& Other Stories Unisex Decoration: How a Fashion Brand Quietly Became a Home Décor Obsession

There is something quietly radical about a fashion brand that refuses to stay in its lane. When & Other Stories first launched in 2013 as part of the H&M group, it positioned itself as a creative collective of design studios — a brand built on the idea that style is personal, layered, and never strictly defined by gender or category. What started as a conversation about clothing and beauty quickly evolved into something richer. Today, the brand’s foray into home decoration — and specifically its growing range of unisex, gender-neutral decorative objects — has earned it a devoted following among people who want their living spaces to feel as considered and intentional as their wardrobes.

This is not a story about a fashion brand slapping its logo onto a few candles and calling it a lifestyle play. It is a story about a genuine design sensibility that translates seamlessly from the body to the home, and about why gender-neutral décor is having a cultural moment that shows no signs of slowing down.

What Makes & Other Stories Different in the Home Décor Space

Walk into most home goods stores and you will find the same tired binary: a soft, pastel-heavy section clearly aimed at women, and a darker, more “industrial” corner presumably meant for men. The assumption embedded in these categories is that taste is gendered, that femininity means florals and masculinity means concrete, and that anyone who doesn’t fall neatly into one of these camps is simply out of luck.

& Other Stories built its entire identity in opposition to this kind of thinking. The brand has always drawn inspiration from its three design studios — based in Stockholm, Paris, and Los Angeles — and the creative output of those studios reflects a genuine plurality of influences. There is Scandinavian minimalism, French romanticism, California ease, and a consistent thread of curiosity that keeps the collections from ever feeling too safe or predictable.

When these sensibilities are applied to decorative objects, the results are striking. & Other Stories home pieces tend to share a few defining characteristics. They favor materials with natural texture — stone, ceramic, unglazed clay, raw linen, hand-poured wax. They work with a palette that sits outside conventional gender coding, favoring warm terracottas alongside cool greys, deep inky blues alongside dusty pinks that feel more earthy than saccharine. And they lean into forms that are sculptural and quietly artful, objects that feel as though they belong in a gallery or a studio as much as they do in a bedroom or a living room.

The result is a collection that genuinely feels unisex — not in the bland, everything-goes-beige sense, but in the more interesting sense that nothing in the range is designed to signal a particular gendered identity. You can layer a beeswax candle with a ceramic ring dish, a graphic print, and a ribbed glass vase and the arrangement will feel cohesive without ever telegraphing that it was assembled by or for any particular kind of person.

The Rise of Gender-Neutral Home Décor

It would be easy to frame gender-neutral décor as a recent trend, something that arrived in lockstep with broader cultural conversations about gender identity and expression. But the truth is that the appetite for décor that refuses easy categorization has been building for much longer, quietly reshaping the interiors industry from the inside out.

For much of the twentieth century, domestic space was deeply gendered by design. The home was conceived as a feminine domain, and the objects within it — the soft furnishings, the decorative accessories, the carefully curated surfaces — were marketed almost exclusively to women. Men’s relationship to domestic space was rendered largely invisible, or confined to a single room: the study, the workshop, the garage.

This started to shift meaningfully in the early 2000s, driven by a combination of changing household structures, the rise of design culture more broadly, and a growing consumer awareness that the aesthetics of domesticity could be reimagined. Suddenly, men were reading design magazines without irony. Couples were decorating together as genuine partners rather than following a script where one person deferred to the other. Single-person households — a rapidly growing demographic — were approaching home styling on their own terms, without a gendered template to follow.

The pandemic accelerated all of this dramatically. With people spending more time at home than at any point in recent memory, investment in domestic space surged. And because that investment was made by an extraordinarily diverse range of people all grappling with the same enforced domesticity, the décor that emerged from that period was correspondingly diverse. People wanted objects that felt authentic to their actual personalities, not objects that fulfilled a gender expectation. The market responded.

& Other Stories has been well positioned to meet this moment. Its crossover between fashion and home means that its customer base already thinks about aesthetics in a personal, non-prescriptive way. Fashion customers who shop & Other Stories have long been accustomed to the brand’s suggestion that style is self-defined. Bringing that sensibility into the home feels like a natural extension rather than a category leap.

Key Pieces and How to Style Them

One of the pleasures of shopping & Other Stories for home decoration is that the pieces tend to work in combination — with each other and with items from completely different sources. The brand has a strong point of view without being totalizing, which means its pieces integrate into existing spaces without demanding that you start from scratch.

Candles and Scent Objects

& Other Stories has developed a particularly strong reputation for its candle range. These are not novelty candles or heavily branded scent experiences. They tend toward clean, unusual fragrance profiles — smoke and amber, fig and cedar, marine notes that read as coastal without being clichéd — and they are housed in vessels that are genuinely beautiful on their own terms. Many are made in sturdy ceramic or glass that can be repurposed once the wax is spent, which is the kind of considered design detail that resonates with a customer who thinks about what objects they bring into their home.

For styling purposes, these candles work beautifully on a coffee table grouped in odd numbers, on a bathroom shelf alongside other ceramic pieces, or on a mantelpiece where their sculptural quality can anchor a larger arrangement. Because the vessels tend toward neutral tones with interesting surface textures, they read well in both minimal and more layered interiors.

Ceramic and Stone Decorative Objects

This is perhaps where & Other Stories’ design sensibility shines most clearly in the home category. The brand has produced a rotating selection of ceramic objects — small dishes, sculptural vessels, abstract figurines — that draw on an art school aesthetic without feeling precious or unapproachable. These are objects designed to be touched and used, not locked behind glass.

