Original Project
Written & Photographed by
VRIDDHI VINAY
Edited & Published by
ËËN
Alex (she/her) — Brewerytown, Philadelphia: A Sanctuary Outside Consciousness
Alex is a full-time scientist working with cardiomyocyte research by day and a Pisces sun by night. It’s safe to conclude then that she plays with hearts for a living, and the one-bedroom living space she shares with her boyfriend reflects this. She’s festooned her living space around a two-layered coffee table, one framed by an umber settee and a burnt orange sectional.
Vinyl records, album covers, and posters of the 80s to early-2000s music projects dot the walls, from Lauryn Hill to Joni Mitchell to a vintage Eritrean record lining a banister. The palette can only be described as a “muted dream”, using a mixture of natural warm tones. The art under the red lighting, including works from her ancestral Dominican Republic and a Milkboy Philly poster as her boyfriend’s father was one of the co-founders, is curated like a lavish cocktail bar’s playlist.
The living room is reminiscent of a dim-lit swanky listening room, as originally intended. Alex’s vision for her space was an area for her, on her best days, to leave her work at work. She doesn’t keep a desk, besides a small one hidden by her makeup vanity room upstairs. She says that she mostly likes to decompress by listening to her records or music through her focal entertainment center. When she’s stressed out, she needs to bring herself outside of herself.
She uses her space to practice spirituality in many ways. She keeps her agua de Florida downstairs, regularly burns incense in different areas, and charges her crystals to maintain energy. As a scientist, she’s found science and spirituality to be mutually inclusive, thus changing the way she defines and finds energy. She cleanses the space every time she cleans it, often through incense burning.
Cooking is how Alex expresses herself creatively, especially when she finds herself angry. Once, she cooked a whole chicken at 4 am and it was beautiful. She also loves to read in this space while one of her musical selections plays.
She was inspired heavily by Mid-century Modern design movements, like the conversation pit rotation of her seating, and planned the layout of the shared space, using meticulously designed Pinterest boards. She found a balance between maximalism and empty space in this musical room, thus echoing music’s formal definition as “organized sound and silence”. She found that designing her living room was the “bread and butter” of her design efforts, which she mentioned as Gunna’s “Bread and Butter ” coincidentally played in her personalized listening room. She sourced most of her items from the MoMA design store online for art prints, Facebook marketplace, thrift stores, and from family members. Her favorite art piece, a painting of three women in rich yellows and oranges titled “La Niña”, sits by her entertainment center and is a native Dominican abstract piece on canvas. Her favorite things about Dominican art are the warm colors and its evoking of the beach.
In the rest of her apartment, her bedroom is quite tame. She likes to keep it as clean in its layout and decorations as possible for resting, and one can only draw a parallel to Dita Von Teese’s extremely maximalist Los Angeles house with its minimalist bedroom. However, her favorite part of the apartment exists here: her walk-in closet.
Her closet is a thrifted masterpiece, reflecting her love for her fashion involving a lot of thrifted vintage designer and independent pieces from SSENSE, Poshmark, and ThredUP. In a spare bedroom, she keeps an art deco makeup vanity also lined with all of her beauty favorites, completing an upstairs area for beauty rest and beauty routines.
Alex’s favorite item in her living space is a headless Barbie from her childhood. She thinks the Barbie was beautiful with a head but now is more beautiful without it. It speaks as an allusion to the Winged Victory of Samothrace. The Barbie from her childhood is her favorite because it says so much while doing so little, and it plays with nostalgia. This Barbie is like this sanctuary of beauty, as its headlessness toys with what we fathom beauty to be.
Sahiti (she/her) & Sirianna (she/her) — Washington Square Park, Philadelphia:
Sahiti and Sirianna are two roommates proud and intentional of their Southern Indian roots and young family — that is, a young family made by their sweet dog named Ranga. They have occupied this gorgeous, two-story space complete with high ceilings, natural light, and a black spiral metal staircase for two years now, and they’ve added their own bespoke touches. Sirianna’s eye for color led her to paint both of the living room window sills a rich teal, reminiscent of water lines lined with kajal looking in.
