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.

It all feels slightly cinematic. Not in a staged way, but in the way things unfold. One moment you’re walking through olive groves, the next you’re holding a falcon, trying to act normal about it. Meals appear with a kind of quiet precision, shaped by an extraordinary chef, Bernardo Costantino, who somehow makes the entire experience feel both elevated and completely natural at the same time.

And then there was the chapel. An afternoon that moved from breathwork to meditation to, eventually, dancing. Which is not something I usually associate with old stone chapels, but now feels like an oversight on my part.

And somewhere in all of that, between the quiet and the slightly surreal, you realize you’re not just visiting. You’re participating in something they’ve very intentionally made space for.

The estate itself is extraordinary, but that’s almost beside the point. What stays with you is how it’s been lived in, preserved, and gently reimagined. Not polished into something new, not frozen in time, but allowed to continue. The house still feels like a place where things happen, not a place that’s been prepared for you.

And then there are the arrangements.

This is the part that quietly undoes you.

I’ve always known, at least intellectually, that collecting and arranging are two different skills. But being there made it impossible to ignore. A lot of people collect objects. Fewer people know how to live with them. And almost no one knows how to arrange them in a way that feels both completely natural and slightly disorienting, like you’re seeing something familiar but can’t quite explain why it works.

Things sit together that shouldn’t, at least not on paper. A Venetian mirror next to something far less polite. Textiles layered without asking permission. Marble, wood, glass, history, all speaking at once without raising their voices. It isn’t styled. It isn’t precious. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be understood quickly.

It just holds.

And that feeling is what made me fall in love with design in the first place, long before I had the language for it. Not objects, not even rooms, but arrangements. Compositions. The way things sit together and create meaning that none of them could carry alone.

I think about that often. Pitching Jack Ceglic’s house early on, completely fixated on how he arranged things rather than what the things were. Later, getting to work inside Jack Lenor Larsen’s home for Object & Thing, where the entire premise was that arrangement itself could be the art form. Not hierarchy, not perfection, but a kind of lived composition that allowed objects to relate to each other in real time, shifting and settling the way a conversation does.

Those experiences rearranged something in me. They challenged everything I thought I understood about space, about taste, about what makes something feel complete.

And standing in Cavalerie, I felt that same sensation again. That slight recalibration.

Because nothing there is trying to be liked.

You can always tell when something has been designed to be liked. It’s very aware of itself. It wants approval. It wants to make sure you understand it quickly and agree with it. It’s been edited just enough to remove any possibility of discomfort.

The result is usually very beautiful.

And slightly forgettable.

What Cosima and Austin have preserved, and what Emanuel built before them, is something else entirely. It’s a way of assembling that doesn’t rush to resolve itself. It allows for tension, for surprise, for things to sit together without over-explaining why they belong.

There’s a confidence in that. A lack of anxiety.

And it changes how you experience the space. You don’t walk through it and immediately understand everything. You keep noticing things. You return to corners. You sit with combinations that didn’t make sense at first and realize they’re the ones you remember most.

Which, I’m starting to think, is the whole point.

We’ve gotten very good at making things look right. We’ve gotten less comfortable letting them feel like something. Because feeling something usually means risking being slightly wrong, slightly off, slightly misunderstood.

Most contemporary interiors are trying very hard to avoid that.

But the spaces that stay with you don’t.

They take their time. They ask something of you. They don’t meet you exactly where you are, they pull you slightly somewhere else.

And that’s what Cavalerie does.

It doesn’t perform for you. It hosts you.

Which is a subtle but very important difference.

I left feeling a little recalibrated, and also slightly suspicious of my own instincts. How often am I trying to make something work in a way that will be immediately understood? How often am I editing something down not because it’s better, but because it’s safer?

I don’t have a clean answer yet. I’m still thinking about it.

But I do know this: if you have the chance to go, you should. Not because it’s beautiful, though it is. But because it reminds you that beauty is not the same thing as interest, and that the most compelling spaces are rarely the ones that try to be.

They’re the ones that have been lived with, argued with, added to, rearranged, and left slightly unresolved.

The ones that feel like someone is still in conversation with them.

Love,
Colin

I’m writing this on a train to Rome, still slightly disoriented from Salone, which has a way of quietly rearranging your taste without asking permission.

I wasn’t there for the fairs or the booths. I’ve actually never really been to them. I was there to present our most recent BENI collaboration with Casa Milana, which already felt like more than enough. Gabriella and Mario have created something incredibly rare. The collection is precise without being rigid, expressive without trying too hard. It feels like it understands the assignment and then gently ignores it. Being included in that, in Milan of all places, is not something I take lightly.

