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Your House Is Not the Corner Bar...but Does It Need Custom Matchbooks?

They’re cutesy, emblazoned with monikers and logos, and part of the growing phenomenon of people treating their domestic spaces and personal "brands" as interconnected.

Custom matchbooks are cutesy, emblazoned with monikers and logos, and part of the growing phenomenon of people treating their domestic spaces and personal

There’s a theory of restaurants (popularized by restaurant industry expert Ben Leventhal) that every restaurant wants, in its restaurant heart, to be either a nightclub or a diner. My friend Alison Thurston—who loves dinner parties and thrifting for home decor and analyzing the people we know as much as I do—and I have developed our own theory of homes: Every home, in its home heart, either wants to be a sanctuary or a restaurant. (Binaries are as false as they are useful frameworks, and sometimes they’re very fun.) Sanctuary homes are sunlit, minimalist, full of plants, quiet, peaceful—and a sure sign that they’ve been actualized is a sense of airy placelessness. Restaurant homes are curated, candlelit, soundtracked, oriented toward socializing—and a sure sign that they’ve been actualized is, I’ve decided, custom matchbooks.

And the people are customizing! I’ve seen them twice in person, and online aplenty: ones with martini glass icons and hands clanking glasses, illustrated pets and other graphic logos, even a line drawing of a home’s facade, with type stating things like "Polly’s Place" or "Cripe Cottage."

Alison and I both have restaurant homes. But only Alison has custom matchbooks. They’re a good mauve with no name and just her address and an insignia of a cat on the back. She has an ‘only first-time guests’ policy for handing them out. This is why we have restaurant homes, we like to invite the new. "I like always having random people come over," she says. "My favorite thing about single and slightly manic friends is they bring a random guest to dinner. When you’re in a sanctuary you need to be vetted, and be a guest who behaves." We love guests who don’t behave. She now distributes the extras to our friend’s "dilettante lovers who we’ll never see again" and to the Philadelphia Gas Works technician who inspects the pipes.

Before Alison, I first even learned about the possibility that a human civilian could order their own custom matchbooks for something other than a wedding from a TikTok by art director Delaney Lundquist, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, and posts interior design content on social media under the handle @tremont_home. She thinks the appeal, for her originally and for the more than 18,000 people who liked her TikTok about her custom "Tremont Home" matchbooks (which she sells templates for on Etsy), is celebratory freewill.

Interior design content creator Delaney Lundquist sells templates for her custom "Tremont Home" matchbooks on Etsy.

Courtesy Delaney Lundquist

"When you’re in your twenties and thirties, the novelty of having your own space, that you are entirely in charge of, is very special," she says. "Commemorating that with a memento that is highly personalized, and maybe a little bit of an inside joke, is playful. I think that’s what really sticks with people."

"And,"—she adds immediately—"the interior space is increasingly visible and performative on social media. The matchbook is a little visual identifier, a representation of your brand and your home and your persona."

Nick O’Brien, the CEO and founder of Templi, a printed goods company that has seen a 336 percent increase in custom matchbook orders since 2022, says of course the rise in people making custom matchbooks for their houses can be tied to the influence of social media culture. Is it a crystallization of the commodification of home-life-as-personal-brand? (Think: an ambient impulse to have a dinner party that looks tasteful, no matter how it tastes, and that projects a sense of your "aesthetic.") Sure it is. But, O’Brien says, it’s all got a big wink to it. Pet portraits on the matchbook covers are as common as satirical references to English estate-culture or sly indications that one’s house is a corner bar. O’Brien points to a memorable forest green set he printed with the words "Meet Me at Gianna’s" and a tablescape illustration. "It shows a love of restaurant culture," he says, "It’s casual, and they’re just trying to have fun."

O’Brien adds that part of the appeal for personal matchbooks is that they are newly available for the regular consumer. In the past couple years, he explains, the minimum order for custom matchbooks has come way, way down due to printing innovations from the manufacturers. Previously, minimums would be something like 5,000 items per order, and now they can reasonably start at 50 pieces, for about $100. Online graphic design platforms like Canva, as well as the availability of for-sale templates on Etsy, has made the design aspect more accessible as well.