This teal balances off of the corner adjacent to the storm blue-colored couch with a yellow stand showcasing one of Sahiti’s chalk pastel art pieces and luscious green plants. A structured, metal-limbed black coffee table sits across the ornate fireplace in the room with a gold-framed mirror and family portraits of the three on the mantle, letting the bones of this gorgeous apartment truly shine through.
The tweaked silhouettes of the living room undeniably are evocative of Bauhaus design, a German artistic movement recognizable by simple and blocked-out colors mixed with neutrals and distinct sleek shapes. This style also seems melded with the airy new-age Bangalorean and Hyderabadi home decor aesthetic of light fabrics and minimal clutter.
The spiral staircase was both a selling point and a caveat. Sahiti was out of town for the week Sirianna, whom she had already lived with in another apartment at the time, toured the apartment. Sirianna woke her up as soon as she got back to their old apartment in the middle of the night saying that she saw the spiral staircase and that they needed to sign the lease immediately.
However, Ranga cannot climb up and down the stairs, so Sirianna needs to bring her up and down every single time. It’s a double-edged sword. Still, the bright light that casts through the living room windows during golden hour is stunning to look down from the top of the stairs. Therefore, the pros outweigh the cons. Both roommates can report no one has ever fallen from the staircase, inebriated or not.
Interior decoration is either a learned thing from family or a learned trait, and from moving a lot, hanging things on the wall is not a learned trait for Sahiti. Sahiti’s family growing up told her to not have many things in case you move.
From living across India and the US, the art pieces and tchotchkes she picked up were selected from both countries to be the ones that survived entering and leaving many different abodes. For Sirianna, she immediately put up decor before she even unpacked suitcases and was naturally drawn to the geometric placements. Five of the pieces of furniture in the room started as trash picked on this exact street. For example, the kitchen butcher table and the five-foot-tall bird of paradise plant in the corner were found a few blocks down coming home on a summer night from a date. Besides curbside furniture, a lot of the furniture is gifts from family or Facebook marketplace. All these furniture pieces have their own story, whether from their old use or how each roommate collected them.
Sahiti is an artist in practice and by education, being a recent M.A. in Art History graduate and a printmaker, and many of the art pieces in the living room and her bedroom are her own. She uses cultural art forms, lived experiences, and the people around her to inform her practices. Above the couch, she has a framed screen print of navarasam or nine facial emotions used in South Indian dances. Her large chalk pastel piece is a self-portrait complimented by the rays of the sun and its yellow stand.
Painted foam heads from her high school IB art class dot their combined living room bookshelf full of mostly South Asian books. Across the couch, four artworks by another artist, one Sahiti direct message personally on Instagram for special prints: trans anti-caste South Indian artist Nabi Haider Ali dot the wall.
Sirianna expresses herself creatively in this space with her painting and plant projects, like the windowsill. Her favorite object in this apartment is her bird of paradise plant, which she rescued and nursed back to health. She also enjoys getting creative with hosting, and finding new ways to have people for dinner, especially since they have an extra bedroom. She loves hospitality and imagining new ways to bring comfort to their loved ones who visit. She also loves designing intricate birthday parties with themed foods and events in this space. Socialite, after all, is a state of mind.
Bruna (they/them) — West Philly, Philadelphia: Curating Creation and Consumption in the At-Home Gallery
Bruna, a Brazilian aspiring birth doula who is equally Philly as they are Rio, knew two things since they were little: (1) they were always going to smell oh-so-good and (2) their living space was going to reflect who they are as a person. Their room speaks to the visitor, shows them around, and invites their gaze to Bruna’s personal contemporary independent queer art gallery.
Upon entering their room, the visitor can see the natural light flooding through their windows opposite the door and embracing their plants and love-seat and coffee table setup with its warm glow. Every single wall in Bruna’s room is decorated with prints and posters from various artists, mirrors with unique frames, accessories, dried vegetation, and tapestries. Even the ceilings feature dangling mobiles like a blue-painted fish one from their lover, Indigo, or a seashell they threaded with wire to dangle from their skylight.
In positioning their furniture, they’re a strong believer that you should be able to see your windows and door from your bed, and the structure of their room is always a work in progress to play with energies. The intentional clutter, uniqueness of Bruna’s found objects, and not a single corner of wasted space from the mixed patterns on their bedspread to shelves displayed with all sorts of beloved objects, Bruna’s room speaks the most to a visitor about the Eclectic Maximalist design movement.