They were generous enough to host the presentation in their home, which changes everything. It immediately feels more personal, more grounded, less like a presentation and more like an invitation. The collection includes five designs, one of which is a meditation mat. Before we opened the doors, Gaby led us through a short meditation. Nothing performative. Just a quiet pause before the day began. It set the tone in a way that felt very true to them, and honestly, very needed.

It’s rare to begin a design presentation by slowing down.

And I think that’s why the homes stay with me.

The real stars of the week, at least for me, are always the homes. They feel closer to the truth. Less commercial. You’re not being sold something. You’re being let into something that was never meant to be public, which makes the experience feel slightly intimate in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else.

And then there’s the one everyone quietly agrees on.

The Interni Venosta presentation at Palazzo Olivazzi, a private home designed by Osvaldo Borsani in the late 1940s, never before open.

It was tucked inside a beautiful building, the kind you might walk past without realizing what’s behind it, but this time there was no mystery about where to go. A queue wrapped around the block, security guiding people through, everyone waiting their turn. You stepped inside, slipped on a pair of protective booties, and immediately became more aware of how you were walking. Which somehow made it feel even more important. Everyone standing there, patiently, as if they already knew it would be worth it.

If you follow anyone with a decent eye, you’ve already seen it. It’s one of those places you save, or pin, or underline in a book, knowing the image is doing something but not everything. The photos never quite prepare you for the feeling of actually standing in it.

And then you’re inside.

And it’s quieter than you expect.

Nothing is trying to impress you. The built-in millwork carries the room without announcing itself. The proportions are slightly exaggerated in a way that feels generous rather than grand. Walls are carved, not decorated. Spaces are divided in ways that somehow make them feel larger. The fireplace sits inside the architecture like it was always going to be there, not added, not styled, just… understood.

I spoke with the owners while I was there, who mentioned, almost in passing, that Borsani designed the apartment when he was twenty-four.

Twenty-four.

Which is the kind of detail that lands softly and then stays with you all day, quietly adjusting your sense of what’s possible.

And the apartment still holds.

That’s the part I can’t quite shake.

It doesn’t feel like a preserved moment. It doesn’t feel nostalgic. It feels current in a way that’s hard to explain, like a series of decisions that never needed to be revisited. Everything is resolved, but nothing feels finished. It’s alive in that very particular Milanese way where restraint does most of the work.

Borsani has always felt slightly underrated to me, not because people don’t know him, but because his work doesn’t ask to be known in the way so much design does now. It doesn’t rely on a single recognizable move. It builds slowly. It reveals itself over time.

Which is exactly why I always stop when I see it.

When I’m sourcing, I always stop when I see Borsani, not because the piece is loud, but because something about it feels resolved in a way that’s hard to improve upon. The lines are precise but never sharp for the sake of it. Edges soften where they should. A leg meets the floor with intention. A handle sits exactly where your hand expects it to be, not to impress you, just to work.

There’s a refinement in the joinery, in the way materials shift from wood to brass to glass without announcing the transition. Nothing is exaggerated, but nothing disappears either. Even the more decorative moments, the inlays, the carved details, the small gestures, feel integrated into the structure rather than applied to it.

That’s what I respond to.

A chair like the P40 has presence, but it’s in the intelligence of it. The way it adjusts, the way it supports the body without forcing it into one position, the way it feels considered from every angle. It doesn’t try to be sculptural, which is exactly why it is. Cabinets feel almost architectural, like they belong to the room rather than sitting inside it. Tables have weight, but it’s balanced. They don’t drag the room down, they steady it.

It’s a kind of elegance that doesn’t rely on perfection.

It relies on decisions that have already been made, and don’t need revisiting.

I’ve been placing his pieces in client homes for years, often without much explanation. They don’t need one.

They just make everything around them better.

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I was convinced the room was missing something.

Not in a dramatic way. In a very reasonable, highly defensible way. The kind of logic that sounds so convincing you almost want to compliment yourself on it. It just needs one more layer. One more piece to pull it together. Something to finish the thought. Possibly something expensive, which always feels like commitment.

I’ve had this instinct for years. When something feels off, I assume it’s because something isn’t there yet.

It’s a comforting idea.

Because if something’s missing, the solution is simple. You go find it. You add it. You improve your life in a visible, trackable way. Maybe you even get a shipping notification, which feels like progress.

But more often than I’d like to admit, nothing is missing.

Something is just in the way.