Stone pieces — small trays cut from marble or travertine, bookends in onyx or granite — carry the same quality. They feel grounded and permanent in a way that plastic or mass-produced resin never could, and their natural variation means that no two pieces are quite identical.

In a shared or unisex space, these objects do something important: they anchor the room without asserting a particular personality. A travertine tray on a bedside table works as a jewellery catch-all for anyone, regardless of what that jewellery looks like. A ceramic vessel on a desk becomes a pen holder, a small planter, or simply a beautiful thing to rest your eyes on during a long afternoon of work.

Textiles

& Other Stories has extended into soft home goods with the same considered approach. Linen cushion covers, cotton throws, and fabric napkins appear in the home range with a frequency that suggests the brand takes its textile credentials seriously. The prints tend to be abstract or geometric rather than figurative, which keeps them feeling gender-agnostic. The colorways sit in that careful middle ground the brand does well — not beige for the sake of it, but natural, nuanced, and versatile.

A linen cushion in a faded olive or a dusty terracotta introduces color to a neutral sofa without competing with other decorative elements. A textured throw in an off-white or oatmeal tone reads as luxurious without being fussy, and it works in a bedroom, on a reading chair, or draped over a sofa with equal ease.

Wall Art and Prints

The brand’s collaborations with artists and photographers mean that its print and poster offerings are consistently more interesting than the mass-market alternatives. These are not generic botanicals or motivational typography. They tend toward abstraction, graphic composition, or photography with a strong visual point of view, and they are priced at a level that makes building a small collection genuinely accessible.

For anyone decorating a space to be shared — whether a bedroom, a study, or a common living area — art is often the most contentious decorative decision. & Other Stories’ prints sidestep this problem neatly. Because they tend toward the abstract, they are less likely to be legible as belonging to one person’s taste rather than another’s. A large-format photographic print of a rocky coastal landscape or an abstract painting in muted terracotta and black is simply beautiful, and beauty crosses most stylistic and personal divides.

Decorating a Shared Space with & Other Stories

Perhaps the most practical question for many people shopping this brand is: how do I actually use these pieces in a space that two people share? This is a genuinely common challenge. Living with another person — a partner, a flatmate, a family member — means negotiating aesthetic preferences, and those negotiations can become strained when the options available seem designed to please only one kind of person.

The gift of genuinely unisex décor is that it provides a neutral foundation without requiring that the space become impersonal. You can build a shared bedroom around & Other Stories’ palette of natural materials and earthy neutrals and then layer in more personal, individual touches — a piece of artwork with personal significance here, a plant that one person tends to there — without the overall effect becoming incoherent.

A practical approach is to identify two or three objects that both people are drawn to and let those anchor the space. In the & Other Stories range, this might be a statement ceramic vase, a particular scented candle whose fragrance both people love, and a textile in a color that works in the existing room. Build outward from those three points of agreement and the space will feel genuinely shared rather than compromised.

It is also worth noting that & Other Stories’ range is not static. The brand releases new pieces with the rhythms of its fashion collections — seasonal drops, limited collaborations, ongoing additions to the core range. This means that returning to the brand over time keeps the home feeling current without requiring wholesale reinvention. Add a new cushion in this season’s considered colorway. Replace a spent candle with a new vessel. The home evolves the same way a wardrobe does: incrementally, personally, in conversation with your changing tastes.

Sustainability and Conscious Shopping

Any honest conversation about & Other Stories home décor has to engage with the question of sustainability. The brand exists within the H&M group, which has faced significant and legitimate criticism over the years for its environmental practices. That context does not disappear simply because the product in question is a beautiful ceramic dish rather than a fast-fashion top.

What can be said is that & Other Stories’ home range tends toward quality over quantity, and that objects made from natural materials with genuine craft credentials sit more comfortably with a considered, sustainable approach to consumption than their mass-market equivalents. A well-made ceramic piece that you keep for years, that you repair if it chips and continue to love, is a different proposition from a disposable accent piece bought for a single season and discarded.

The most sustainable approach is always to buy less and buy better. By that standard, & Other Stories’ home pieces — priced at a premium relative to fast-fashion home ranges but accessible relative to high-end design brands — represent a reasonable middle ground. They are objects worth caring about, and objects worth caring for.

Why This Matters Beyond Aesthetics

There is a deeper argument lurking beneath the surface of all this talk about ceramics and textiles and scented candles. The spaces we inhabit shape how we feel about ourselves. The objects we choose to live with are not neutral; they carry assumptions about who we are and who we are expected to be. When those assumptions are gendered in reductive and limiting ways, the home becomes a site of quiet constraint rather than genuine comfort.

Gender-neutral décor, done well, is not about erasing personality from a space. It is about refusing the premise that personality is determined by gender. It is about creating environments that reflect the actual complexity of the people who live in them — people who are interested in beauty regardless of what form it takes, who want their homes to feel considered and alive and honest.

& Other Stories has been doing this work in fashion for over a decade, and the extension into home decoration feels less like a commercial strategy and more like a logical completion of the brand’s original vision. The studio, the atelier, the personal space — these have always been part of what the brand is gesturing toward. Now it is offering you the objects to populate them.

Whether you are furnishing a first apartment, refreshing a long-established home, or looking for a gift that will sit beautifully on a shelf without making assumptions about its recipient, & Other Stories’ approach to decoration offers something genuinely valuable: beautiful things that belong to no one in particular, and therefore can belong completely to you.