As a child, as expected, their mom who was interested in cohesive design used to decorate their space. Then, in their adolescence, they visited someone’s room which was tailored to who they were as a person and really represented their personality and interests. This changed Bruna’s whole worldview on what they knew about interior decor. Instantaneously, they felt like “Oh my god. I can decorate my own room with things that make me feel good or with found objects, and it doesn’t need to be framed or intentionally purchased as decorative art.”
Their mom wasn’t a minimalist decorator but has a very cohesive, pristine taste catered to her hobbies and personality with matching color palettes and items like a store model showroom bedroom, which Bruna wants to stray from since that does not say a lot about the space’s occupant.
Their first collection was their jewelry. Bruna emphasized how gold can have spiritual protective properties, and they’ve been preserving their jewelry since they were 10 years old. Rows upon rows of gold and kooky earrings fill an earring holder made out of chicken wire by their mother, and they credit their mom for helping them learn how to make something out of nothing. Bruna, simply put, is an artist who cannot be constrained to a single medium. A recent development for Bruna is that they used to give away most of their crafts to loved ones as gifts but have learned recently how to keep a few for themselves to exhibit. They manage clutter with all their items, as they usually work late at night when they’re smoking in their bed and find a sudden burst of energy, with s four-tier stuffed art cart they keep by their colorful wall-in closet.
Bruna keeps their colorful, artistic room organized by breaking the space up into sections. By their bed, there is a sticker-covered mini fridge full of shrooms and their favorite snacks, which encourages them to keep themself fed from the inconvenience of the third floor. Across from their bed rests their bookshelf full of English and Portuguese books, zines, framed photos, knickknacks, and their perfume collection.
Their favorite perfumes in their collection, which amasses bottles, roll-on oils, and even jasmine oil fragrances they made themself from their mom’s tree in Rio, come Brazilian brand called Granado since they are usually drawn to woods scents. Bruna’s zine library on the same bookshelf is also impressive. They love collecting zines as more DIY art pieces that live in their room, especially ones that they can read in one sitting and involve the author venting their feelings. Since they want to work with kids one day, they keep their zines for kids to read in the future.
Bruna’s gorgeous old gold love seat and coffee table setup functions as their laptop workspace. They learned that they thrive most in an environment where they can lounge and recline, but they can’t work on their bed in case they fall asleep. Bruna’s workspace setup is cozy and innovative, and when they were in college, they loved having people come work with them while they both took comfort in either the bed or the couch.
Finally, the opposite side of their room concludes in Bruna’s spiritual altar. Like their mother, they practice Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion. They have a couple of figures their mentors and figures from Brazil have gifted them or used to practice Candomblé. Spirituality and religion were parts of life that they just grew up around, and as an adult found many of the habitual things they do to feel safer or inspire joy to already be structured practices.
Every morning they open the windows by their altars to let light in and burn incense. They also continue to combine their creativity with their spirituality and make a lot of their herbal waters in-house for release and bathing in this room. Bruna also uses their plants to grow herbs and make herbal medicines for pregnant people as a birth doula. Together, as they hoped for, Bruna’s room lives and breathes with them, bringing their personality out of their chest. The essence of their soul rests in a room full of collected art prints and their own work, and cannot read as anything else but undeniably “Bruna”.
Indigo (they/she) — West Philly, Philadelphia: An Archivist’s Afrocubanismo Home Base
Indigo needs little introduction, recognizable for her archival work, research on the Sahel, West Philly, and Palestine teach-una, bubbly personality, or her silhouette walking through Philly always including an armful of flowers. Her room is as equally dynamic and stretches the limits of maximalism even, without a single blank spot left on their walls or flat surfaces that isn’t arranged with framed paintings and textile prints, perfumes from across the world, historic National Geographic photo pages, jewelry, painted vases, vintage lamps, books, unique postcards, etc.
In one eye movement in between blinks, if you were to look up, you’d see a banister lined by dangling jewelry and hanging wall accents, look down and see a patterned Central Asian rug, look to the left and see a mirror as large as a door frame next to a mirrored cabinet ornamented with gold earring sets, then finally look to your left and see some West African masks next to a poster of penetrative gay porn.