This is the part I resist. Because adding feels like action. It feels creative. It gives you momentum. You get to research, source, imagine a better version of the room where everything finally makes sense and you, by extension, also make sense.

Removing feels like admitting you were wrong.

I don’t love that journey for myself.

But I’ve started noticing a pattern. The rooms that feel the clearest to me now are not the ones I built up the most. They’re the ones I edited down the furthest. Not minimal, not empty, just… less crowded with explanation.

Because that’s what a lot of objects are doing. They’re explaining. They’re justifying the room. They’re saying, this makes sense, this belongs, I have a reference for this if you’re curious.

And after a certain point, it starts to feel like over-talking. Like a dinner guest who will not let the story end.

I had a version of my living room where everything was working. It referenced the right things. It felt thoughtful. I could’ve explained every decision if someone asked, which is always a red flag. It photographed well. It made sense on paper.

And yet, I kept wanting to adjust it.

So I did what I usually do. I looked for something to add.

Another object. Another layer. Something to sharpen the point. Something small and perfect that would quietly fix everything and also validate all my previous decisions.

But nothing was fixing it. It just kept getting denser. More resolved, but somehow less clear. Like a sentence that keeps getting longer without saying anything new, but now includes a semicolon.

Eventually, out of mild frustration more than discipline, I removed one thing. Then another. A piece I liked, but didn’t need. Something that had quietly become permanent simply because it had survived long enough.

And the room changed immediately.

Not because it gained anything.

Because it stopped trying so hard.

That’s the shift I’m still learning how to trust. That clarity doesn’t always come from adding the right thing. Sometimes it comes from removing the thing that’s interrupting what’s already working.

I see this outside of rooms too, which is deeply inconvenient.

In conversations where I say one sentence too many and can feel the moment politely leave. In work that would’ve been stronger if I stopped a paragraph earlier. In decisions where I keep searching for a better answer instead of trusting the first quiet one, which was correct and annoyingly calm.

There’s a version of more that feels like care. Like you’re being thorough, attentive, invested.

And then there’s a version that’s just avoidance wearing a nice outfit.

I’m not always great at telling the difference.

But I’m getting better at recognizing when I’m adding something to solve a feeling instead of a problem. Which, unfortunately, is most of the time.

Lately, I’ve been trying a different approach. When something feels off, I remove one thing before I add anything new. Just one. No dramatic purge. No identity crisis. Just a quiet subtraction.

And then I wait.

Usually, the room tells me more in that pause than it did when I was busy improving it.

Sometimes I put the thing back. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I forget where I put it, which feels like the room making a decision for me.

But the act of removing interrupts that automatic assumption that more is the answer.

Because it usually isn’t.

More is louder. More is easier to justify. More looks like effort.

But less is where the room starts to make its own decisions.

And most of the time, it already knows what it’s doing.

It just needs you to stop interrupting it.

Love,
Colin

Someone messaged me recently and said, I saw you’re writing on Substack, you should talk about pendant lighting.

Which felt less like a suggestion and more like a trap.

Because this is where most rooms quietly fall apart, and often very confidently.

Pendant lighting looks simple. A cord. A shade. A bulb. It feels like one of the easier decisions you’ll make, something you can pick quickly and move on from, like cutlery or a bath mat.

You cannot.

It’s one of the few things in a room that refuses to be ignored once it’s there. It hangs at eye level. It inserts itself into your life. It tells you where to look whether you agree with it or not.

A bad pendant doesn’t disappear.

It hovers. Persistently. With opinions.

I’ve made every version of this mistake. Fixtures hung too low so everyone subtly adjusted their posture around them like they were in a room with a low ceiling and high expectations. Fixtures hung too high so they lost all authority and just floated above the room like a polite suggestion. Fixtures that were technically correct and still felt completely wrong, which is its own special category of disappointment.

That’s the problem.

Pendant lighting isn’t really about the object. It’s about what happens underneath it. It creates a moment whether you intended to or not. A table suddenly matters more. A surface becomes a destination. A room organizes itself around this one decision you made on a Tuesday afternoon.

If it’s off, everything feels slightly off.

If it’s right, the room settles.

The right pendant doesn’t decorate the space.

It defines it.

The rest of this post, including the contemporary pendants I would actually hang in my own apartment right now and how I choose them every time, continues for paid subscribers. These are fixtures I trust. Some quiet, some sculptural, all of them doing more than just hanging there.

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My cleaning lady broke my lampshade this week.

It was expensive. Silk from the 1960s. The kind of piece you don’t replace so much as quietly accept you’ll never find again. And still, what surprised me wasn’t the loss itself. It was how much I felt it.

