🖼️🗿🎀 how to decorate 🎀🗿🖼️

The latest in the How To Be Creative™ series, we dive into the basics of making space.

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I don’t want to brag (I’m going to brag.) but I keep very good home. Meaning: I know how to decorate a space. It’s a gay Taurus sixth sense.

I tend toward the maximalist and silly, creating spaces that my younger self imagined my home to be: colorful, bursting with art, with lots of big and little things that reflect a life well lived, of the world being experienced. I think I’ve accomplished that! Just take a peek at my current living room (right) along with other spaces I’ve lived in over the past five or so years.

It helps to live with

The Fox Is Black

, a graphic designer who helps to soften the edges around my otherwise point-and-shoot mentality when it comes to interiors. We work together to pull off “the look” of our places but I would say I’m the one who puts nails in the wall as I am a toxically impatient earth sign who cannot stand to live in a half-built nest: get shit cute — and do it fast! That’s my motto. Sweat the details later but make it feel good now. It’s your home! Don’t “You live like this?” to yourself! Unpack those boxes and get things looking like your dream home!!

So how do you do it? Why should you do it? Why trust my judgment? Well, in truth, I have zero interior design credentials but I have really great taste and many a friend have asked me for help setting up their apartments and or have asked for advice for making their space more interesting. Take that or leave that! Anyway, let’s get into it, babes, as it’s a long one.

You gotta start somewhere.

The biggest question I get is how do I have so much great art. Where did I get them? How did I find them? Where did I get things framed? Why is this thing here and that thing there? How does it all go together? How did you hang it all? Here’s the thing: years and years ago, after getting my own place, I started collecting shit. Not hoarding but I stated to collect objects and art that I thought were aesthetically valuable or actually valuable, via thrift stores, vintage shops, and prioritizing friendships with artists. As you’ll see, much of decorating a space is about doing it and slowly replacing things over time. Like fashion, you shouldn’t rush out and buy needless stuff because you feel like you have to: you buy cheap shit, you look like cheap shit, you become cheap shit. Use your taste as the lens with which you view the world and build from there — but you gotta start somewhere. Don’t leave a wall blank because one day you’ll “have art.” That’s ridiculous. Why not have art today? I don’t mean buying art: see more things as art. The world is beautiful. How can you invite that in? Once you see things that way, things will fly onto your walls.

Put anything on your walls.

To answer the above: yes, I have collected a lot of art over the years but I’m also not afraid things on my walls. If you look at the pictures of my home in this story (All these spaces featured in this story are rooms in homes I’ve lived in in the past decade, etc.), you’ll notice that not everything “is art” in the traditional sense: I hang cute blankets or quilts, cardboard signs that I’ve found on the street, signs that I’ve ripped off telephone poles, protest signs I’ve bought off friends, stickers that I didn’t stick onto something, newspaper clippings, boxes with cute patterns, toys, cool notes people wrote me, records, vintage board games, a cool shirt, hats — if I can hang it, I will hang it. This is to say: put anything on your walls. Blankets and mirrors can be a lifesaver when it comes to taking up space along with things like clocks, cute mail, non-traditional pictures (a la, not-portraits): kill the blank space any way you can — and you do that by putting anything on the wall. Decorating a space is a great metaphor for getting a creative project done: just do it.

Don't discriminate on what is art…