Like many personal objects that photograph well, these matchbooks, in their tiny way, carry the weighty tension between living online and offline. In a November 2025 New York Times story, Jennifer Bradley Franklin wrote about the rise in regular people giving everyday homes family crests, names, and insignia, and the wider trend of presenting domestic spaces as part of a carefully crafted identity and image. The branding of the house is effortful.

O’Brien imagines that people are drawn to these physical markers as a rejection of the screen-heavy world. The matchbook is something real to hold. But it’s also a signal that you’re living an offline life in which people are coming to your house and hanging out with you. And it’s a signal that looks very good in photos, to indicate to people online about your life offline. "Does it photograph?" he asks rhetorically. "Extremely well. It’s difficult to mess it up. It’s engagement-inducing."

Lifestyle content creator Rachel Shea DiBease’s custom matchbooks say: "I stole this from Rachel’s."

Courtesy Rachel Shea

There’s a pure delight to these objects that’s undercut by the culture of the moment: that everything seems like it could be in service of a curated ethos. Sheila Liming, author of the 2023 book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, says that this little tension vibrating in each custom matchbook is what makes the phenomenon so fascinating. "It makes it feel like the stranger is the main audience for that gesture, and not necessarily the person who’s benefiting from it in the moment," she says, "which is a strangely depersonalizing way to go about hosting someone in your home." (Of course, if you’re a restaurant, you truly do court the stranger.)

At the same time, Liming adds, mementos are wonderful: "There is a matchbook in my purse right now that I’ve been carrying around for over a year, because it reminds me of a certain meeting that I had in a restaurant with a person, right? I can understand how this keepsake culture, or this attachment to mementos, has carried over into hosting culture, and that desire to maybe stamp an experience with a physical object in the same kind of way."

Like most mementos, the matchbook is real and it exists to reference an intangible experience. I forgot partway through writing this that matchbooks are actually useful. And I use them! All time! I light candles with them almost every day. They spark my thrice-yearly cigarettes.

Custom matchbooks, by design, won’t be seen everywhere. They’re not the status coffee table book. Their status is in their individuality and your pursuit of this personalized indulgence. Content creator Rachel Shea DiBease, who posts lifestyle content from her homes in Charleston and Philadelphia, thinks they’re great eye-catchers. Her custom matchbooks say: "I stole this from Rachel’s."

"It’s a conversation starter," she says. "When I first started doing it, my husband, who’s in school for architecture, his friends would come over for board game nights and thought I was a graphic designer, because who else could make these?"

Lundquist adds that these are the types of things that can make people really excited about hosting. "If the matches are what makes you excited to host and invite people over, hell yeah, make the matches and let that be the entryway to getting everything else," she says. I love to cook, but it’s imagining the tablescape that thrills me about having the dinner party.

For my friend Alison, the dream, she says—especially because her custom matchbooks have a more elusive design without her name—would be to hear a rumor of people talking about her mysterious matchbook, like they might discuss for an if-you-know-you-know kind of restaurant. A place so good, its glory spreads by word of mouth. So, of course, custom matchbooks for the home reveal the impacts of branding culture—and the performance of self intensified by social media—on our personal aesthetics. But we restaurant-house people make sacrifices for the public. A sanctuary should be in the protected hills; a restaurant is on the street level and ready to be recognized. A restaurant must entice and surprise and be generous. And memorable!

Top photo courtesy Templi

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We Planned a DIY Backyard Renovation. Here’s What Really Happened

My husband and I poured concrete ourselves and built a carport—but not without delays and setbacks. (And we still have a ways to go.)

"By this time next year," my husband said, the morning after our wedding, "we’ll have the backyard completely renovated."

"We’ll have a party," I said. "An anniversary party," he agreed.

