After decades of bland minimalism, people are decorating their homes to the max. Is it a response to our troubled times or individual expressionism?
Outside, Tania James’s home looks fairly average, a flat in a Victorian conversion on a north London street lined with trees and speed bumps. Inside, it’s a riot of colour.
Neon pink, yellow and orange zap across the walls, while dozens of 60s and 70s tea trays line the stairs, each a different pattern. In the living room are green and pink sofas with leopard-print cushions. A pink plastic light-up pigeon and a toy plastic horse sit on a shelf alongside a big yellow plastic bird she found in a charity shop. “I was like, oh my God, £4 – that’ll go with the pigeon!” she says. On another shelf sits her brightly coloured glass-bottle collection, which she has been adding to for the past 20 years – “it’s a one-in, one–out policy now”. There is a fireplace painted highlighter yellow, pink and purple, with a baby-sized blue plastic bear standing to attention in the grate. In the bay window, a jungle of house plants spreads its fronds. “I don’t want to say I’m attached to stuff,” says James. “I’m not materialistic – but it’s important to me to have how I feel inside, out.”
She understands that the home she shares with her family is “Marmite” – someone once told her: “It’s like 10 cups of coffee with a migraine.” But she loves it. “I work from home and I literally need it,” she says. And while it may sound chaotic, on a sunny Monday morning it feels surprisingly serene.
In 2018, James’s maximalism has found its moment. After decades in which the idea of a stylish home tended towards a minimalist aesthetic of pale walls and bare wood, the past few years have seen a decisive turn, with everywhere from Gucci to John Lewis to River Island bringing out flamboyant homeware ranges. Ikea once urged people to “chuck out your chintz”, but last month it launched an accessories collection by artist Per B Sundberg, who describes his work as “lush, rough and burlesque”; it includes skull-shaped vases and candlesticks in the shape of poodles.
On Instagram, maximalist interiors abound. James is known as Ms Pink on the site (she and her partner run a company called Quirk and Rescue, selling cushions and prints) and she points out the democratic nature of social media; you would have had to buy specialist magazines in the past to access anything approaching this range of ideas. But the move towards maximalism also seems to be about other shifts: a reaction to grim political times, and a rejection of the idea of a house as, primarily, a commodity.
In the 00s, as house prices rose swiftly, cultural forces, including TV property shows, encouraged home-owners to keep their house beige and bland, the idea being that this would increase its appeal should they ever need to sell or let it. Now there seems to be a move towards making our living space – big or small, rented or owned – into an expression of our personality. In other words, a home.
Maximalism can be read as an escape from a world and culture that at times seems bleak. James sees it in part as a backlash against austerity: “People are like, right, what can we do to make ourselves feel good?” The American interior designer Jonathan Adler suggests it’s because “minimalism is a bummer. When you’re about to kick the bucket, you don’t want to look back and see an endless haze of beige.” He says maximalism is about surrounding yourself with things that make you “feel a little bit more glamorous than you think you are”. Rather than more-is-more, he describes this as “glamour-upon-glamour”.
Pati Robins, a full-time carer whose maximalist rented home on the outskirts of Cardiff has attracted more than 50,000 Instagram followers, says maximalism for her is about “a collection of things that I love … I have to feel something for them. If something gives me a great joy or any reaction, I pick it up.”
When she and her husband first started renting their home from a housing association in 2006, she says it was a nicotine-stained, “magnolia hell, all Scandi and Ikea, all white and empty”. She had moved from Poland with one suitcase and her husband “was a homeless veteran, so he didn’t have many belongings. When you live like someone else is living because you don’t want to stick out too much,” she says, “you end up feeling like a guest in your own home … it was just awful.”
Tomris Tangaz, the course director in interior design at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, says that during eras when “things get tough, people find ways of negotiating those climates and I think private spaces in particular – your four walls – are the only spaces that are not loaded, that are free of authority and rules”. (There are, of course, often a lot of rules that come with renting a property, which can impinge on tenants’ ability to express themselves, so it’s interesting to see how Robins and many other people on Instagram are finding ways to negotiate that.)
Tangaz says there is a sense that our homes represent a rest from the world outside, and while Robins doesn’t want to ascribe too much of her home’s decor to turbulent political times – “I didn’t start maximalism after Brexit,” she says – she does think of it as her “own personal sanctuary. I close the door and I escape the world.” It’s a feeling she says her husband, who suffers from mental health problems, shares. When the house was still empty, “he felt more on edge … it reminded him of hospitals”. Now it is filled with their objects, “he’s a bit calmer”, she says.
Her version of the aesthetic feels very different from James’s – her walls are painted dark colours, for instance. In her living room, the head of a donkey juts from a neon pink frame.
Maximalism is all about expressing individuality and personality, and so the cultural reference points are hugely varied. Ben Spriggs, executive editor of Elle Decoration magazine, mentions the colour-saturated worlds of Wes Anderson and the Italian palazzo look of Call Me By Your Name. Both he and James namecheck the 1980s Memphis design movement, with its squiggly patterns and bold colours, especially the aesthetic of its founder, Ettore Sottsass, whose fans included David Bowie and Elio Fiorucci – Sottsass co-designed the latter’s flagship New York store.
In Luke Edward Hall’s one-bedroom flat, there are shell-shaped wall lamps, merman candlesticks and so many books that his shelves sag under their weight. He is one of the artists and interior designers most associated with today’s maximalism, and says that at a time when the world can be quite grim, it is about escaping into a fantastical universe.
For him, that involves being surrounded by objects that have a story. “It is a way of expressing yourself,” he says, sitting on a mustard yellow sofa. “In the same way I have scrapbooks, it’s a way of having these memories surrounding you.” On a nearby table are small glass anchovies picked up on a trip to the Amalfi coast with his partner; on another there are glass chicory and asparagus picked up in Venice. He and his partner “love anything shaped like a fish, vegetable or animal”, he says. His fridge is adorned with magnets of crustaceans, Campari and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. In the bedroom, there are palm-print bedsheets and a leopard-print carpet, green wallpaper and pink curtains.
For James, one of the most appealing aspects of maximalism is its DIY quality – her living room includes fake cheese plant leaves bought for less than £2 from Ikea and spray-painted neon orange and pink, as well as a customised Mothercare clock from when her children were young. This customisation reminds her of the punk scene she was part of in the 70s: “People are realising that you don’t have to be rich and able to employ an interior designer – you can just get stuff you love and make it look good.”
With minimalism there was a clear aesthetic, while maximalism embraces everything from Robins’s dark walls, James’s neon birds, and Hall’s shrimp magnets. “It’s much more personal,” says Tangaz, “much more about what you want to create.” Robins believes people are “getting sick and tired of living like everybody else. I think we just want to be seen as individuals.” If that means pink walls, orange floors and lamps in the shape of artichokes, so be it.
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