& Other Stories Unisex Decoration: How the Brand Is Redefining Shared Spaces and Gender-Neutral Living

There is something quietly radical happening in the world of home decoration, and it has less to do with minimalism versus maximalism or Scandinavian cool versus Mediterranean warmth than it does with a fundamental rethinking of who a space is designed for. & Other Stories, the Stockholm-born fashion and lifestyle brand that launched under the H&M Group umbrella in 2013, has been part of this shift in a way that feels organic rather than trend-chasing. Its approach to decoration — candles, glassware, ceramics, fragrance accessories, and small objects for the home — carries the same ethos as its clothing: thoughtfully designed, aesthetically coherent, and stubbornly resistant to the idea that any single product is meant for one type of person.

This post explores what & Other Stories unisex decoration actually means in practice, why it resonates with a growing audience, and how you can use the brand’s pieces to create a living space that feels personal, layered, and genuinely free of outdated aesthetic rules.

What Does “Unisex” Really Mean in Home Decoration?

The word unisex has a long history in fashion, but its application to homeware is newer and, in some ways, more interesting. When we talk about a unisex garment, we generally mean something cut to fit a range of bodies without signaling one gender over another. With home decoration, the conversation becomes less about fit and more about cultural codes — the colors, materials, scents, and forms that have historically been marketed as belonging to one sphere or another.

For decades, interior design and home retail leaned heavily on a gendered divide. Soft pinks, floral motifs, delicate glassware, and light floral fragrances were presented as inherently feminine choices. Dark woods, leather, angular lines, and smoky or woody scents were coded as masculine. These associations were never universal — they varied by culture, era, and class — but they were persistent enough to shape how products were developed, marketed, and displayed in stores.

The shift toward unisex decoration is, at its core, a rejection of those inherited codes. It does not mean erasing personality or producing objects so bland they offend no one. It means designing things whose appeal is genuinely rooted in quality, form, and sensory experience rather than in a demographic assumption.

& Other Stories has positioned itself naturally in this territory. The brand’s design ateliers in Stockholm, Paris, and Los Angeles have always drawn on a mix of references — art, architecture, craft, subculture — that are not easily mapped onto a single lifestyle archetype. That intellectual promiscuity, combined with a commitment to real materials and considered aesthetics, is exactly what makes its home pieces land as unisex without the label needing to be stamped on anything.

The & Other Stories Aesthetic: A Closer Look

Before diving into how to style these pieces, it helps to understand what gives & Other Stories decoration its distinctive character. Several qualities run consistently through the brand’s home and lifestyle offerings.

The first is a commitment to materiality. Whether a piece is a ceramic candle vessel, a glass carafe, or a simple soap dish, the material is chosen for how it actually looks and feels rather than for cost efficiency alone. Stoneware has a weight and tactility to it. Glass has clarity and slight imperfection. Metal hardware has a density that cheap substitutes never quite replicate. These sensory qualities are universally appreciated — they do not belong to a gendered aesthetic vocabulary.

The second consistent quality is restraint. & Other Stories pieces are rarely loud. They tend toward quieter palettes: muted terracottas, off-whites, warm grays, deep navies, sage greens. The forms are often simple and architectural, drawing on modernist design traditions that prioritize proportion and function. This restraint is part of what makes the pieces easy to live with over time and easy to mix with objects from other sources.

The third is a relationship with fragrance. A significant part of what & Other Stories does in the home space involves scent — candles, room sprays, and the accessories that hold or diffuse them. The brand’s fragrance palette skews toward complex, ungendered compositions: woods balanced with aquatics, florals grounded by resins, citrus heads laid over earthy bases. These are not the saccharine sweet candles of a certain kind of retail environment, nor are they aggressively smoky or leathery in a way that signals masculinity. They sit in a more interesting middle ground.

The fourth quality is a willingness to play with cultural references without being slavishly on-trend. A piece might reference 1970s Scandinavian craft in its form while using a color that feels current. Another might borrow from Japanese ceramics or Moroccan glassblowing traditions without tipping into pastiche. This cultural fluency is part of what gives the brand’s decoration a sense of depth.

Building a Unisex Space with & Other Stories Pieces

Now to the practical question: how do you actually use & Other Stories home and decoration pieces to build a living environment that feels genuinely shared, genuinely personal, and genuinely good?

The answer starts with thinking about the space itself — not as a backdrop for products, but as a sensory environment with its own logic. A room has a light quality, a sound quality, a smell, a texture underfoot, a visual rhythm created by the objects on its surfaces. Unisex decoration is not about removing all distinguishing characteristics from this environment. It is about ensuring that no single characteristic shouts loudly enough to define the whole room by conventional gender codes.

Start with scent, because scent is perhaps the most powerful and least noticed design element in any home. If you choose a & Other Stories candle with a fragrance that sits in the green-woody-aquatic family — something that evokes cut grass, rain on stone, or cedar bark — you have already set a tone that resists easy categorization. Light it in the evening when the room is in use and you will find that it creates a mood rather than a message. That distinction matters.

Pair that candle with its vessel as a design object in its own right. & Other Stories candle vessels have often been designed to be retained after the wax is gone — repurposed as vases, small planters, pencil holders, or simply as objects to be enjoyed for their form. A matte stoneware cylinder in a dusty olive or warm stone color asks nothing of the viewer in terms of gender. It simply sits well on a shelf or side table, doing its quiet work.

From there, build outward. The brand’s glass pieces — tumblers, decanters, small decorative vessels — work particularly well in unisex spaces because glass is a neutral material in a way that patterned textiles or highly stylized ceramics sometimes are not. A short, wide tumbler with a slight amber tint reads as functional and beautiful simultaneously. It belongs in a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedside table, or a living room bookshelf with equal naturalness.

