. Pure curiosity pulled me into curating it online and everything grew from there.

This is why the past is the most underpriced resource a creator has right now. Everyone is racing forward and staring at the same feeds and pulling from the same shrinking pool of references, which is exactly why it all starts to look the same. The entire history of design is sitting right there almost untouched, full of solved problems and abandoned ideas and visual languages that worked beautifully and got forgotten. When you train your eye on that history you are mining a vein almost no one else is even looking at. You start to see connections other people cannot see because you are drawing from a well they never walked to. That is the whole reason Lusso exists.

Here is what actually has me excited. AI now lets one person with a trained eye do what used to take an entire studio. The bottleneck that used to exist is gone. It was the hours and the hands and the budget standing between the idea and the finished thing, and that wall is coming down. If you have spent years quietly refining your taste you are about to feel that multiply, because the machine will handle everything downstream of the decision and leave the decision to you.

So this is not the end of creating. It is the door swinging open to our new future. Execution was always the easy part even though we didn’t know it at the time. Now it is basically free, which means the years you spent looking were never wasted and are about to become the most valuable thing you own. Go learn why things worked. Go build an eye no algorithm gave you. Become obsessed with a specific genre or era. The people who commit to that are not being replaced by any of this. They are the ones about to build the future everyone else will be copying next.

Then came Lusso. It’s been almost four years now of diving back into the decades that got design right, the sixties through the eighties when tone and line and intentionality were the baseline instead of the exception. Objects that still hold their charge half a century later. We talked about why they endure and what separates conviction from performance, and I did it on X consistently, every single day.

Something happened along the way. Over 180,000 people started following that thinking and curiosity, with 16k on Instagram and 2k subscribers finding the Substack in its first two months alone. It came from having a point of view and holding it long enough that people started to trust it.

That’s what Lusso actually is. A record of an eye being trained in public.

Which brings me to now. I’m currently working on some consulting projects launching in January, something I’ve been preparing for for years and I’m genuinely excited about. The work comes down to reading a space or a brand for what it’s actually trying to say and finding the visual language that says it clearly.

Most brands chase what’s happening right now. The ones that last understand what endures. The difference comes down to a way of seeing, and mine took fourteen years to build.

If you’re building something and want it to feel inevitable, that’s the work I’m open to taking on: creative direction and brand strategy and interior consulting.

What would it take for your brand to feel like it was always meant to look the way it does?

The archive is open. Let’s build something worth putting in it. Reach me by DM or at lussoarchive.com.

As always, thanks for the continued support.

Christian

Roberto Burle Marx never separated his interests, and that’s probably why his work has outlasted almost everyone who tried to define modern Brazilian design on narrower terms. He came up between the 1930s and 1950s as Brazil built a new identity for itself, alongside architects like Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa reimagining what a modern nation could look like.

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Folks assume I started Lusso to glorify a past that feels just out of reach. They see sunken living rooms and vintage electronics and larger than life cigarette ads from the seventies and assume the goal is nostalgia for its own sake.

The real goal is recognition. Nostalgia is just the door in.

Most people move through life without ever learning how to identify good design. They feel it emotionally but can’t articulate why one room feels transcendent while another feels dead, or why one object becomes timeless while another feels disposable within six months.

Lusso was never meant to be a museum for dead aesthetics. It’s a filter, a way of training your eyes again.

Looking backward matters because somewhere along the way you stopped demanding beauty from the world around you. You accepted convenience instead of atmosphere and optimization instead of identity. You traded tactile experiences for frictionless ones and convinced yourself sterile design was sophistication.

Study the past closely enough and you start noticing something. The best eras of design were never afraid of emotion. The interiors of the seventies felt cinematic and even the excess of the eighties carried an ambition that feels missing now. These spaces and objects tried to elevate everyday life instead of disappearing into the background of it.

Today so much of the world feels designed by spreadsheet. Cities repeat themselves and cafés start looking algorithmically generated. Technology gets thinner every year while somehow feeling less human. We’re told this is progress. Maybe sometimes it is. But progress without texture or personality or risk or imagination eventually becomes emptiness.

That’s why I keep posting on X. Not because the past was flawless. Most of these eras carried their own ugliness and excess too. But buried inside them were ideas worth recovering, atmosphere and individuality and boldness.

Good design should make daily life feel larger. It should create memory and desire and curiosity and presence.

The real aim is carrying forward what mattered about the past and demanding more from the environments you build now.

So what would it take for you to start demanding that from the world around you again?