Not just because of the object, but because something in the room had been quietly holding its place, and suddenly it wasn’t. The balance shifted. The light changed. The atmosphere I had gotten used to was gone.

It made me realize something slightly inconvenient about myself. It’s rarely the big things that undo me. It’s the broken shoelace. The small interruption. The thing that doesn’t seem like it should matter as much as it does, the moment where something minor slips out of place and suddenly everything feels slightly off.

And I know, on some level, that this sensitivity is part of what makes me good at what I do. Noticing the slight misalignment, the thing that’s almost right but not quite, the way a room shifts when something small changes. That’s the work. That’s the eye.

But it’s also a lot to live with. Because when you’re tuned to small disturbances, nothing is ever entirely neutral. A room is never just a room. It’s a series of tiny negotiations, constantly adjusting, constantly asking for your attention. Some days that feels like a gift. Other days, it feels like everything is just slightly off.

And then, almost against that instinct, there are these other moments.

The stain on the sofa that I know shouldn’t be there, but now only reminds me of a long, slightly chaotic game night that went on later than planned. The matting on my pony hair lounge chair from maple syrup dripping off a plate when I decided, for no good reason, to eat pancakes there on a Sunday morning. The scratch on top of my Biedermeier cabinet because I insisted on moving a heavy piece of art myself instead of waiting for help. The gilded andirons that are no longer gilded at all, because I built a fire that was far too ambitious and paid for it accordingly.

None of these things were intentional. None of them are, technically, improvements. And for a long time, I would’ve tried to undo them. Clean it, fix it, replace it, restore the room to a version of itself that felt untouched, intact, slightly more impressive.

But that version of a room comes at a cost. It asks you to be careful all the time, to wait, to not quite relax, to treat the space like something you’re preserving instead of something you’re living inside. I’ve done that. Saved things for later. Avoided sitting somewhere because it felt too precious. Kept objects in a kind of suspended state, waiting for the right moment to fully enjoy them.

The right moment, in my experience, rarely arrives.

And in the meantime, nothing really happens. No stain. No scratch. No story. Just a very well-maintained version of a life that hasn’t quite been lived in.

Which sounds good, until you realize how quiet it is.

And this is the part I don’t say out loud very often. I live alone. No pets. No kids. No partner moving things around or knocking something over or leaving evidence of their own habits behind. Everything stays where I put it.

Which, for a long time, felt like control. A kind of calm. A well-managed environment where nothing unexpected happened unless I allowed it to.

But there’s another side to that. A room that stays perfect is also a room that isn’t being interrupted. And I’ve started to wonder if some of these objects I care so much about, the ones I try to preserve and protect, are also quietly keeping things at a distance. Not intentionally, not in any dramatic way, just in the small, everyday ways that add up.

Don’t sit there. Don’t use that. Be careful with this.

And suddenly the room feels less like somewhere you live, and more like somewhere you’re maintaining. I don’t think the objects are the problem, but I do think the way I relate to them might be.

Later that same week, I found out the work on my terrace is only sixty percent done.

After a year.

I moved into this apartment because of that terrace, and the working fireplace. It felt like the kind of space that would change how I lived. More light. More air. A place to sit outside and feel, at least briefly, like I had made a good decision.

Shortly after I moved in, I was told I’d lose access to it for a while. Local Law 11. Repairs. Repointing. It all sounded temporary enough at the time.

That was a year ago. And now, apparently, we’re at sixty percent.

Which, objectively, is not a disaster. The work is happening. Progress is being made. Nothing has gone terribly wrong. And still, it bothers me in exactly the same way.

Because it’s almost its own kind of disruption.

There’s a specific kind of frustration reserved for things that are nearly finished. Not broken. Not abandoned. Just incomplete enough to keep asking something from you. Almost is exhausting. It sits there, suggesting resolution, while quietly refusing to give it to you. You keep thinking the next move will close the loop, one more decision, one more adjustment, and then it will finally feel done.

It rarely does.

I’ve been thinking about how much of my life I spend trying to get things to that feeling. Finished. Settled. Resolved. A room that no longer asks anything of me, a version of things I can stop adjusting.

But that feeling doesn’t seem to last very long.

Something always shifts. A lampshade breaks. A timeline changes. A room you thought was done starts asking different questions. And suddenly, everything feels a little more temporary than you’d like.

I think we’re taught to believe that a space, like a life, eventually arrives. That if you make the right decisions, arrange things carefully enough, you’ll reach a point where everything holds.

I haven’t found that to be true.

