Guides

Design style guides

What defines each style, where it goes wrong, and how it lands in every room of a house. The rooms in the room library are these styles, furnished and priced.

By style

18 styles, each with a guide and a hub of furnished rooms.

JapandiJapandi Style: What It Is, and How It Works Room by RoomJapandi is the overlap between Japanese restraint and Scandinavian warmth. Here is what defines it, what it costs to get wrong, and how it lands in each room of a house.
CottagecoreCottagecore Decor: How to Get the Look Without It Becoming a CostumeCottagecore started as an internet aesthetic, not an interior style, which is why so many cottagecore rooms look staged. Here is how to translate it into rooms you can live in, including the dark cottagecore variant.
HyggeHygge: What It Means, How to Say It, and How to Build It Into a RoomHygge is a Danish word for a quality of atmosphere, not a furniture style. Here is what it actually means, how to pronounce it, and the small number of decisions that produce it in a real room.
Wabi-SabiWhat Wabi-Sabi Means, and What It Looks Like in a Real RoomWabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic built on impermanence, imperfection and age. It is also the interior style most easily faked. Here is the idea, its origin, and how it translates into rooms.
Organic ModernOrganic Modern Interior Design, Explained Room by RoomOrganic modern keeps modern architecture's clean lines and replaces its hard edges with curves, warm neutrals and natural material. Here is what defines it, and how it lands in each room.
BiophilicBiophilic Design at Home: The Principles, and What They Look Like in a RoomBiophilic design is not a houseplant strategy. It is a framework about light, materials, airflow, prospect and refuge, and most of it costs nothing. Here is the theory, then room by room.
Dark AcademiaDark Academia Decor: How to Get the Look Without Losing the LightDark academia is the only aesthetic on this list built around a verb. It is a room for reading and working in, which is why the version that fails is the one that is too dark to read in. Here is how to build it room by room.
MaximalistMaximalist Decor: The Rules That Keep More From Becoming MessMaximalism is not the absence of rules, it is a different set of them. The rooms that work are held together by repetition and a tight palette, and the rooms that fail are the ones that mistook abundance for permission.
ScandinavianScandinavian Interior Design: Why It Looks That Way, and How to Do ItScandinavian design is usually explained as a taste for white walls and pale wood. It is really a set of solutions to a light problem, and once you know which problem each element solves, the style stops being a look you copy and becomes a set of decisions you can make.
Mid-Century ModernMid Century Modern Interior Design: What It Is and How to Get It RightMid century modern is the most reproduced style of the last seventy years, which is why so many rooms that use its furniture do not look like it. The style is a set of proportions, not a shopping list.
Art DecoArt Deco Interior Design: The Geometry, and How to Use It Without a CostumeArt deco is a geometry before it is a palette, which is why rooms that buy the gold and the velvet still miss it. Here is the underlying grammar, room by room, and the line between an art deco room and a Gatsby set.
CoastalCoastal Decor: How to Get the Light Without the SeashellsCoastal is the most misunderstood style on this list, because the version sold in shops is a theme and the version that works is a set of conditions. One is about objects shaped like boats. The other is about light, air and materials that survive damp. Here is the second one, room by room.
Jewel ToneJewel Tone Decor: Which Colors Count and How Much to UseJewel tones are the easiest palette to name and one of the harder ones to live with, because the thing that makes them work in a photograph is the thing that makes them exhausting in a room. Here is which colors actually qualify, how much of each to use, and what to put them against.
ModernModern Interior Design: What Actually Defines It, Room by RoomModern design is usually described by what it removes. It is more useful to describe it by what it demands, because a room with almost nothing in it has nowhere to hide a bad decision.
TraditionalTraditional Interior Design: Symmetry, Wood and Where to StartTraditional design is the only major style built on symmetry as an organizing rule. That structure is why traditional rooms feel settled, and losing it is why most attempts at the style read as merely old-fashioned instead.
FarmhouseFarmhouse Interior Design: What It Actually Is, and How to Avoid the Kit-House VersionFarmhouse is a functional tradition before it is a decorative one. The forms it borrows all come from rooms organized around work, and keeping that logic is what separates real farmhouse style from the version sold as decorative signage.
BohemianBohemian Interior Design: Why It Cannot Be Bought in One TripBohemian is the style most dependent on accumulation, which makes it the one least suited to being bought all at once. What holds a bohemian room together is not randomness but repetition, and knowing the difference is what stops a collected room from reading as a themed one.
IndustrialIndustrial Interior Design: Applying the Palette Without the BuildingIndustrial design takes its logic from buildings that were never meant to be homes. Most houses have no structure worth exposing, which is the real practical problem, and the workable answer is to borrow the materials rather than the architecture.

Practical guides

Sizing, small spaces and the rooms that do not belong to one style.