Larry and I were sitting underneath a somewhat shabby overhang on the edge of our garage, watching the sun rise over the garden where we had gotten married the previous evening. Our DIY backyard wedding—which included 60 guests, a chamber choir, a potluck dinner and a $15 eyelet lace dress—had been so successful that we felt like we could do anything.

So we committed, in the way that one commits on the first day of a marriage, to completing the backyard renovations by June 2025. Larry began making concrete molds for our patio in September, with the goal of pouring concrete in October. That’s when we learned that fall was one of the busiest times of the year for outdoor contractors, with everyone hoping to get their projects done before the winter. We weren’t able to get anyone in to do the initial pour until late November, at which point Larry decided that there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t learn to make and pour concrete himself.

The winter weather held long enough for Larry and a friend to do a second pour in December, at which point we decided that there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t learn to make and pour concrete as well. So, when the spring came, I put on my overalls and got to work.

At left, learning how to pour concrete. At right, trying to get the pontoon boat under our new carport.

Courtesy of Nicole Dieker

Mixing and pouring concrete is remarkably similar to making a cake, in the sense that you need to add the right amount of water, stir everything around really well, pour it evenly and get all of the air bubbles out before it sets. You’ll want to avoid slopping too much concrete over the sides of the mold, for the same reason you’d try to avoid getting globs of wet cake on the outside of your baking dish, but anything that gets spilled can be cleaned up afterward.

It’s also an excellent project for a newly married couple, in part because it allows you and your spouse to work together without getting hung up on the persnicketiness of, say, hanging wallpaper. There’s no tiny little flower that has to match up with another tiny little flower while one of you is standing on a chair with the weight of the paper and paste dangling from the ends of your hands, which are, of course, held over your head, and everything starting to dry before you can get the seam in place, and there’s always that one little air bubble that never gets ironed out, and whose fault was that, anyway?

Concrete, despite or perhaps because of its strength, is incredibly forgiving. Which gave Larry and me the strength to forgive ourselves when it became obvious that we would not have our renovation completed in time for a first anniversary party in June 2025. "And now that this is becoming a multiyear project," Larry said, "I think the next component that needs to be completed is the carport."

Our house came with a single-car garage, which Larry had already turned into a tool shed and workspace. Our single car is parked in the driveway. The carport, which would be built in place of the overhang we had been sitting under the day after our wedding, would hold our pontoon boat during the winter, so Larry and I wouldn’t have to pay the marina to winterize and store it.

Larry estimated that it would take two weeks to build the carport. It took two months. During that time, he calculated the optimal angle for drainage, since the roof needed to be both high enough to accommodate the boat and low enough to line up with the garage. He had maybe 10 degrees of wiggle room, and ended up giving the boat just four inches of clearance. Larry also carefully measured the notches required to make the rafters flush—there were 19 of them, and each needed to be precise—and designed and printed 3D jigs to help him get the job done."It turns out I didn’t need the jigs, once I figured out how to cut the wood," Larry explained, "but I’m not sure I could have figured out how to cut the wood without making the jigs first."

Almost a year to the day of our first concrete pour, we had a group of friends over to the house to roll the pontoon boat into the carport. This couldn’t be done with a winch because we had to take the boat around a corner, which meant manipulating it back and forth like a piece of furniture, with six people pushing and pulling and me shoving chocks under the wheels every time we paused to recalculate the angle.

Our completed carport.

Courtesy of Nicole Dieker

We actually got the angle wrong, that first evening—both the horizontal and the vertical, since it became obvious that unless we packed part of our backyard with bricks and dirt and any other material we could scrounge up, the boat would roll ever-so-slightly and then inevitably down an incline that could take it straight into our neighbor’s house. So Larry moved piles of dirt from our patio excavation and placed them in the necessary spot, and we invited everyone back over for a second round, and this time the boat rolled precisely into its place.

"How long did that take?" Larry asked a young boy who had come along with his dad and had been instructed to stay out of the way and keep the time. "Twenty-seven minutes!" he replied. Yes, on the second try, after a two-week estimate became a two-month project, after the idea of renovating a backyard by an anniversary deadline became a lifetime dedication to our garden and our marriage and our agreement to do as much as we can ourselves, because that’s how we learn. And we still feel the way we did, the morning after our marriage—as if we could do anything.

