Intuitive Interior Design
“I love your room!” my flatmate gushed. “It’s different from anyone else’s.” She ran her fingers over my Kilim cushions, sunk her feet into my rug, and gazed lovingly at Berivan, a vintage tapestry of a Kurdish woman. My flatmate really got me thinking about interior design and the role it’s played in my life.
My lifelong favourite film features an Anglo-Indian orphan shipped off to a stifling British boarding school while her father went to war. Her room there is an exciting reflection of herself and her experiences, filled with warm orange and yellow tones, animal skin (it was, after all, the Victorian era) and artwork depicting Mughal merriment. That’s kind of like how my room has turned out — a reflection of me. I must confess, I find the subtle toned-down minimalist shtick to be dreadfully dull. I’d rather become a nun, if convents weren’t minimalist in their own way too.
I use the term intuitive interior design, to refer to building your space to reflect how it represents you, not how you want people to think of you. It’s asking what an item of furniture or decor can do for you, not what it might make you look like. It’s putting status symbols on the back burner, ditching shaming and snobbishness entirely. In a nutshell, it’s liberation from the restrictive categories of “good taste” and “bad taste”, and allowing personal taste to take the wheel. Taste is often circumstantial, you see.
I find external social conventions on the curation of one’s home to be like diet culture, minus the food. One’s decorative habits take on moral value, wherein “good taste” suggests the person is virtuous and “bad taste” becomes a get out of jail free card for casual, yet almost dehumanising, denial of that person’s intrinsic worth. I can speak from experience that these categories are egregiously exclusionary of Kurdish people too. If there was a “Kurdish interior design style”, it would be vibrant and zesty in the same way, with soft furnishings the colour of spring flowers and mass-produced posters of rugged mountain scenes, to assuage our yearning for our idyllic stolen land.
But among the white and affluent, these expressions of colourful creativity are sacrificed at the altar of “not nice”, bulldozed to make room for heirloom cashmere finishing touches. Spending my life with more white people than usual, I wasn’t allowed to put anything on the walls because their paint job was thought to be more important. Among Turks, the “Kurdish aesthetic” is turned into the butt of jokes. Humour has it (see what I did there?) that all Kurdish homes look the same, “too much”, designed by Kurdish women adorned with “nonsensical” jewellery. When overt Kurdophobia is “out”, it becomes “in” to covertly express anti-Kurdish sentiment, hiding behind the rhetoric of “choice”. It’s a classic “love the sinner, hate the sin”; surely it’s not “real” Kurdophobia or “doesn’t count” when that person’s not openly criticising Kurdish people, only the “choice” to “live like that”.
The hierarchicalisation of interior design is like any other hierarchy — it’s oppressive. Even when I’m not oppressed. And if it can manage to oppress someone who’s not oppressed, that must make it pretty oppressive. As the Turkish Government tells Kurds to relinquish their identities in exchange for money, power and glory, I’m told to ceremonially burn the one blanket that gives me the warm, fuzzy feeling of my homeland and do a “guilt-free swap” for bespoke oatmeal-coloured linen dyed with actual oatmeal from a perma-dynamic organic oat farm. An Englishman’s home should be his castle, but God forbid a Kurdish woman’s home be her Amed Walls or Erbil Citadel.
While practicing intuitive interior design, I must learn to acknowledge how less socially accepted design quirks can serve us too. A woman might find that having a lot of mirrors helps her with improved body image. A student in halls might use brightly coloured kitchenware to reduce the chances of it going missing. And speaking of halls, the coveted luxury less-is-more look is exceedingly difficult to execute in small spaces. How many Eames Chairs am I supposed to put in a room the size of a Mercedes Sprinter van? I do think the ability to optimise small spaces is crucial to the Kurdish aesthetic, given how many of us have spent years on end in immigration limbo in temporary housing. My partner spent half a decade there and I don’t think he even knows what an Eames Chair is, or sees the point.
As I outgrow my little room and move on somewhere else, I’m going to tell them this. I don’t need my life to be dictated by rules made by and for people whose lives, experiences and interests are nothing like mine. I’m keeping it Kurdish. I want the lace curtains. The evil eyes. An enormous sun-shaped silver mirror, which I click-and-collected from another Kurdish man. I’d like to be able to enjoy these things without the idea that it reduces my worth as a person.
