My taste skirts the line between tasteful and gaudy. It’s a baroque monstrosity where something as classical as a Greek statue or Roman bust or as sacred as a lovingly handmade cross becomes kitsch on the background of high contrast colors and other antique or [faux] luxury items and accoutrements. It’s the mind spilling over into the environment, but not indiscriminately. Everything is carefully curated and intentionally placed. It’s as ostentatious as it is logically categorized according to some innate (and cultivated) but highly trusted aesthetic intuitions. It’s the point where artifice and authenticity rapturously consummate in a serpentine tangle.

I favor dark yet warmly lit, slightly claustrophobic, but chaotically organized environments. Beautiful, lush, decadent spaces that engulf and consume you. I can’t visit the Sistine Chapel (for now), but I can attempt to recreate a version of it. But instead of a monument to the divine, transcendent, and Apollonian, it’s a collusion with the chthonic, sensual, and Dionysian. While the former is bright and airy, the latter is humid and balmy, with all of its religious, divine, classical, and symbolic imagery impregnating the material. It’s the transcendent inseminating itself into base materiality, fusing the sacred and profane together. The divine is not just out there, it’s in here, right now, deep in the caverns. There’s something animistic and nostalgic about it. Decorating the space is a ritual and the space itself is totemic, a sanctum santorum of its own.

It’s timeless/atemporal. Could they be from the 1800s, early 1900s, or something entirely modern? It rejects the form as function, restraint, and pragmatism of contemporary styles but is also syncretic in a way that eclectically borrows styles from different eras and traditions. It’s timeless but also suspended in its own time. It captures different influences that makes it highly pregnant with context but it is also singularly detached from the rest of the world. It operates on its own time, logic, and rules.

All the photos are from Pinterest.