The rooms I’ve loved the most are not the ones that were perfect. They’re the ones that held onto these small, slightly inconvenient details, the evidence that someone was there, that something happened, that the space wasn’t protected from life but shaped by it.

The same is probably true of people.

I’m trying, slowly, to become more comfortable with that. With the torn lampshade that doesn’t get replaced immediately, with the terrace I’m still waiting to get back, with the parts of my own life that feel like they should be further along than they are. Not as problems to fix, but as signs that something is still moving, that something is still becoming.

I don’t always like living in that in-between. I still want things to click into place. I still want the room to feel done, the situation to feel resolved, the answer to feel clear.

But I’m starting to see that the discomfort isn’t a sign that something is wrong.

It’s a sign that something is alive.

The lampshade wasn’t the problem. The terrace isn’t the problem.

The problem is how easily I slip into waiting.

Waiting for things to be finished. Waiting for the room to feel right. Waiting for a version of my life that doesn’t ask anything from me.

And then realizing, quietly and a little too late, that nothing I’m waiting for actually lives there.

Love,
Colin

If you’ve been following along, you know I like things on walls that aren’t art. A vase. A hook. A plug-in sconce. Something that interrupts the flatness without overcommitting, something that gives a wall a little purpose without requiring a full personality.

Candle sconces feel like the next step.

Not because they’re more important, but because they do something a little more complicated. They don’t just sit there and hold something. They change the room. Quietly, but completely.

I didn’t grow up thinking about sconces. They weren’t part of my visual language. For a long time, my apartments were lit in the most predictable way possible. Overhead lighting that did its job and nothing else. It made everything visible, which is not always the same thing as making something feel good.

I think I started reaching for sconces when I realized I wanted a little less honesty at night.

Overhead light is efficient, but it’s also unforgiving. It flattens a room. It removes shadows. It tells the truth at times when you might prefer something slightly edited, slightly softer, slightly more generous.

A candle sconce offers an alternative. It pulls the light off the ceiling and places it where you actually live, along the walls, at eye level, just within your periphery. The room shifts. The edges soften. The space starts to feel less like something you’re looking at and more like something you’re inside of.

The first time I hung one, I didn’t fully understand what I was doing. I had a blank wall, a sconce, and a vague sense that something was missing. I mounted it, probably a little too high, lit the candle, and waited for it to feel unnecessary.

Instead, the room felt finished in a way it hadn’t before. Not decorated. Just… resolved. Like it had been waiting for that exact level of light all along.

Mirrored sconces took me a little longer to come around to. At first they felt like too much. Light reflecting light. A kind of doubling that seemed slightly theatrical, like the room was trying too hard to impress someone.

But then I saw one working properly, catching a flame and quietly multiplying it, and it stopped feeling like decoration and started feeling like atmosphere. The mirror wasn’t the point. The light was. The mirror just carried it further, softened it, gave it somewhere to go.

It’s the same flame, just… more of it.

The rest of this post, including the candle sconces and mirrored pieces I actually buy and return to, continues for paid subscribers. Some are quiet. Some are more reflective. All of them change a room more than you expect.

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I finally made the folder.

It’s called “Styling Notes,” which isn’t a particularly inspired name, but it felt important to call it something. To stop pretending all of these images were just loosely floating around my phone, waiting to organize themselves into a personality.

For years, I’ve been saving things without much structure. Screenshots, museum photos, corners of rooms, objects I’ve passed on the street, a vase in a restaurant bathroom that felt more resolved than most living rooms I’ve been in. Things I didn’t fully understand, but didn’t want to lose.

At some point it became less about saving and more about collecting evidence, though I wasn’t entirely sure of what.

I used to think I was saving images because I liked them. That felt like a complete enough explanation. Clean. Reasonable. Slightly untrue.

Because when I actually look at what I’ve saved, it’s rarely the whole image.

It’s a pillow turned slightly too far, just enough to feel like someone adjusted it and then immediately left the room. A chair that feels slightly too large for the table beside it, like it wandered in with confidence and no intention of apologizing. A lamp placed just off center in a way that makes the room feel more deliberate, not less.

Again and again, it’s something small. Something specific. Something that doesn’t quite resolve in the way you’d expect.

And the more I look, the more I realize I’m not saving things literally.

I’m saving a feeling.

A kind of tension. A moment within the moment. The split second where a room stops being arranged and starts feeling alive.

And that’s when I started asking a different question.

Not “Do I like this?” but “What, exactly, am I responding to?”

