I Made My Room Minimalist Chic and It’s… Fine, I Guess?

When I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn in May, I allowed myself to see it as the marker of transition. Indeed, the pandemic has seismically shifted the world as we know it, but I have been in stasis with my ‘work-life balance,’ as it were. I have a job, I have friends, I have done the first-year-in-a-new-city-post-grad song and dance. I’m not necessarily waking up every day with a toothy smile, serotonin bouncing off the walls of my skull, but I’m doing okay.

Something that I knew I could largely improve, though, was how I treated my living space. My old room was very tiny, with barely enough room for a full bed. I had shoved my dresser in my closet. When I left any more than a couple of articles of clothing on the floor, you suddenly couldn’t see any more floor. I was embracing a messy, cramped, and quite frankly heterosexual vibe and… for what?

Essentially, I had given up on my living space, and I was at work or out with friends enough to not care or justify making it nice. I said, “This is New York, baby!” and then subjected myself to living like a sophomore in a frat house for the first time.

So after moving, with my new room being a bit bigger, I took to livening up my living space. As someone with petrifying decision anxiety and a strong (but by no means specific) taste for design, buying things for my room became quite burdensome. A case study: I spent three hours, across five different days, fishing for a bedside lamp because my only parameters were: cute, weird but not ugly, not that tall but not that short, not crazy but, like, interesting, and less than $40.

Eventually, the room came together. I have plants. I have some vibrant prints on the wall. I have a rug that takes up most of the floor but doesn’t warp the proportions of the room. I have a (shoddily) installed wall sconce for my desk.

My room has blues, whites, and subtle earth tones. Light wood finishes. Accessories purchased by way of Strategist listicles. It’s simple, it performs and passes as cute, it’s functional.

Now that I have it all ‘together,’ though, I’m left feeling quite uninspired. The space I live in is very, very important right now in pandemic; I spend literally all of my time here. And don’t get me wrong, it’s quite nice. It’s comfortable, I get my work done, I can relax here.

But I feel like I’ve just done to my bedroom what I’ve done to my wardrobe via fast fashion brands like ASOS. I’ve tapped into the affordable, cheap market of seemingly nice, durable-esque products targeted at a vague millennial/Gen Z urbanite audience. My room looks like it’s good for a stock image on some Ikea-alternative website, and nothing more. Pottery Barn Twenty-Something™.

I don’t know what a ‘me’ room is, but it’s not this. My room is the outcome of my spending habits, which are entrenched in the belief that the minimalist x cute aesthetic is the ideal. This is not to say that I don’t like minimalist chic; it’s appealing, functional, and has proven to be affordable.

But at the end of the day, I find myself trying to prove to some imagined studio audience, watching from behind the thin drywall, that I’m an adult who has made their space in a somewhat stylish way. That I’m self-sufficient and care about my space.

Compared to my old room, this is a giant step up. I don’t think it’s an end goal, though. I mean, it’s fine! It’s fine. It’s just a little too Close Encounters of the Capitalist Kind for me to be content with.