& Other Stories Unisex Decoration: The Art of Styling a Space That Belongs to Everyone

There’s a particular kind of magic in a room that feels completely at ease with itself — where nothing shouts for attention, where the objects on a shelf seem to have been there forever, and where every guest who walks through the door feels an immediate, wordless sense of welcome. That quality, that effortless livability, is harder to achieve than it looks. It requires a deliberate approach to decoration that resists the pull of trend and instead asks a deeper question: who is this space actually for?

That question is at the heart of what we might call unisex decoration — a philosophy of interior design that has quietly moved from niche aesthetic preference to mainstream sensibility over the past decade. And few brands embody this philosophy as naturally as & Other Stories, the Stockholm-born label that began its life in fashion and has steadily expanded its universe to include beauty, accessories, and a home and lifestyle offering that carries all the considered, unhurried intelligence of its clothing.

Understanding what makes & Other Stories’ approach to decoration so resonant — and how to apply those principles to your own home — is worth exploring at length. Because this isn’t really about copying a brand’s visual identity. It’s about understanding a way of seeing.

What “Unisex” Really Means in Interior Design

The word “unisex” has a complicated relationship with interior design. For a long time, it was used as a kind of negative space — a room described as unisex was often simply a room drained of anything considered feminine, leaving behind beige walls, dark furniture, and a general blankness that pleased no one particularly. That interpretation missed the point entirely.

True unisex decoration isn’t about subtraction. It’s about balance, multiplicity, and the refusal to design for a projected audience. It means choosing objects, textures, and color relationships that speak to human sensibility in a more universal register — warmth, curiosity, craft, comfort, beauty — rather than to socially constructed ideas about what men and women are supposed to prefer.

& Other Stories has always understood this intuitively. The brand’s DNA is built around the idea that personal style is deeply individual, not prescribed by gender, and that the best aesthetic choices come from a place of genuine curiosity rather than rule-following. When those values translate into home decoration, the results are spaces that feel abundant and intentional without ever being aggressive or exclusive.

The & Other Stories Aesthetic: What It Actually Looks Like

If you’ve browsed the & Other Stories website or walked into one of their stores, you’ll have noticed a consistent visual language that is instantly recognizable without feeling formulaic. It draws from several distinct wells.

Scandinavian functionalism is the foundation. There’s a preference for clean lines, honest materials, and objects that serve a purpose even when that purpose is primarily aesthetic. Nothing is fussy. Nothing needs too much maintenance or too much context to appreciate.

Layered on top of that is a Southern European warmth — earthy terracotta tones, hand-thrown ceramic vessels, a softness in textile choices that prevents the space from feeling clinical or cold. This is the part of the & Other Stories palette that breathes, that invites you to sit down and stay.

Threading through both is a curatorial instinct that privileges the found, the artisanal, and the imperfect. A candle holder that looks like it came from a Marrakech medina sitting beside a minimal glass vase that could be Danish design from the 1970s — that conversation between objects, across time and geography, is deeply characteristic of the brand’s point of view.

The result is a space that feels like it has been collected rather than decorated. That distinction is crucial.

Color: Working Within the Unisex Palette

One of the most powerful tools in creating a space that feels open to everyone is color, used thoughtfully. The & Other Stories approach to color in home decoration tends to avoid both the aggressive masculinity of very dark, very saturated tones and the cloying softness sometimes associated with overly pastel interiors. Instead, it occupies a rich, sophisticated middle ground.

Think of warm whites and off-whites — not the cold, blue-toned whites of a minimal gallery space, but creamy, chalky whites with a slight warmth that reflects light beautifully and makes a room feel lived-in. These work as the base layer, the wall color or the dominant textile tone that everything else responds to.

Against that, the palette introduces organic, earthy mid-tones: terracotta, dusty rose (which reads as a sophisticated clay pink in the right context rather than as a gendered choice), warm sand, stone gray, and a recurring presence of deep forest green or sage. These colors feel grounded in the natural world, which is one of the reasons they feel universally appealing — they don’t belong to any cultural category of gender, they belong to the landscape.