This is also, not coincidentally, the question I find myself asking on set, usually while standing over a table adjusting something by half an inch and trying to explain to a room full of adults why it matters.

Sometimes it’s scale. Something slightly too big or slightly too small that shifts the authority of the entire composition. Sometimes it’s placement, the difference between something looking accidental and something looking inevitable, which is often about three inches and a level of emotional commitment that feels wildly disproportionate to the task.

Sometimes it’s tension. The presence of something that doesn’t fully belong but somehow makes everything else more convincing.

What I’ve realized is that I’m rarely saving perfection. I’m saving the part of the image that doesn’t fully explain itself.

That might be a floral arrangement that feels like it could fall apart at any second but doesn’t. A table setting where nothing matches exactly but everything agrees. An art hang that feels slightly too low until you stand there long enough to realize it’s exactly right.

These are the same conversations I have with clients, just with fewer screenshots and more hand gestures.

I’ll say things like, “It just needs a little more air,” or “Let it sit there for a second,” which is a polite way of saying I don’t fully understand it yet, but I trust that we’re close.

None of these are rules. They’re patterns. And they’re easy to miss when everything’s scattered.

The folder changed that.

Seeing everything together made it clear that I’ve been circling the same ideas for years. Looking for the same kinds of relationships, the same quiet disruptions, the same balance between control and looseness that makes a space feel alive.

It also made me realize that instinct isn’t as mysterious as I thought. It’s just observation that hasn’t been organized yet.

When you start naming what you’re actually looking at, your work changes. Not because you start replicating what you’ve saved, but because you start trusting the part of you that noticed it in the first place.

There’s a difference between copying an image and understanding it. One is surface. The other is structure.

The folder, for me, isn’t about reference. It’s about clarity.

It’s a way of asking, over and over again, why something works. Why your eye stopped there. Why you felt something before you had language for it.

And once you have that language, even partially, you stop second guessing as much. You stop assuming your taste is random or inconsistent. You begin to see that it has shape, even if it’s still forming.

I still don’t always know what I’m looking at when I save something.

But I trust that I will.

Eventually.

That’s the real function of the folder.

Not to organize images.

To organize the way I see.

Love,
Colin

For a long time, I thought I didn’t like sectionals.

I thought of them as large, fixed decisions. The kind of furniture that arrives with a plan already in place. This is where the room gathers. This is where you sit. This is how the space works now. There’s something about that level of certainty that has always made me uneasy. It assumes a kind of permanence I rarely feel.

I told myself I preferred flexibility. Movement. Rooms that could adjust slightly over time instead of locking into one arrangement.

And then last week, after I shared a Substack post featuring images from my Brooklyn Heights apartment, I started getting messages.

What sectional is that?

I remember reading that and thinking, oh.

I wouldn’t have called it that. I’m still not sure I would.

In that apartment, I had a Mario Bellini Le Bambole. Modular. Low. Soft enough to feel informal, structured enough to hold the room. It wasn’t a predetermined shape. It didn’t insist on a corner. It felt more like a collection of pieces that happened to be together. I found mine through The Peanut Vendor in London, which feels relevant only because people always ask.

But that’s the thing.

A modular sofa can become a sectional.

It can take on that shape. It can suggest that certainty. It can gather itself into something that looks finished, even when it isn’t.

Which, I’ve realized, is the difference.

A sectional arrives decided. A modular sofa lets you decide, and then change your mind.

The rest of this post, including the modular sofas I return to and how I configure them in different spaces, continues for paid subscribers.

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I don’t fix rooms I just met.

This is a relatively new policy, one I adopted after years of quietly rearranging people’s homes in my head while pretending to be a normal guest.

I would walk in, take my coat off, and immediately start editing. That chair could move. That lamp is too low. That corner feels unresolved. I wouldn’t say anything out loud, of course. I’m not a monster. But internally, I was conducting a full renovation before I had even been offered a drink.

It took me a while to realize that what I thought was discernment was often just discomfort.

The urge to fix is strong, especially if you do what I do. You walk into a space and your brain starts solving. It looks for imbalance, for tension, for the thing that feels slightly off and wants to correct it before it has fully understood it.

But what feels wrong at first is not always wrong. Sometimes it’s just unfamiliar.

I’ve learned this the slow way, by spending time in rooms that didn’t make immediate sense to me. Rooms that felt slightly awkward on first impression, where nothing aligned with my personal logic of how things “should” be.

And then, slowly, something shifts.

You sit down. You stay a little longer. You notice how the light moves in the afternoon. You see how someone actually lives in the space. Where they drop their keys. Where they linger. What they reach for without thinking.