Top photo by Ellinnur Bakarudin/500px via Getty Images

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What Have We Learned About the Design of Attracting Employees?

Another wave of companies is emphasizing returning to the office—but that doesn’t mean they’re addressing workers’ needs in meaningful ways.

In 2023, John (a pseudonym) was called back to the office. As an engineer in Chicago, he was one of thousands of workers across the country who left a desk to work from home in the wake of Covid’s shelter-in-place orders. In the two-bedroom apartment that he shared with his wife, he set up his workstation at the kitchen table each morning and put it away for dinnertime, every day for two and a half years. Though he liked waking up later, spared from a transit commute, he longed for his old office, where he had multiple monitors and camaraderie with his team. The initial mandate to return, which required two days per week minimum in their downtown office, was soon expanded to three days. John seems ambivalent about the new policy—and his office.

"They only have two microwaves on the floor that I’m on, and that fills up very quickly. And they also have a fridge policy where you can’t leave anything overnight, and they will throw anything left away," he says. There’s no free coffee or silverware for his lunches. This is no different from his office life before the pandemic, but like many workplaces that reduced their footprints to save money during Covid, returning to work has meant that more people are using the reduced facilities. Sure, he enjoys the comfort of multiple monitors, but these details have become daily frustrations. Five years since the pandemic first began, many companies like John’s are mandating that employees come back to an office, including more than half of Fortune 100 desk workers—up from five percent in 2023. As work-from-home employees are getting back to their desks, the question of what role the physical office can play in bringing workers back remains prominent. After years of working from home, can an office makeover be tantalizing enough to draw even the most adamant remote workers back?

Covid’s onset today feels like a haze: Early on, many office workers moved remote with the understanding that it would be temporary. From variant to variant, offices pushed their reopening. A Gartner survey of CEOs conducted in August 2021 found that two thirds of companies postponed reopening plans, per the New York Times. Building managers and employers rightly turned their attention to small-scale interior updates, making swift changes to keep people distanced and improve hygiene: circles drawn on linoleum floors, and hand sanitizing podiums went up in front of doors. Social distancing in the office, however, prompted many company leaders to begin rethinking how their office might look. Gensler, the world’s largest architecture practice, developed an algorithmic tool in 2020 that applied Center for Disease Control guidelines for social distancing to spatial design.

Eric Gannon, a project director at Gensler, says that the tool helped generate a lot of new conversations about what those guidelines might mean for post-Covid offices. For potential clients, the prospect of changing an office from 100 people to 30 to accommodate a six-foot radius seemed daunting. As states issued stay-at-home orders, the Covid interior safeguards proved irrelevant; remote work seemed to become a permanent future: The U.S. Census reports that the number of remote-only workers tripled between 2019 and 2021, a possible death knell to the office (and to business districts) as we know it. But Gannon feels the office had already been in decline for years prior to the pandemic.

"Everything from how the work environment supports people doing solo work to group work, to socializing and learning, all of it was on a pretty steady decline and heading up to the pandemic—it was, honestly, starting to tank," he says. "The pandemic drew a lot of emphasis on it, but we were aware that workplaces were starting to shift in terms of needs."

Empty desks at the Fuze office in Boston on March 10, 2020, one of many that became ghost towns during the work-from-home era of the pandemic.

Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Open offices, popularized in the late 1990s, had been especially fading into irrelevance. The scheme supposedly ‘broke down barriers’ of cubicle walls to encourage a more socialized and collaborative workplace, but a 2021 New Yorker article documenting the office’s evolution notes that, by the early aughts, the ‘open plan office’ became more of a grift than a gift, a ploy to cram more people into less space. In 2010, reads the story, "the average North American employer allocated two hundred square feet to each worker; by 2017, that number had shrunk to about a hundred and thirty square feet." As anyone who works in an office can attest, noisy distractions abounded, forcing employees to hide away in their headphones.

