& Other Stories Unisex Home Accessories: Where Personal Style Meets Thoughtful Living

There’s a particular kind of pleasure in walking into a space and feeling like it truly belongs to you. Not because you followed a trend board or replicated a showroom setup, but because every object in the room reflects something genuine about who you are. That’s the promise quietly embedded in the & Other Stories approach to home accessories — a philosophy that treats the objects around you not as background noise, but as extensions of character.

& Other Stories, the Stockholm-founded fashion brand known for its ateliers in Paris, Stockholm, and Los Angeles, has spent years perfecting the art of considered design. What began as a ready-to-wear label quickly expanded into beauty, then accessories, then — in a natural evolution that made complete sense — homeware. And crucially, the homeware line doesn’t subscribe to the gender-coded language that has long divided domestic spaces into “his” and “hers.” Instead, it speaks to anyone who appreciates objects with a strong point of view.

This is what makes the & Other Stories unisex home accessory range so compelling to a growing audience of design-conscious shoppers. In a market oversaturated with pastel-heavy bedroom collections aimed at women and dark leather everything positioned toward men, here is a brand that simply refuses to play that game.

The Philosophy Behind the Design

Before diving into specific pieces, it helps to understand what the brand actually means when it brings its sensibility to the home. & Other Stories has always described itself as offering women “a wide range of shoes, bags, accessories, jewelry, beauty and ready-to-wear collections,” but its home and lifestyle additions function in exactly the same spirit: they are made for people, full stop.

The aesthetic leans into tactile quality, restrained color palettes, and shapes that feel at once timeless and very contemporary. You’ll find a lot of matte ceramic, unfinished-looking linen, burnished metals, and glass that catches light without screaming for attention. The result is a collection of objects that read as quietly confident — they don’t need to announce themselves, and that’s precisely why they work in almost any living environment.

This gender-neutral quality isn’t a marketing decision layered on top of the products. It’s embedded in the design language itself. A candle holder made from recycled glass doesn’t belong to a man or a woman’s home. A textured ceramic vase doesn’t declare a gender. A woven cotton throw draped over a reading chair asks nothing of the person sitting beneath it except that they enjoy comfort and beauty. This might sound obvious, but in the broader home goods market, it remains quietly revolutionary.

Candles and Scent: The First Layer of Any Space

One of the most popular categories within the & Other Stories home offering is fragrance for the home — candles, room sprays, and incense accessories that transform the invisible atmosphere of a space. Scent is deeply personal, and the brand approaches it the way a perfumer might: with seriousness, restraint, and an understanding that a fragrance should tell a story without overwhelming the room.

The candle holders themselves are worth discussing separately from what’s inside them. Many of the brand’s designs use recycled or hand-blown glass in shapes that are sculptural enough to display on their own long after the wax has burned down. A tapered, amber-tinted glass holder sitting on a shelf catches afternoon light differently than it does at night with a flame inside — and the brand seems to design with both moments in mind.

For anyone building a home fragrance ritual that feels personal rather than prescribed, this is an ideal starting point. Neither masculine nor feminine in their scent profiles — which tend toward woody resins, green botanicals, and mineral coolness rather than heavy florals or synthetic musk extremes — these candles work in any room inhabited by any person who simply likes a space to smell considered.

Ceramics and Objects: The Art of Choosing Carefully

The ceramic pieces in the & Other Stories home range occupy a fascinating middle ground between art object and functional item. A small ceramic bowl can hold rings at a bedside table or act as a catch-all near a front door. A stoneware cup works for coffee or pencils with equal grace. This flexibility is intentional, and it speaks directly to the unisex sensibility: the object doesn’t dictate how you use it or who you are.

What characterizes these pieces is an appreciation for the handmade aesthetic without tipping into artisanal cliché. The glaze finishes are often matte or semi-matte in shades of dusty terracotta, warm cream, deep charcoal, or muted sage — colors that function as neutrals in almost any interior palette while still having genuine personality. Nothing in this collection feels like it was designed by committee or focus-grouped into blandness.

There is also a thoughtful scale to these objects. Many brands that enter the homeware space produce pieces that are slightly too large or too imposing, making a room feel like a showroom rather than a home. & Other Stories tends to favor objects that feel right in a hand, that sit at a human scale, that don’t demand to be the center of attention but become quietly indispensable once they’re part of your daily rhythm.

Textiles: Where Comfort and Aesthetic Intersect

Throw blankets, cushion covers, and textile accessories represent another major dimension of what makes this home range interesting. Fabric is perhaps the most inherently unisex category in home design — a soft blanket is a soft blanket — but the choices made in texture, weight, and color still communicate an enormous amount about a brand’s worldview.

& Other Stories tends to work with natural fibers: organic cotton, linen, wool blends, and occasionally recycled materials that reflect the brand’s growing commitment to sustainability. The textures favor substance over decorative effect — a waffle-weave cotton throw feels substantial in the hand, and a linen cushion cover has a slight roughness that ages beautifully rather than pilling or fading into something forgettable.

The color language in the textile range mirrors the ceramics: you’ll find terracotta, warm ecru, deep navy, dusty rose that reads almost as a neutral, and occasional accents in unexpected mustard or forest green. These aren’t bold statement colors, but they’re not safe beiges either. They’re the kinds of colors that photographers use as backgrounds because they make everything near them look better — which is exactly what you want from a textile you’re going to live with for years.

For couples or housemates with different aesthetic sensibilities, this matters enormously. A throw blanket in deep olive green or warm sand doesn’t belong to anyone’s gender — it belongs to the room, and to whoever finds it comfortable.