And the room starts to explain itself.

Not all at once. Just small, quiet clarifications. That chair isn’t misplaced, it’s where they sit every morning. That table isn’t too small, it’s intentionally not trying to dominate the room. That corner isn’t unresolved, it’s just not performing for you.

Rooms, like people, take a minute.

And this is the part I had to learn the hard way.

When I walk into your home, I’m not judging you. I’m not mentally rearranging your furniture. I’m not making a list of what I would change.

At least, not anymore.

Now, to be clear, when I’m on set, or capturing a home for editorial, I don’t get this luxury. That’s my job. I walk in and I make decisions quickly. I adjust, refine, edit. I look for what’s not working and I fix it.

But that kind of looking is a performance. It belongs to the camera. It belongs to the frame. It belongs to a very specific moment where everything is being asked to make sense all at once.

And living is not like that.

Your home is not a problem to solve in five minutes. It’s a place that has been unfolding without me, quietly, long before I arrived with my opinions.

What I’m actually trying to do now, when I’m a guest, is understand the room on its own terms.

I pay attention in a different way. Less fixing, more noticing. The way someone actually lives in the space. The small habits. The quiet logic that doesn’t announce itself.

It’s not that different from how I work when I’m styling or photographing a home, except there’s no pressure to improve anything. If anything, I’m trying to protect something.

I love when an image feels like a human was just there. Not staged into submission. Not resolved within an inch of its life. Just… inhabited. Like someone stepped out of the frame a moment ago and might come back.

And you can’t get that if you fix everything too quickly.

Because a home is not a still life. It’s not a photograph. It’s not a problem waiting to be solved. It’s a record of someone’s life, which is always going to be a little inconsistent, a little unresolved, a little specific.

And those are usually the parts that matter.

I think we’ve all been trained, in small ways, to prepare our spaces for an imaginary audience. To anticipate judgment. To assume that someone walking in is quietly evaluating.

Is this right. Does this make sense. Does this look like me at my best.

But most people aren’t thinking that. And the people who are probably aren’t the ones you need to design your home for.

The truth is, the most compelling rooms I’ve been in didn’t make perfect sense immediately. They revealed themselves over time. They required a second look, a little patience, a willingness to not fully understand everything at once.

They felt lived in.

And that’s a different kind of beauty.

Now, when I walk into a space, I try to resist that initial instinct to fix. I let the room be slightly confusing. Slightly unresolved. I give it time to tell me what it actually needs, if anything at all.

Because sometimes it doesn’t need you.

Sometimes the only thing that needs adjusting is your perspective.

It turns out that first impressions are not always about the room. They’re about you.

And if you’re patient enough, the room will eventually make its case. And when it does, it’s usually more interesting than anything you would have imposed on it in the first five minutes.

Love,
Colin

It started, as these things often do, with something small. A pair of bird foot candle holders by Lee Hale. They come as a pair, which somehow makes it better. Slightly more deliberate. Slightly less concerning. I bought them without much justification. They didn’t solve a problem. They weren’t filling a gap. They simply existed, slightly strange and completely self-assured, each one holding a candle in its delicate claw like it had always done so. I put them on a table and immediately trusted them.

That was the beginning.

Although, if I’m honest, it probably started much earlier.

I grew up on a dairy farm in Ohio, which meant I was surrounded by animals whether I wanted to be or not. My mother, for reasons I still respect, collected art of them. Not refined studies or quiet landscapes. Actual animals. Fat pigs. Chickens with attitude. The occasional cow looking deeply unimpressed. They were everywhere. On the walls. On shelves. Watching you eat dinner. Watching you go to the bathroom.

At the time, I didn’t realize this was training.

There’s something about objects that borrow from the animal world that feels both ancient and slightly inappropriate. A table with feet. A candle holder with claws. Furniture that looks like it might move when you leave the room. It shouldn’t work. And yet, when it’s done well, it feels completely natural.

I’ve found myself returning to these pieces more and more. Not because they’re whimsical, although they are, but because they carry a kind of presence that purely abstract objects don’t always achieve. They feel grounded in something older. Instinctual. Slightly surreal, but never ironic. I think, ultimately, it’s a nod to something I’ve always been drawn to, the natural world, not in an obvious way, not through decoration, but through form and gesture, through objects that feel like they remember something we’ve forgotten.

The Traccia table by Meret Oppenheim has lived in my mind for years. A low table balanced on bird legs, both elegant and faintly unsettling. It doesn’t try to disguise the reference. It leans into it. The gesture is clear, but the execution is refined enough that it never tips into novelty. It feels composed.