These problems persist, according to Gensler’s 2025 Global Workplace Survey, a study of more than 16,000 full-time office workers across 15 countries and 10 industries. They found that space-effectiveness for all activities including working solo, collaborating in person, socializing, or learning, haven’t improved since 2008; the majority of respondents report that their biggest distractions—overhearing phone and in-person conversations, as well as foot traffic—remain inherent to open offices. These open office plans "fail to accomplish one of their major stated goals—increasing collaboration. Instead, researchers have found, they drive workers into more isolation," reports Scientific American.

It’s no wonder that working from home makes people happier, yet employers still want their workers back. A 2024 study by KPMG shows that 79 percent of American CEOs envision "corporate employees whose roles were traditionally based in-office to be back in the physical workplace in the next three years." That’s up 34 percent from the year prior. JPMorgan Chase concurs: Their recently completed Foster + Partners office building, a 2.5-million-square-foot "supertall" in Manhattan that cost $3 billion (with interior workspaces designed by Gensler), is "a bet on the idea that working from an office is a competitive advantage in a business landscape that is rapidly changing," designed with a goal "to make workers healthier in mind, body, and spirit—and therefore equipped to do their best work efficiently and effectively," writes Dwell contributor Diana Budds in Fast Company. Communal spaces on each floor, ample light, and clustered workstations all contribute to making workers "feel like they have more personal space."

Time will tell if a fancy HQ will be enough to attract workers back or just a post to which disaffected employees will be chained, and CEOs around the country might be taking note. But among those employers who chose to up their workplace game, JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon is an outlier. Many CEOs (or architects) aren’t billing their new builds or rehabs as a means to get butts back in seats, framing them instead as recommitments to attracting and retaining talent by providing more holistic workspaces. Still, 59 percent of organizations plan to increase investment in office renovations that "support return-to-office" efforts, reads an op-ed in Constructive Dive by the Americas market lead for project and development services at global real estate investment firm JLL. Despite that excitement, Gensler’s research found that only 30 percent of offices have been renovated post-pandemic, and "that’s sixty-plus percent that have been untouched where [workers are] trying to live a new life in the same environment," says Gannon.

Realistically, few corporations have the capital to build entire new buildings, and renovations aren’t cheap (and as the JLL piece notes, becoming even pricier under labor shortages and material costs). Some employers have instead retooled workplaces, using strategies like "hoteling," where workers ‘book’ a desk daily or weekly, a means to cheaply provide the type of flexibility and change of scenery that employees crave. Redditors have taken to the forum to discuss the practice, calling hoteled workplaces "cesspits." One tech employee in Chicago described how "flexibility" and "collaboration" are undermined when employees who refuse to use the booking system and instead "make their own rules and take the desks closest to the windows."

If there’s budgeted capital, employers might renovate their space, or, says Gannon, depending on when their lease is up, may choose to relocate and begin anew. But it’s not just about adding a cafe or letting employees book the desk of their choosing that may make these spaces desirable to workers wearily returning from their homes. Gannon sees the glitzy, "almost laughable" amenities of the past, popularized by start-ups—like ping pong tables—as a big turnoff; those employers who might now be trying to entice their employees out of their houses by making the office into a home-like environment, like creating ‘living rooms’ with residential seating, are also missing the mark. "At some point you want your nest at home, and you think of your personal space differently than trying to personalize your office space," he says.

"It’s like the consumer mindset," Gannon adds. "Workers aren’t people you just push things on. They have opinions, and that’s, I think, a reality for us now." Instead, Gannon emphasizes the need for more authentic or purposeful interior redesigns that can be adapted or reconfigured over time and rooted in data sourced from employees. (Though he warns, "don’t ask if you’re not going to do something with it.") Workers, it seems, know when the carrot is just a stick in disguise: It could explain why, according to Pew Research, 46 percent of remote workers say they would rather quit than return to the office.

