The New Rules of Sexy Interior Design

Herman Wakefield, “creative director” of the popular meme page Northwest MCM Wholesale, has noticed a similar shift away from on-the-nose sexiness. It’s as if burnout is hitting those who happily gobbled up Togo sofas, bright pop colors, and “almost ugly” statement pieces in the wake of the pandemic to sex up their homes.

“I think people have sort of a bold, ostentatious design hangover. Now they’re looking for more functional pieces and less peacock feather-esque items to attract a mate,” Wakefield, a fake name he uses to protect his anonymity, says. “People are now looking for things like a weird folk art sculpture or something abstract like a tumbleweed on the wall to bring tension and moodiness to the home.”

In that vein, it’s difficult to imagine a better way to introduce sexual tension into a room than with mood lighting. Wakefield recalls one of his “design-sensitive” straight friends complaining about his “depressing” house, to which Wakefield suggested he needed to fix his “crappy overhead lighting.” (“Oh shit, man, you’re right… There’s no lamps in here!” said friend responded.) Floor lamps, table lamps, and desk lamps all lend themselves to fuckable lighting design, Wakefield says. He recommends the GUBI Timberline floor lamp, which is described as having a “a sinuous organic form.”

Though the 2019 explosion of boob-shaped decor left many of us with a milquetoast aftertaste, Wakefield notes that there are a limited number of shapes we can model furniture after. (Though that doesn’t excuse art sellers on Etsy reproducing the shape to “Live, Laugh, Love” levels of cringe.) Given that our bodies are naturally occurring, it makes sense, he says, that the shapes of our sex organs get pulled into design. American artist Isamu Noguchi’s work, for example, is often referred to as phallic, but Wakefield thinks he was more likely just exploring natural forms.

I think people have sort of a bold, ostentatious design hangover. Now they’re looking for more functional pieces and less peacock feather-esque items to attract a mate.

“Sometimes, people will say, ‘Oh, look at that tree, how phallic!’ or ‘Look at the Grand Canyon! What is this? A feminist art statement?’” he laughs. “I think we reverse engineer a lot of our ideas about design. Those forms are naturally pleasing because they’re based on natural design laws, and happen to correspond with parts of our anatomy.”

While conspicuous tits are no longer subversive, Levinson believes one way to make a home horny is with an artistic gesture to phallic forms. (As Wakefield says, penises can serve as inspiration to decorative objects, but it’s far less common to see a straight-up dick in someone’s dining room.) “I actually have a collection of dicks. I love dick [sculptures]. If I’m traveling and I see a ceramic dick, I’m buying it,” Levinson says. “I have three in my house. We just don’t see the male form in that way often enough.”

During quarantine, sex and flirtation were constrained within our own four walls, so we got publicly horny for pretty much anything that could remotely inspire fucking. A friend of mine recently described himself as a “dirty little slut” for home decor, as if Hot Girl Summer had collided head-on with HGTV programming. As Diana Budds writes in New York Magazine, “Very sexy sex isn’t aspirational enough anymore; people demand a dream home to have it in.”

“We were projecting all of our anxieties onto the place we were stuck inside, including horniness, because our house was suddenly our gym, our workspace, and where our kids went to school,” Levinson says. “So, we had to try to create escapism through our house, and we did that by saying, ‘Well, this is my horny room now! It’s not just where I sleep and work and eat now. It’s horny.’”

Wakefield says that lots of romantic partners saw the demise of their coupledom in quarantine, which caused a boom in “weird, covid hookup culture” and, simultaneously, sexed-up bachelor pads with expensive Eames loungers. Now, as new relationships and norms like ENM are forming, he thinks consumers—namely, straight men who were “metrosexually design-pilled” over the course of the pandemic—are looking for finesse: less Burt Reynolds with a box of See’s chocolates, and more Pedro Pascal with psychedelic-infused bubbly.

But in an era in which Levinson says we’re obsessed with codifying aesthetics, horny decor is, really, whatever makes you want to fuck. That might be an object as explicit as a sex swing, or as subdued as the color lavender. Perhaps, to you, white walls aren’t clinical, but a total turn-on. And if a titty vase as the centerpiece for your dining room table floats your campy boat, then utter a hearty “Fuck you!” to the purveyors of so-called taste.

Read the rest of Jezebel’s Horny Week 2023 stories here.