And then there’s Lalanne. I had the opportunity to style a Lalanne rhino bar for a Sotheby’s sale, which is a sentence I still don’t fully understand. It stood in the room with a kind of quiet authority. Not decorative. Not playful in the way you might expect. Just present. That’s the thing about those pieces. They don’t read as animals first. They read as objects that have fully accepted what they are. They don’t apologize.

The rest of this post, including the zoomorphic pieces I return to and the ones worth investing in now, continues for paid subscribers.

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For a long time, I believed in investment pieces.

I believed in them the way people believe in vitamins. Not because I loved them exactly, but because they seemed responsible. Adult. Like proof that I had learned something and was no longer making decisions purely based on feeling.

Investment pieces promised relief. Choose correctly and you can stop choosing. Buy this one perfect thing and you won’t have to worry anymore. No more second guessing. No more regret. No more replacing things that didn’t work out.

That is a very seductive fantasy.

I bought into it fully. Chairs that were meant to last forever. Sofas that were supposed to age beautifully. Tables I imagined passing down, despite having no children and a very complicated relationship with moving furniture up narrow staircases.

Some of these pieces were fine. Some were impressive. A few were deeply wrong in ways that only revealed themselves after months of daily use. The kind of wrong you can’t spot in a showroom. The kind that shows up in your body when you avoid sitting somewhere or walk around something without realizing why.

That’s the part no one really talks about. Investment pieces don’t announce themselves immediately. They behave at first. They photograph well. They make you feel accomplished. It’s only later, when the room quiets down, that you notice you don’t actually reach for them.

Longevity, it turns out, is not the same as durability.

The objects that have lasted longest in my life are not the ones I invested in. They’re the ones I kept choosing. The chair that moved apartments with me because it somehow always worked. The bowl I didn’t think much about until I realized I used it every single day. The lamp that drifted from room to room until it felt less like a piece of furniture and more like a companion.

None of those were purchased with a ten year plan in mind. They stayed because they earned it.

This is where the rental comes in.

So many people live in spaces they describe as temporary. The rental. The in between apartment. The place that’s not “forever.” And because of that, they postpone having what they actually want. They wait to buy the chair they love. They live with the wrong table. They tell themselves, I’ll do it properly later.

Later becomes a very convincing excuse.

I understand this instinct. Renting can make everything feel provisional, like you’re not allowed to care too much yet. Like comfort or beauty somehow doesn’t count unless the walls belong to you. But life doesn’t pause just because a lease is twelve months long. You still sit. You still eat. You still need places to rest your body and your eyes.

Some of the most loved objects in my life were bought for rentals. Not because they were meant to last forever, but because they made my life better then. Some of them traveled with me. Some of them didn’t. Both outcomes were fine.

I also work with an art advisor who taught me something that quietly rearranged my thinking. Buying art for investment almost never works out. The people who do well aren’t the ones trying to predict value. They’re the ones who buy what they love. What they want to live with. What they’re willing to look at every day without needing it to justify itself.

And maybe, just maybe, it gains value. But that part is incidental.

That conversation clarified something for me. Art behaves a lot like furniture in that way. The moment you ask an object to secure your future, it starts to fail you in the present. It becomes a strategy instead of a companion. Something to monitor instead of something to live with.

There’s also a strange pressure that comes with calling something an investment. Once you’ve labeled it that way, it becomes harder to admit when it isn’t working. You keep it longer than you should. You defend it to guests who didn’t ask. You blame the room instead of the object.

I have done all of this.

At some point, I realized that the language of investment was making me anxious. It was turning my home into a long term plan instead of a place to live. It asked me to predict a future version of myself and decorate accordingly, which is an impossible task and also a terrible way to make decisions.

Now I’m much more interested in objects that want to be used. Things that invite touch. Pieces that don’t demand loyalty but reward familiarity. Objects that make sense in rentals, in transitions, in lives that are still unfolding.

Longevity isn’t planned. It’s practiced.

It comes from daily use. From habit. From affection. From noticing that something keeps working for you without needing to be defended.

This doesn’t mean buying poorly made things or ignoring quality. It means asking a different question. Instead of Will this last forever? I ask, Will I use this tomorrow? Will it make my life a little better right now?

Forever is abstract. Tomorrow is honest.

The older I get, the more I trust the objects that stay quietly. The ones that weren’t waiting for permanence to be meaningful. The ones that didn’t require ownership to matter.

Those are the things that last. Not because I planned for them to, but because I lived with them.

Love,
Colin