Okay, so here’s a thing no one asked for but maybe needed anyway — what if we’re just… tired of minimalism? Like bone-deep tired. Every house you scroll past looks like a sterile dentist’s office with better lighting. A vase. One chair. Maybe a mildly smug bowl of decorative pears on a white table. Not a single cable in sight — where’s your router, Margaret? Where are your things?
Somewhere along the way, we decided “less is more.” And then, bam, everyone’s living room started looking like a showroom where no one actually lives. So I thought — or maybe just felt — what if more is more? What if color, clutter, old rugs, stacks of zines, a candle that smells like burnt toast and disappointment… what if that’s home?
Wall-to-wall-to-wall-to-wall stuff. Yes, all of it.
You know what happens when you hang up one weird painting? You get weird looks. But you hang twenty, and suddenly you’re an eccentric collector. There’s power in chaos, but the trick is to commit so hard that it becomes its own logic. Don’t mix and match — mix and mash and repeat until the eye stops asking questions.
My cousin once covered her entire kitchen wall with mismatched plates. Not even nice ones. Just… weird thrifted ceramic nightmares. Butterflies with human eyes. Gold-rimmed dishes that probably saw too many TV dinners. But now? Everyone thinks it’s “folk-art inspired.” Which is just art-world speak for “I don’t get it but I’m scared to admit it.”
The pandemic has changed the way we relate to the world, re-igniting a love of loungewear as well as indoor glamour, outdoor spaces and even our ideas of society. And it has changed the way we relate to our homes. Once, spaces that we only saw at the top and tails of days have become busily multifunctional: nurseries as well as offices, battlegrounds as well as sanctuaries. For some, that meant clear outs – charity shops are bracing themselves for the flood of second-hand goods – but for others, that has meant surrounding themselves with things they love.
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210430-cluttercore-the-joy-of-a-maximalist-home
Corners shouldn’t be empty. Corners should scream.
That one sad houseplant in the corner? Toss it. Or add three more and a broken lamp and a pile of vinyl that no one plays. Maybe a chair with one leg shorter than the others. Or a mannequin wearing a trench coat and sunglasses, just to keep guests on edge. Corners are not passive — they’re potential. Misshapen pockets of your house just begging for a random shrine or at least a mood.
I once stacked eleven milk crates into a crooked shelf and used it to store nothing but expired tea. Not sure why. But now when people visit, they stare at it, trying to solve it. Like it’s a statement. Which… I mean, maybe it is?
hile minimalistic rooms have a therapeutic effect with their chic, clutter-free aesthetic, there’s something incredibly invigorating about a wild and carefree maximalist space.
https://www.mydomaine.com/maximalist-decorating-tips
Clash everything until it makes sense
Matching is a disease. Fight it. If your rug goes with your curtains and your curtains go with your pillows, what even is the point? Try paisley next to checkerboard next to leopard print. Let it clash like two aunts arguing at Thanksgiving. Loud, weird, and oddly comforting.
If your eyes don’t hurt a little, you’re doing it wrong. If guests walk in and mutter “wow, this is… something,” you win. I’ve got a living room with orange walls, a couch with banana print, and a poster of Nicolas Cage in a gold frame. It makes no sense. It makes perfect sense.
Rules are like IKEA instructions. Unread and overrated.
Design blogs will tell you how to balance light and texture and focal points. They’ll use words like “cohesive” and “harmonize.” Bah. Let your house be incoherent. Let it babble. A room should feel like it’s trying to tell five stories at once while drunk on cheap wine.
Throw a lava lamp next to a Victorian oil painting. Hang a beaded curtain in a doorway that doesn’t need one. Use furniture not for sitting but as altars to your favorite obsolete tech. I still have a VCR that doesn’t work but holds all my chargers. My dog hates it. I love it.
Memory over aesthetics. Every time.
That crayon drawing from 1998 that your nephew made? Frame it like it’s a lost Picasso. The chipped mug from that weird road trip where you almost hit a deer and definitely hit some emotional walls? Centerpiece. Minimalism asks, “Does this spark joy?” Maximal chaos yells, “WHO CARES, IT’S GOT A STORY.”
You’re not designing a showroom, you’re building a living memory maze. A place where things carry scent and scratch and stain and soul. I once spilled coffee on a pillow and just drew around the stain with permanent marker. Now it looks like a modern art accident. Boom. Character.
Aesthetic experiences have been distinguished from other experiences based on an aesthetic mode of processing that often entails concentrating working memory resources on the aesthetic stimulus. Since working memory is a limited-capacity system, there should be a trade-off between available resources and the aesthetic experience. To test whether the intensity of the aesthetic experience is reduced if working memory resources are otherwise occupied, we employed an experience sampling method.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7954329/
Silence is suspicious. Let your home make noise.
Minimal homes echo. Literally. You clap and the room claps back. Weird. A chaotic home? It absorbs sound like an old dive bar carpet. You drop a fork and nobody notices. Things hum here — the fridge, the lamp, the stack of paperback books that whisper when the fan’s on. Your house should murmur, not whisper.
And the smell — oh yeah, it matters. Not in a “buy this $80 candle” way, but in a “burn too much incense while sautéing onions” kind of way. Let it mingle. Scent should confuse people a bit. “Is that cinnamon? Or motor oil?” Exactly.
No shame in the mess. Mess is real.
There’s a reason minimalism thrives on Instagram — it’s easy to fake. Push everything out of frame, snap the shot, and boom: perfection. But you live in your house. You sneeze, you cry, you drop noodles behind the radiator. Embrace it.
Someone once told me my place looked like a flea market exploded. I took it as a compliment. Life isn’t clean, so why should your couch be?
Final thought? Wait, no, actually…
There probably isn’t a final thought. That’s the whole point. The anti-minimalist home isn’t about wrapping it all up with a bow. It’s about the bow being stuck to the fridge with a magnet, next to a postcard from 2003 and a picture of someone you don’t remember taking.
It’s a space that evolves, not upgrades. That expands sideways instead of forward. That doesn’t ask permission from design magazines or Pinterest boards. Your house should look like you argued with five interior decorators and ignored all of them.
So yeah. Fill the walls. Clutter the shelves. Add too many pillows. Too many lights. Too many memories. And maybe one lava lamp. Actually, make it three.
The Anti-Minimalist Home: Designing for Maximal Chaos