The most important question for styling your home

Room Service Vol. 1

Welcome to Room Service—a column dedicated to interiors and styling. I’ll share my own perspectives, projects I’m working on, and advice I have for your own spaces.

---

Typically when someone asks me for input on how they should outfit or style a corner of their home it sounds like this:

What should I do with this wall above the couch?
How should I decorate my bedroom?
Do you think I should get a plant or a side table here?

But the question I always come back to is: What do you need?

Which is another way of saying: what’s annoying you in your space right now? How can you make it more functional?

---

I started making the biggest improvements in my apartment about a year ago when I started to really take stock of what minor annoyances I experienced on a daily basis.

For example:

1. Style isn’t the solution—but your solution can be stylish.

I have a lot of kitchen equipment. Reaching for a ladle or a microplane required digging through drawers. I also had this wall facing my stove that I originally envisioned would be a good spot for some art or maybe even a mirror. But what really annoyed me in that space was my lack of space and storag I recognized that my kitchen had a storage problem—not a style problem.

So, I looked for options that could utilize the wall space opposite my stove. I’m not a fan of peg boards, and there wasn’t enough space for a shelf, or cabinet so I found this steel grid that plays off the other stainless steel elements in my kitchen.

2. I took note of how I actually lived and used my space.

When I moved into my apartment I was excited to have a designated dining room—it made me feel grown up. However, my bedroom is pretty tight and originally there wasn’t space for a dresser. So, I kept my dresser in the dining room and figured it would double as a credenza—classic NYC apartment move.

The thing is…I love getting dressed. I love putting different outfits together and finding a use for that one silk skirt I got in 2018 that I forgot about. I noticed that getting dressed in my dining room = making a mess in my dining room.

The issue: I often left clothing draped all over my dining room as I’d get dressed and dash out the door leaving all my clothes behind in my path. I recognized that this solution did not suit the way I live.
The fix: I took a long hard look at my bedroom, moved the bed around and found that I could scoot my dresser in there. Now, my mess is more manageable and doesn’t explode into the living space.

3. I searched Pinterest for solutions—not inspiration

For my most recent project, I decided I needed to do something about the wall my TV is mounted on. I had saved many images on Pinterest of living rooms with gorgeous styled shelves. I also realized, I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d put on these shelves. I’m very against buying a bunch of books in bulk just to style shelves—but that’s for another newsletter. What I really needed from that space was to cover up the radiator below my TV and add storage for all my random tools/stuff.

the image that has been saved to my Pinterest for years.

Instead of going all in on a shelving project based on inspiration from Pinterest, I looked for living room storage solutions.

I bought these IVAR cabinets from Ikea, and painted them to offer more storage and a radiator cover solution. The surface also gives me some space to play with styling and adding personality the way I would with built in shelving.

You can tell when a home has borrowed or selected an aesthetic rather than true style. It’s a patchwork of different micro-trends and feels like an image from Pinterest you’ve seen before—it doesn’t feel human.

I prefer spaces that look like someone has really lived there. It expresses who that person is because it has proof life—not because it has some blatant gallery wall. When you prioritize function it also naturally conveys personality. My kitchen storage shows I’m someone who loves to cook. My office room reveals all my crafts and little projects. Function doesn’t simply overrule form, it drives forms.