Instead of trying to convince employees that the office is perfect for them individually, then using policy to force it on them, Gannon explains that employers would be better off investing in spaces that genuinely enable them to work better by focusing on what employees need to perform their best—technology, flexibility, and meaningful amenities. Building managers and owners also have a stake—and responsibility—in the equation; a paper by the Chicago Fed reported by The Hill in July 2025 shows that massive amenities like gyms have little effect on overall office vacancy rates. However, "meaningful amenities" might look like free parking, which, writes The Hill, "eliminates a major logistical headache and financial burden, especially when downtown parking prices are high or public transit is unreliable." Relieving daily frictions is the way to go.

It echoes John’s experience: workers see optimism in returning because of the technology tools and relationships they’ve built with their team; the day-to-day frustrations of commuting, sitting for long periods in one place, being unable to collaborate effectively, and being exposed to nuisances can all be detrimental to the back-to-work project. Luring people with shiny objects or novelty spaces simply isn’t an effective strategy. For some it may require more complex renovations. For others, it might mean smaller interventions like ensuring that workers don’t return to half-hearted offices where even the mistake of forgetting a spoon can lead to a headache.

Top photo of JPMorgan Chase’s new office in Manhattan by Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.

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I Defied the "Landlord Special" and Replaced My Electrical Outlets

Picture this: You bravely excavate layers of caked-on paint with screwdrivers and Exacto knives, only to get behind the curtain and realize...it’s definitely time to call the professionals.

I Defied the "Landlord Special" and Replaced My Electrical OutletsRenters who fix or undo the "landlord special" should get an automatic pass into heaven. Removing glops of paint from fixtures. Connecting the gaps where the wall and floor are supposed to meet. Peeling off shoddily applied contact paper or tile decals. This is all God’s work and will be duly rewarded in the afterlife.

As such, I should get an automatic pass into heaven for replacing two of my electrical outlets that were covered in layers of decades-old paint and therefore unusable, a project I paid for out of pocket, of course. I couldn’t imagine my landlord reversing the work of the painters he hired two years ago to give my walls a fresh coat. But a girl needs access to electricity. These outlets were so heavily coated in paint that a plug wouldn’t even stay in—and they were two-prong, and I really wanted to upgrade to three-prong.

I initially planned to replace the outlets by watching YouTube tutorials because I didn’t want to spend much money on this project. It seemed straightforward enough: turn off the breaker, remove the plate, detach the wires, swap in the new outlet, reattach wires, screw in the new plate, turn on the breaker, and then plug in your blow-dryer or whatever. In reality, the ordeal was more complicated.

To start, I had to remove the paint, which took a handful of hours over the course of a couple of days. Furniture needed to be pushed aside so I could comfortably crouch down. I didn’t have proper tools for removing caked-on paint so I used a flathead screwdriver to chip away what I imagined was five layers of cancer-causing lead paint. I felt like an archaeologist—one working in extremely hazardous conditions.

Paint chips were all over my floor and getting stuck in between floor boards. I have never had to mop and vacuum such specific areas in my apartment so many times in a row. Removing the paint from the tiny grooves of the screws was arduous. At one point I introduced an Exacto knife into my paint-removing toolkit. I’m lucky I didn’t accidentally stab my hand with a screwdriver or knife.

Finally, after a week of excavating and unscrewing the plates, I peeked inside the holes. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but the YouTube tutorials made it seem like I’d be presented with easily identifiable colored wires that were neatly wrapped around the terminal screws and grounding screws of the outlet. Ha ha! Instead, every wire was rusty and black, thick and impossible to bend. It was clear that some of the wire coating would need to be removed and pulled back. At this point, I knew I had to call a professional.

After scrolling through tons of folks on TaskRabbit, many of whom were charging upward of $250 (out of my budget), I got a recommendation from a friend who said her local handy guy could do this for cheap "as a favor." The dude came in, checked out the wires, and as I’d expected, said this job would be a breeze for him, and maybe take him 15 minutes tops to replace both outlets.