Ceramics are another strong entry point. & Other Stories has produced small ceramic dishes, bowls, and vessels in forms that feel rooted in a long tradition of functional craft — the kind of pieces that belong in a home because they have always belonged in homes, not because they are fashionable. These are the objects that hold rings by the sink, display a stem or two from the garden, collect loose change, or simply sit empty and still and contribute to the visual texture of a surface.

How to Layer & Other Stories Decoration with Other Pieces

One of the practical pleasures of building with & Other Stories home pieces is that they layer well. Because the brand’s aesthetic vocabulary is restrained and grounded in real materials, its pieces coexist comfortably with objects from very different sources — a handmade pot from a craft market, an inherited piece of silverware, a book whose spine color happens to match the room’s tone, a piece of driftwood picked up on a beach.

This is the hallmark of genuinely good design: it does not demand that everything around it submit to its logic. It simply joins in.

To layer effectively, think in terms of material conversation. If you have a matte stoneware piece from & Other Stories, place it near something that has a contrasting texture — a smooth river stone, a piece of polished wood, a glossy glazed ceramic from another source. The contrast is what gives a surface visual interest without noise. Similarly, if you have placed a piece of & Other Stories glassware on a shelf, the items around it should offer something different in weight and opacity — something opaque, something with grain or texture — to provide visual relief.

Color, in a unisex space, works best when it is treated as a series of tones rather than a scheme with a hero color. & Other Stories pieces tend to anchor well in the warm neutral zone — ochers, bone whites, taupes, soft terracottas — but they also work beautifully as the neutral backbone of a more chromatic arrangement. A single vivid piece — a bright glazed vase, a book with an intense cover, a small print — reads with far more presence when everything around it is calm and considered.

The Shared Bathroom as Unisex Decoration Territory

If there is one room in which the concept of unisex decoration has the most immediate practical relevance, it is the bathroom. Bathrooms have long been the room most aggressively segmented by gender in both product marketing and in the way households are actually organized. His and hers branding has been everywhere.

The bathroom is also, for many people, the room in which they most consciously engage with scent, texture, and the aesthetics of daily routine. It is where fragrance from a candle can be most concentrated and meaningful. It is where a ceramic dish earns its place by holding something essential.

& Other Stories soap dishes, small trays, and bathroom-appropriate vessels are particularly good unisex pieces because their design is founded on function. A small rectangular dish that holds a bar of soap or a ring does not declare anything about who uses it. It simply serves well and looks considered. A glass bottle repurposed as a bathroom vessel — holding cotton rounds, a stem of dried flowers, or a small brush — brings the same quiet materiality to a functional space.

The brand’s candles in the bathroom work differently than in a living room. In a smaller, more enclosed space, even a modestly sized candle fills the air quickly. Choose a fragrance from the cooler, greener, or more mineral end of the spectrum — something that evokes a spa, a forest, or a cool morning — and the bathroom becomes a space of genuine decompression rather than a functional necessity.

The Workspace and the Unisex Decoration Opportunity

With more people working from home than at any point in recent history, the home workspace has become its own interior design territory. And it is, by its nature, a space that tends to resist gendered aesthetics simply because productivity and focus are the organizing values rather than comfort or sociability.

& Other Stories pieces work remarkably well on a desk or in a home office. A small ceramic tray corrals daily essentials — a pen, a few coins, a USB drive — without adding visual clutter. A short glass vessel holds a stem of something living, connecting the space to the natural world without demanding attention. A candle on a desk, lit during deep work sessions, creates a small ritual that marks the beginning and end of focused time — a practice that belongs to no gender and every person who values their cognitive environment.

The key in a workspace is sparseness. Every object on a desk should justify its presence. When the objects that make the cut are chosen for genuine beauty and function — as & Other Stories home pieces generally are — the space feels intentional without feeling decorated in the performative sense.

Why Unisex Decoration Matters Beyond Aesthetics

It would be easy to treat this topic as purely a matter of style — a guide to buying nice things that look good in a shared apartment. But the broader significance of the shift toward unisex decoration is worth acknowledging, because it connects to something real about how people are choosing to live.

The movement away from gendered spaces is, at a basic level, a movement toward authenticity. When a person is no longer choosing objects because they signal the correct gender identity but because they genuinely respond to them — to their form, their material, their smell, their relationship to light — the home becomes a more honest expression of who that person actually is. And when two people share a space, the absence of gendered coding makes it easier for both to feel that the space belongs to them equally.

This is not a radical political statement in most homes. It is simply a more honest and more functional way to think about how we surround ourselves with objects. & Other Stories, whether it set out to do this explicitly or not, has produced a body of home and decoration work that supports this kind of living. Its pieces do not make assumptions about the person who places them on a shelf or lights them on a table. They simply offer themselves as well-made, genuinely beautiful things.

That, in the end, is the most compelling argument for unisex decoration: it removes a layer of assumption between a person and the objects they live with, making more room for the only thing that actually matters, which is whether those objects bring something real to the texture of a life.

Final Thoughts: Starting Your & Other Stories Decoration Collection

If you are starting from scratch or looking to refresh a space with a unisex sensibility, the simplest approach is to begin with one piece that you respond to intuitively — a candle whose scent stops you in the aisle, a ceramic vessel whose proportions feel right, a glass piece that catches light in a way you find genuinely pleasing. Build from there rather than planning a complete scheme in advance.

The beauty of & Other Stories decoration, like the brand’s clothing, is that it rewards a slow, accretive approach. Individual pieces that arrive in a space over time, chosen because they resonate, produce a more honest and livable environment than a room assembled all at once to a predetermined aesthetic. Let the space grow. Let the objects accumulate their own small histories. And let go of the idea that any of them belong to a particular kind of person.

They belong to you. That is enough.