Basics of Decor for a Bachelor Apartment

Your home does not need to impress. It needs to suggest that an adult lives there.

The bar is, I assure you, not high, and yet the number of men who live in spaces that communicate nothing beyond “I have a mattress and a screen” is sufficient to warrant this entry. You do not need to become an interior decorator; you need only to make a small number of deliberate choices instead of no choices at all, which is what distinguishes a dwelling from a container.

First: lighting. If your home is illuminated exclusively by overhead fixtures, it will feel like a waiting room, and you will wonder why you never feel quite at ease in it. Add one lamp, a floor lamp or a table lamp, placed in a corner or beside where you sit. Warm light, not the fluorescent glare of a place where people fill out forms. One lamp changes a room more than anything else you can do for under fifty pounds, and the transformation is so immediate that you will be annoyed you did not do it sooner.

Second: something on the walls. A framed print, a photograph, a map; anything that suggests you have looked at the walls and formed an opinion about them. Do not hang posters with tape. Do not leave the walls bare and claim minimalism, for minimalism is a deliberate aesthetic choice, considered and intentional. Bare walls are not minimalism. They are absence.

Third: a proper set of bedding. A fitted sheet, a flat sheet, a duvet with a cover, and at minimum two pillows with cases. This is the baseline, beneath which there is no acceptable territory. A bare duvet without a cover is not acceptable. A single flat pillow is not acceptable. Your bed is where you spend a third of your life, and it should not look like a place where someone has been briefly unconscious.

Fourth: a surface for eating that is not also your desk, your workbench, or your lap. A table, even a small one, with a chair. The act of sitting at a table to eat a meal is a statement that you consider mealtimes to be distinct from all other activities, and this is a low bar; I encourage you to clear it.

Fifth: eliminate the obvious. The pile of shoes by the door requires a rack or a tray. The stack of post on the counter must be dealt with or discarded. The collection of empty bottles you are keeping for reasons you cannot articulate is not a collection; it is rubbish with sentimental delusions, and it must go.

You do not need much. You need enough to demonstrate intent, for the difference between a home and a space someone happens to occupy is not money. It is attention.