Incredible, I thought, how much could he charge, right? When he finished, in his most Brooklyn accent, said in a single breath, "Okay miss, that will be $100, but just so you know, my normal rate for this would be $250, and that’s my baseline fee for surviving and doing this kind of work, but I told your friend I’d cut you a deal, so you can pay me whatever you want on a sliding scale starting at $100, but just so you know, my normal rate for this would be $250 and if you could pay my usual rate I’d appreciate it."

He looked right into my eyes as I said, "Okay, let me run to the ATM," where I withdrew $260 since the bills came in increments of $20. People ought to get paid for what they think they deserve, I thought, and this handy guy has done me a huge solid. I forked over the cash, thanked him, and went into my apartment to plug in a bedroom lamp.

Top photo by Tacojim via Getty Images.

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My 2026 DIY Resolution Is to Commit to a Gallery Wall

It’s a classic for a reason.

I often find myself admiring well-staged photos of tastefully arranged and resolutely simple living spaces; intellectually, I understand the appeal of several harmonious shades of beige. But my ideal scenario is much, much different: pure aesthetic chaos.

Over and over again, I’m drawn resolutely toward dizzying maximalism. Outdoors, I prefer a cottage garden to almost anything; inside, I like innumerable layers of colors and textures. Bold rugs with rich, dense patterns; gingham linens; kooky-shaped velvet sofas; centuries-old British farmhouses with wooden rafters so low they graze your head; tartan wool blankets; aggressive wallpaper patterns; pressed-tin ceilings; weird lamps and funny little items sourced from thrift stores. Picture a 17th-century painting full of paintings, or perhaps Sir John Soane’s house.

In reality, in such a space, I would find myself overstimulated to the point of vibrating clear out of my skin. The question is how to tap that feeling of abundance, without letting it take over. Enter the gallery wall, which presents an opportunity to play with the chaos that I enjoy—but firmly within guardrails.

Unfortunately, I always collapse a bit in the face of the steps involved. First you have to pick the wall, then you have to choose (or worse, acquire) the art, then you have to frame the art, then you have to figure out how to arrange all that art, then—God help me—you have to get out a hammer and a level. It’s not that I’m incapable of tackling a complex project with a lot of stages, it’s just that such things have to be crammed in around the complex project with a lot of stages that I’ve already committed myself to for 18 years, i.e., parenting.

And yet, I always find myself back on Pinterest, pinning photo after photo of cheerfully crowded walls, the opposite of my blank, boring walls (or worse, the half-assed ones). Clearly, it’s time.

Part of the problem is that I need a greater variety of stuff to put on the wall, but my time and budget are both limited. I’d like to solve this problem with some of the ephemera I’ve collected over the years. Recently, for instance, a piece of paper fluttered out of a secondhand cookbook—an orange piece of Doubleday stationery with the relevant publication details. I have so many similar things tucked into drawers: postcards, vintage prints, bookmarks from every bookstore I’ve ever visited, covers from old Harlequin paperbacks, family photos from back when we still developed film. All of it could be tucked into frames. (Though I’ll always regret the ephemera I didn’t snag while I could—why didn’t I think to grab a placemat from Astoria’s Neptune Diner while it was still in business?)

If I were to frame it all professionally, it would cost a small fortune. But I don’t have to. A close friend DIYed her own gallery wall by simply buying up every nice-looking frame containing hideous art she spotted at thrift stores and replacing the picture, then taping up the back, which nobody sees. Custom mats are widely available on Etsy for a nice polished look, too. I have all the pieces at hand—I just need to do it. And this year I will. What else are long January weekends for?

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These Are the Home Design Trends That Will Rule 2026

Experts we talked to said they were done with white minimalism, and looking forward to ornamentation, tactility, and even a connection with the cosmic.

A private residence in Brooklyn, NY, by Hans Lorei that embraces a moody palette.

In 2026, one big looming question within design—and well outside of it—is how artificial intelligence will shape the future. But designers and other industry experts we spoke with seem certain that even as the powerful but still-unruly tech plays a yet larger role in our lives, homes will go in the opposite direction, becoming refuges that support connection not with screens or computer-generated thought, but with one another.