Deeper tones appear as accents: charcoal, chocolate brown, warm black. These give a room its anchoring weight, the visual equivalent of a low note in a piece of music.

What you almost never see in this palette is the kind of aggressive cobalt blue, millennial pink, or viral sage green that signals a specific moment in time. The & Other Stories approach ages beautifully precisely because it doesn’t chase trends.

Texture and Material: The Tactile Intelligence of Unisex Decoration

If color is the first thing you notice in a room, texture is the thing that keeps you interested. It’s also the quality most responsible for whether a space feels genuinely welcoming or merely visually composed.

The & Other Stories home aesthetic is deeply invested in texture, and specifically in the contrast between textures that gives a room its complexity. Consider the pairing of matte and glossy surfaces: an unglazed ceramic bowl beside a sleek glass candleholder. Or rough linen against polished wood. Or raw cotton beside smooth leather.

Natural materials are non-negotiable in this world. The brand gravitates toward:

Ceramic in all its variations — from the rough-hewn and hand-formed to the precisely thrown and glazed. Ceramic objects carry both weight and intimacy. A small ceramic tray on a nightstand changes the quality of the entire surface.

Linen in its most honest form — slightly rumpled, slightly textured, never over-ironed. Linen is one of the great unifiers in interior decoration. It’s been used in domestic settings for millennia across almost every culture, and it carries that accumulated human meaning without any of the gendered associations that can make other textiles feel limiting.

Wood, particularly in tones that lean toward the lighter end of the spectrum — pale oak, ash, birch — or in darker varieties with a weathered quality that speaks of time and use.

Stone and stone-adjacent materials: marble in its most understated applications, concrete, rattan and cane, which have had a remarkable renaissance in recent years and bring a kind of warm geometry to a space.

Metal used sparingly and thoughtfully — brass that has been allowed to develop a patina, black iron, burnished gold that reads more like amber than jewelry. The key is that metal should feel earned in a space, not applied.

The intelligence in combining these materials lies in restraint. You don’t need all of them in every room. Two or three in dialogue with each other is almost always more interesting than an attempt at comprehensive layering.

Objects, Collectibles, and the Art of the Curated Shelf

Perhaps more than any other aspect of decoration, the styling of surfaces — shelves, mantels, windowsills, bedside tables — reveals the most about a home’s personality. This is where & Other Stories’ influence is most directly felt, and where the principles of unisex decoration are most practically applied.

The brand’s home offering includes an array of small objects: sculptural candles, abstract ceramic figures, glass objects with an almost geological quality, textile items small enough to sit beside a stack of books. What makes these objects work together is that they share a sensibility without sharing a style. They feel like they were found rather than purchased as a set.

When styling a shelf or any flat surface in the unisex aesthetic, a few principles apply consistently.

Vary the scale dramatically. A tall narrow vase beside a low wide bowl beside a small round object creates a skyline effect that is visually satisfying without feeling arranged. The difference in height is what generates the interest.

Group in odd numbers. This is an old interior design rule, but it holds because it works. Three objects feel like a conversation. Four objects feel like a committee. Two objects feel like they’re waiting for someone.

Allow for negative space. The empty areas around your objects are as important as the objects themselves. Resist the urge to fill every inch of surface. The breathing room is what gives each object its dignity.

Mix the personal with the aesthetic. A shelf that contains only beautiful purchased objects feels like a display. A shelf that also includes a worn paperback, a stone you picked up on a beach, and a small photograph printed without a frame feels like a life. That combination of the decorative and the autobiographical is essential to the & Other Stories sensibility.

Don’t be afraid of the imperfect. A chipped bowl, a candle that has burned unevenly, a vase with a slight lean — these small imperfections are what distinguish a genuinely inhabited space from a showroom.