She found that her room came together organically and quite naturally. She always had a lot of random knick knacks she’d acquired from traveling, thrift, and consignment shops like Philly AIDs Thrift, leftovers from old roommates in past maximalist apartments, or from family members hailing from her Afro-Cuban, Afro-Dominican, and Kurdish heritage.
For example, her favorite item in this room is a compact detachable wood hair pick with a mirror her Great Grandfather handmade in the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century. Now, when she finds a new piece for her walls, she usually just finds space and, with her eye for colors and photo subjects, it usually meshes well. She always believed in maximalism. She’s been collecting her knickknacks for years, her first item being a beautiful crystalline chalice her friend got her that sits on the side of their bed now. Her favorite art piece in a sea or expressive prints is an Afro-Brazilian man her lover’s mom got them from Bahia, Brazil.
Recently, they just returned from a two-week-long trip to Florida and brought back an entire suitcase worth of newfound items from second-hand stores or Caribbean mom-and-pop shops, like many times in their trips before. Indigo’s design principles are guided by her archival practices and Afrocubanismo, an art movement she fell in love with that is familiar to her from her background that incorporates folkloric imagery with bright colors and abstract depictions. Indigo manages the Indigo Archives, a digital research space about global indigenous cultural practices headquartered on Instagram, where she does write-ups on topics like the history of head carrying for example. Indigo has always been interested in anthropology across the globe and revolutionary history, and her space feeds off of, reflects, and inspires this part of her life.
She’s collected vintage magazines, like National Geographic, for years, and often puts their photo spreads on her walls. The more she learns about global cultures too, the more she can select additions to her room. Sometimes, especially when she’s smoking, she’ll inspect a new artifact in her space and begin to go on a research tunnel about it, its history, and its significance.
She keeps small altars, with candles and gemstones lining most of her windowsills, all around her house in addition to her two main altars. This is also part of her Afro-Cuban traditions and is important to her to have focal points around her apartment for the spiritual entities that share the space with her. In her room, she has a main altar which looks like an art piece in itself, full of jewelry, fresh bouquets and herbs, photographs of her ancestors, shrine figurines, brass bowls, and beads. This is the altar she decorates to honor and make offerings to her ancestors.
By her bed and entertainment center, she keeps her altar full of gemstones and crystals that she uses for rootwork and rituals.
Indigo uses her entertainment center mostly to watch YouTube videos of musical sets and documentaries, which is why she keeps her TV off to the side. Recently, she found herself watching a 1960s jazz performance by Sarah Vaughan in Sweden and a 1983 James Brown performance in Cincinnati. Instead, Indigo prefers to entertain in her living room, which she also solely curated and designed. A stunning, cream-colored velvet couch sits across a coffee table, framed textile prints, a dark patterned ethnic rug, and an overarching floor lamp. Its design aesthetic is of the caliber of a dangly jewelry-wearing, perfumed glamorous auntie. She likes to entertain with the circular sat-sang setup. She likes to have a lot of tea-serving equipment because she likes to offer that with hookah when her friends are over.
Indigo is proud of her room and how its design came to be. A lot of the things in her room are actual one-of-a-kind artifacts and folk art pieces from friends brought back from their homelands like the Caribbean, Egypt, or India. She is a big fan of stealing things from white art traders who upcharge and resell indigenous Black and Brown art to make money off of it. They like to reclaim the pieces so they can be honored better on display.
White people have this curious fetish, they stated, to toy with the “Orient”, and you’ll see it when you go to thrift shops where white people empty their houses of things they have no business having from East, South, and Southeast Asia. Then these white shops continue to gatekeep this wealth between themselves much like colonial art looters in museum institutions. Stealing? It’s all a part of the praxis and reclamation.
Kyna (she/her) — Wilmington, Delaware: Cultural Comfort Over Chaos
Kyna is a well-traveled aesthete who has learned the art of serenity and silence, placing the focus of her living space on being a spa-like oasis prioritizing her own rest and wellness over work or entertainment. Kyna’s space is the perfect detachment from capitalist notions of productivity, bringing constant business and work home, and performance for anyone outside of her perception. She shares this two-bedroom floor-to-ceiling window penthouse-like rooftop pool apartment with her partner, and they both have their individual catered living rooms.