Glassware and Barware: The Daily Ritual Made Beautiful

There’s a quiet revolution happening in the way people think about everyday glassware and barware, and & Other Stories sits squarely within it. The idea is simple: the glass you drink your morning water from, the tumbler you use at the end of a long day, the small carafe you keep on your desk — these objects matter. They’re part of how you experience your own home on the most mundane level, and they deserve to be beautiful.

The glassware in the & Other Stories range tends toward organic forms — slightly irregular, hand-finished in appearance, with a weight that feels satisfying rather than delicate. Rippled glass tumblers, smoke-tinted carafes, textured wine glasses that catch the light at different angles: these are objects that feel like they belong to a person who cares about things without being precious about them.

Again, the unisex quality here is worth noting. The conventional home goods market has long positioned certain types of glassware — crystal, formal, ornate — as feminine or as traditionally feminine domestic territory. Other pieces — heavy whisky tumblers, industrial-looking barware — get coded as masculine. The & Other Stories approach sidesteps this entirely by focusing on quality, beauty, and usability as the only relevant criteria. A beautiful glass is a beautiful glass.

Storage and Organization: Function as Aesthetic

Several pieces in the broader accessory range address the practical needs of organization while maintaining the brand’s aesthetic integrity. Small boxes in lacquered or natural materials, trays in matte metal or ceramic, woven baskets and fabric storage solutions — these are the bones of a tidy, livable space.

What distinguishes the & Other Stories approach here is the refusal to treat storage as purely functional. A matte black tray on a desk or dresser isn’t just somewhere to put things — it’s a framing device that makes whatever sits inside it look intentional. A small lidded box in glazed ceramic is an object in its own right before it ever holds anything. This is the underlying philosophy of the whole range: that useful objects can also be beautiful, and that beautiful objects should also be useful.

For the increasingly common one-bedroom apartment dweller, the remote worker who spends long hours at a home desk, or anyone who wants their living environment to feel curated rather than merely cluttered, these pieces provide a quietly powerful toolkit.

Sustainability: A Value Woven Into the Product

Any contemporary discussion of a brand’s homeware range would be incomplete without addressing sustainability, and here & Other Stories has been making increasingly visible efforts. The brand’s broader commitment to conscious design — recycled materials, reduced packaging, longer-lasting products designed to be kept rather than discarded — extends into the home accessories range.

The logic behind buying fewer, better objects is deeply aligned with the unisex aesthetic philosophy. When you’re not buying into a gendered trend cycle — when you’re not purchasing seasonal collections themed around some cultural moment — you naturally end up buying things that last. A good ceramic bowl doesn’t have a season. A well-made glass doesn’t go out of style. This is perhaps the most environmentally sound argument for the timeless, gender-neutral aesthetic that & Other Stories has built.

Shoppers who want their home to reflect their values as well as their taste will find the brand’s positioning coherent: beautiful things, made thoughtfully, designed to remain relevant and useful for years.

How to Style & Other Stories Home Accessories in Any Space

One of the most common anxieties around buying “design-forward” homeware is the fear of getting it wrong — of buying a piece that doesn’t fit, or creating a space that feels like a mood board rather than a home. The & Other Stories range is particularly forgiving on this front, largely because of its restrained palette and the inherent versatility of its aesthetic.

A few principles help unlock the range’s potential. First, don’t be afraid of mixing textures — a smooth ceramic vase next to a roughly woven textile creates the kind of visual tension that makes a space feel curated rather than matched. Second, treat negative space as part of the design: a single well-chosen object on a shelf is more powerful than five things crowded together. Third, let function guide your choices first. If you need a vessel to hold pens on your desk, start there, and then find the most beautiful version of that thing.

The unisex sensibility also means that these pieces work exceptionally well in shared spaces. A partner who might resist overtly styled or gendered home décor will find little to object to in an organic glass carafe or a matte ceramic tray. These are objects that belong to the space, not to a persona, and that quality makes them genuinely easy to live with.

The Bigger Picture: Why Unisex Home Accessories Matter Now

The rise of interest in unisex or gender-neutral home design reflects something real happening in how people relate to their living spaces. More people are living alone for longer, and home design for solo dwellers rarely fits neatly into gendered categories. Couples with different aesthetic backgrounds are navigating shared spaces and looking for common aesthetic ground. Younger shoppers, in particular, have grown up questioning the gendered coding of consumer goods across every category, and home accessories are no exception.

& Other Stories didn’t set out to make a political statement with its home range. It set out to make beautiful objects for people who care about beauty. But in doing so with such consistent commitment to an aesthetic that doesn’t speak to gender, the brand has quietly positioned itself at the center of a broader cultural shift.

The result is a home accessories range that genuinely works for more people than almost anything else in its market segment. Not because it tries to be everything to everyone — it’s distinctly not that — but because it has a strong point of view that happens not to exclude based on something as arbitrary as gender.

Where to Start

If you’re approaching the & Other Stories home range for the first time, the best entry point is almost always scent. A candle in a beautiful holder is a low-commitment, high-impact addition to any space, and it immediately communicates what the brand is about in the most sensory way possible. From there, a piece of glassware, then perhaps a small ceramic object for a desk or shelf, then eventually a textile — each piece building a language that is entirely your own but speaks in the brand’s quietly confident vocabulary.

There are no rules about which pieces go together, no gendered styling guides to follow, no trend cycle demanding you update your choices each season. There’s just a collection of well-made objects, a consistent aesthetic philosophy, and the pleasure of surrounding yourself with things that reflect not a demographic category, but a set of values: care, quality, beauty, and the conviction that where you live matters.

That, ultimately, is what makes the & Other Stories unisex home accessory range worth your attention — and worth the space it will occupy in your life.