Lighting: The Element That Changes Everything

Any interior designer will tell you that lighting is not an afterthought — it’s the medium through which everything else in a room is experienced. The & Other Stories approach to lighting in domestic spaces reflects the same values as the rest of the aesthetic: warmth, naturalism, and a preference for softness over drama.

Ambient lighting in this world tends toward the warm end of the spectrum. Bulbs with a color temperature around 2700K produce the kind of golden, late-afternoon light that makes any space feel welcoming. Cooler, bluer light — however efficient — tends to work against the earthy, organic quality that defines this palette.

Candlelight is treated not as a special-occasion addition but as a daily ritual. This is deeply Scandinavian in its origins — the long, dark winters of northern Europe created a culture that understands deeply the psychological importance of flame. A cluster of candles on a dining table, a single taper in a ceramic holder on a windowsill, a wide pillar candle on a coffee table — these small light sources create pockets of intimacy that electric light, however carefully chosen, cannot replicate.

Floor lamps and table lamps matter far more in this aesthetic than overhead lighting. A room lit primarily from eye level or below has a completely different quality than one lit from above — it feels more horizontal, more human-scaled, more welcoming.

The Role of Plants and Natural Elements

Living things change everything. The presence of plants in a space introduces a quality that no object, however beautiful, can replicate: the sense of something ongoing, something with its own requirements and timeline.

The unisex approach to plants in decoration avoids both the maximalist jungle look (which, however beautiful, can feel gendered toward a certain domestic femininity) and the single-specimen-in-a-white-pot minimalism that can feel sterile. Instead, it favors a considered grouping of plants at varying heights, in pots and vessels that have their own aesthetic life — a terracotta pot, a woven basket, a ceramic planter with a rough glaze.

Beyond living plants, natural elements play a significant role in this aesthetic: a branch of eucalyptus dried and placed in a tall vase, a bowl of smooth stones, pinecones in a wide ceramic bowl during autumn and winter, dried grasses in natural tones. These elements bring the outside in without requiring the maintenance of living plants, and they reinforce the connection to the natural world that runs through the entire aesthetic.

Making It Your Own: The Personal Layer

Everything described above constitutes a language. But a language only becomes meaningful when you use it to say something specific — when you introduce the elements that are genuinely, irreducibly yours.

The & Other Stories philosophy has always been that personal style is not discovered by finding the right brand or the right trend, but by accumulating a vocabulary of things that resonate with who you actually are. In decoration, that means identifying the objects, images, colors, and textures that genuinely move you — not because they’re fashionable, not because they signal anything to visitors, but because they make you feel more like yourself when you’re surrounded by them.

A unisex space, at its best, is not a neutral space. It’s a space that belongs to specific people — it just doesn’t exclude anyone by virtue of how it’s been put together. The books on your shelves, the artwork on your walls, the objects you’ve brought back from travels, the things that were made by people you love — these are the elements that transform a beautiful space into a home.

Bringing It All Together

The & Other Stories approach to unisex decoration is ultimately a philosophy about respect — respect for materials, for craft, for the people who inhabit a space, and for the idea that beauty is not the property of any particular gender, class, or cultural identity. It’s a sophisticated, inclusive, and genuinely livable way to think about how we surround ourselves with objects and color and light.

The practical translation of that philosophy involves a consistent palette of warm neutrals punctuated by organic earth tones, an investment in natural materials and their honest imperfections, a curatorial approach to objects that favors the collected over the decorated, a commitment to warm and considered lighting, and above all a willingness to let the personal layer speak alongside the aesthetic one.

Whether you’re starting from scratch in a new apartment, refreshing a single room, or simply looking to bring more of this quality into spaces you already love, these principles offer a genuinely useful framework. Not rules to follow rigidly, but a way of asking better questions — about what you actually want a space to feel like, who it’s for, and what it says when you’re not in it.

Because the most well-decorated spaces always feel like they have something to say. And the best ones say it to everyone.