Kyna stressed the importance of having a space to be alone when you live with your partner, somewhere you can decompress and give each other room to breathe and crave each other’s space again out of your volition. After entering the space, the first object within a line of sight is a gorgeous forest green leather solo reclining couch basking in the sun’s rays with its brilliant color. She tied the earthy, sandy colors of the living room together with some pops of color, like matching green throw pillows on the opposite couch or a cheeky Kirby plushie, and thriving plants sitting on her floor.
The floor is a space of grounding for Kyna too. When she does like to invite one or two guests to her sacred space, she likes to use the floor bedrest to sit on the floor with whoever is in her private space because of how intimate it is for conversation. For a friend over, she likes to dim the lights more comfortably for the eyes, make them tea from one of her blends, and light some incense so it smells good. For Kyna, her priority is an absolute pleasure for all of her senses. Her lights can be dimmed to a rich amber shade, she picks only the most luxurious fabrics, her sound bar often plays something from her global playlists, and she keeps a bookshelf in her living room fully stocked with books by mostly immigrant authors since reading is her favorite pastime. Her living room is part of her forever staycation, and she uses this area with her lover to watch movies and rest on a floor cushion.
In her room, she took expert planning to make sure her artwork and palettes were cohesively balanced. Kyna was drawn towards blush tones, first sourcing a rosy velvet rocking chair in a Wilmington consignment store and building the rest of their room around there. They wanted people to be absorbed by the room when they entered, so this cohesion was crucial. Her reading nook in her room, where her chair is, is her favorite space to retire to in her room.
By the natural light and her altar, Kyna can be found smoking a joint and flipping through a masterpiece in her poetry library full of mostly Black and Brown authors, since poetry is her favorite thing to read, which is stored away dreamily on the nook’s floating shelves. Kyna intended her room to be for rest, reading, and sex. Her bed was planned for the most exquisite sensory experience, with cooling sheets with her partner in mind since they are a hot sleeper, and their favorite item, a jasper stone for protection, that they keep under their pillow.
Kyna’s room art arrangement was part of her creative process. She brought back many art pieces like mirrors and prints from her travels to Morocco and Spain, and she took care to arrange them in an aesthetically pleasing geometric configuration with cohesive colors down to the exact brown of the art’s frames. Kyna draws heavily from her Javanese Indonesian culture to inspire her interior decoration direction, familiar with the bright colors and batik textile prints in Indonesian art forms.
Many of the beloved pieces in her apartment are found or gifted like this: from traveling like her wall art, artworks found or made by her partner in the living room, or the green leather couch from Kyna’s dad. As a poet and poetry enthusiast, Kyna also creatively gives and takes from her space through the written medium. She explained that she sees poetry as a language, like Indonesian, and if you don’t continuously brush up on it, you’ll become unfamiliar with it.
She uses her poetry corner a lot to stay in touch with this language and uses poetry journal prompts she learned from her past university professors to practice. Her favorite prompt she does, which she often works on in her bed or living room, is to make a list of her desires, list of her fears, and things she received that week. Then, using 3-4 words from each list, she meticulously constructs a poem
Part of her living space’s calmness is spiritual. She keeps an ancestral altar in the sun, which she is grateful for in this apartment, by her reading nook for her fore-mothers, to which she regularly offers tea, coffee, prayers, and flowers. She also keeps Sufi books in her living room bookcase.
One of the most unique features in her apartment complex, the rooftop pool, was also a big selling point for Kyna in this way. Kyna is drawn to and feels replenished by being in the water. She joked that she may have been a mermaid in a past life. She adores soaking up some sun and swimming, which is also therapeutic for her back and neck, in blue waters.
One of her favorite parts about having a space so tailored to comfort her and her partner is that you develop natural rituals. If a space is truly comfortable for both of you, it’ll allow the relationship to deepen. It is because, in her own words, you’re able to connect more freely, as your body feels better and more at ease. You’re able to resolve things better and indulge in the energies of the other person more because the space becomes more infused with you.
Text/Photography/Project Creation: Vriddhi Vinay
Text & Photo Editing/Graphic Design: Taïna Jabouin
Published by ëëN