Some say that sentiment will be supported by a movement away from anything white, including Pantone’s 2026 color of the year, as well as sterile minimalism. In its place will come interiors that feel warmer, darker, and more expressive, ones that favor moody atmosphere over brightness and tactility over seamless finishes. Midcentury aesthetics might prevail, but not in the bleached Scandinavian or American style that has dominated in the past.

This emphasis on something warmer and more human-centered is matched by a broader rethinking of values, too: What is lost when technology is relied on too heavily? some are asking; sustainability is still a refrain, but now with a deeper consideration for the circularity of materials and the possibilities of re-use; others are questioning what inclusivity should mean going forward, casting a critical eye on tokenism and calling for more intention and accountability when elevating unheard voices in the design world.

Here’s what five design experts loved about 2025, what they’re definitely ready to let go of, and the trends they think will define 2026.

Mike McMahon—Mike McMahon Studio

Loved It: Ornamentation

After years of restraint, ornamentation is making its way back into architecture, says London architect Mike McMahon. This renewed interest reflects a desire for buildings that engage the senses. "Ornamentation is making a comeback, with designers turning to sculpted brickwork and patterned facades to bring buildings to life," he says. "Our [installation] at the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival and the fluted brick facade at Royalty Studios in Notting Hill both explore this renewed appetite for tactile, expressive surfaces."

A rendering of Royalty Studios in Notting Hill by Mike McMahon Studios, which is a refurbishment and renovation of a 1980s office building. The architects have added a "contemporary crown — A proposed renovation of Royalty Studios in Notting Hill by Mike McMahon Studios features a "contemporary crown" with a fluted, tactile wall.

Mike McMahon Studio

McMahon also sees a shift toward more low-impact, sustainable innovation among manufacturers and material suppliers. For his installation at U.K.’s Hampton Court, for example, the studio used Kenoteq’s K-Briq, a masonry unit made from more than 95 percent recycled construction waste.

McMahon says the K-Briq masonry units show "how circular materials can slot seamlessly into contemporary design."

photo by Gary Morrisroe

Hated It: AI Shortcuts

While AI is becoming increasingly visible across the design world, McMahon is wary of how quickly it’s being used as a substitute for architectural thinking. "Social media is flooded with AI-generated designs, and while the technology clearly has its place, its influence on architecture is more complicated," he says. "When it’s used as a shortcut to ‘design’ buildings, the results tend to feel flat and soulless, missing the nuance, intuition, and humanity that real spaces need."

My son as a Sim, with another house too close to mine. — In a story for Dwell, writer Leslie Horn Peterson used YardAI by Yardzen—an AI-powered landscape-design tool—to reimagine her own yard, with mixed results.

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See the full story on Dwell.com: These Are the Home Design Trends That Will Rule 2026

These Are Dwell’s Most Popular Real Estate Stories of 2025

The year’s top listings include a Frank Lloyd Wright gem, Bob Dylan’s Harlem residence, and Burt Reynolds’s mountain cabin.

Frank Lloyd Wright protégé Jim Fox used wood, glass and stone to build the monumental residence in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

From a Taos Earthship to a sky-blue Bay Area Eichler and a 19th-century Ontario mill (complete with waterfall), 2025’s most popular real estate articles spanned a wide range of styles, locations, and price points. What connected them, however, was a good story: Almost all the homes have a history that’s out of the ordinary.

Some were designed by iconic architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Rudolph Schindler. Others had a star turn—like the apartment Bob Dylan lived in while recording his World Gone Wrong album or a home featured in the Netflix series Nobody Wants This. And some were deeply personal projects, like a New York farmhouse renovated by a mother-son duo or a decades-old family home in the Pacific Northwest that hit the market for the first time.

In 2025 we also launched Ask a Realtor, an advice column about the ins and outs of home finding, renting, buying, and selling from expert Douglas Elliman real estate agent Nicole Reber. (Have a question? Submit it here.)