& Other Stories Unisex Home Accessories: Elevating Everyday Living with Effortless Style

There is something quietly revolutionary happening in interior design, and it has very little to do with grand architectural gestures or expensive renovations. It is happening in the details — in the carefully chosen candle on a windowsill, the textured linen throw draped over a reading chair, the ceramic mug that feels exactly right in your hands on a slow Sunday morning. & Other Stories, the beloved Swedish fashion and lifestyle brand, has long understood that the way we dress and the way we live are not separate conversations. They are part of the same ongoing story about who we are and how we want to inhabit the world. Their unisex home accessories collection is perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy yet.

If you have spent any time in an & Other Stories store or browsing their beautifully curated website, you already know that the brand occupies a particular sweet spot in the market — thoughtful enough to feel considered, accessible enough to feel within reach, and distinctive enough to make you feel like you have discovered something rather than simply purchased it. The home accessories line carries all of those qualities into your living space, and the unisex approach gives it a versatility that is genuinely rare in the lifestyle category.

What Does Unisex Actually Mean in Home Design?

The term “unisex” has a long and occasionally contested history in fashion, but in the context of home accessories it carries a refreshingly straightforward meaning. & Other Stories’ unisex home pieces are designed without the assumption that any particular person lives in the space. There are no florals coded as feminine, no brutalist minimalism coded as masculine. Instead, the collection leans into textures, neutral palettes, natural materials, and shapes that feel universally appealing precisely because they are grounded in function and craftsmanship rather than in gendered aesthetic assumptions.

This matters more than it might initially seem. When you are decorating a shared home — whether with a romantic partner, a flatmate, a family member, or simply when you want a space that welcomes everyone equally — objects that carry strong gender associations can quietly create friction. The & Other Stories approach sidesteps this entirely. Their candles smell like forests and sea air and warm amber, not like “his” or “her” fragrances. Their storage objects are elegant without being precious. Their textiles have a tactile quality that invites you to touch them regardless of who you are.

The result is a collection that genuinely works for anyone and any space, from a studio apartment in a city to a weekend house in the countryside.

The Art of the Everyday Object

One of the things that distinguishes & Other Stories’ home accessories from the vast middle ground of lifestyle retail is the brand’s consistent insistence that everyday objects deserve serious attention. A soap dispenser is not just a soap dispenser. A diffuser is not just a functional air freshener. A tray on a bathroom shelf is not just a place to put things. Each of these objects, thoughtfully chosen, becomes part of the visual language of a home — a small but real expression of taste, care, and identity.

The brand applies the same editorial eye to home accessories that they bring to their clothing collections. Items are grouped into loose aesthetic families that feel coherent without being matchy. You might find a heavy ceramic pot in a muted sage green sitting alongside a glass bud vase with clean, unadorned lines, and a cotton storage basket woven in a natural undyed fiber. None of these things are identical, but they share a sensibility — a preference for materials that age well, for forms that do not shout, for a kind of restrained beauty that reveals itself slowly.

This is the opposite of the maximalist, trend-chasing approach that floods so many lifestyle spaces. & Other Stories’ home accessories are designed to be purchased once and kept for a long time, which is both an environmental statement and an aesthetic one.

Fragrance as a Cornerstone of the Home Collection

If there is one category in the & Other Stories home accessories range that has earned the most devoted following, it is fragrance. Their candles and room scents have become something of a cult object among people who care deeply about the olfactory atmosphere of their homes but have grown weary of the usual dominant players in the luxury candle market.

What makes the & Other Stories approach to home fragrance distinctive is the same thing that makes their personal fragrance line notable: a willingness to work with complex, unexpected scent profiles that do not conform to easy categorization. Their home candles tend to avoid the safe, broadly appealing notes that dominate the mass market — no simple vanilla, no uncomplicated fresh linen — in favor of scents that feel more like small narratives. A candle might open with something green and slightly vegetal before settling into a warm, resinous base. A room spray might carry the faint mineral quality of cold stone alongside something subtly sweet.

These are, critically, scents that no one would describe as particularly masculine or particularly feminine. They are atmospheric. They change the feeling of a room rather than simply making it smell pleasant. And they are formulated to work in a range of environments — equally at home in a modernist open-plan apartment and in a more traditionally decorated bedroom.

The wax is typically poured into vessels that are worth keeping once the candle has burned down. Heavy glass jars, simple ceramic pots, matte-finish containers in colors that complement rather than clash with most interior palettes. This attention to the second life of an object is characteristic of the brand’s approach throughout the home range.

Textiles: Where Warmth Meets Restraint

Textiles are the element most responsible for the feeling of a home. Furniture gives a space its bones, paint gives it its skin, but it is the textiles — the throws, the cushions, the bath towels, the table linens — that determine whether a room feels cold or warm, formal or relaxed, alive or inert. & Other Stories understands this instinctively, and their textile offerings for the home reflect a genuinely thoughtful approach to material and weave.

Their throws tend to be made from natural fibers — wool, cotton, occasionally linen — in weights that feel substantial without being stifling. The color palette runs toward the muted and the earthy: oatmeal, charcoal, dusty rose (handled carefully, so it reads as sophisticated rather than girlish), deep forest green, terracotta in its more subdued registers. These are colors that work across seasons and do not clash with the other things a person might already own.

The weave structures are worth paying attention to. A chunky knit throw has an entirely different energy from a flat-woven cotton blanket, even if both are nominally “neutral” in color. & Other Stories tends to favor weaves that catch the light — that have a slight texture or variation that prevents them from looking flat and mass-produced. This gives the textiles a handmade quality even when they are not, strictly speaking, artisanal.

Cushions follow a similar logic: simple forms, quality materials, and a restraint around print and pattern that keeps them versatile. When prints do appear, they tend to be abstract or geometric rather than figurative, which again contributes to the unisex character of the collection.

Bath textiles — towels, bath mats, washcloths — are another strong category. There is a particular pleasure in the & Other Stories approach here: a recognition that the bathroom is as much a sanctuary as any other room in the house, and that the objects within it deserve the same considered attention. Their towels tend to be thick without being fluffy in that overly synthetic way, and they wash well — a genuinely underrated quality in a bath towel.

Ceramics and Tableware: Objects for Living

There is a long tradition in Scandinavian design of treating everyday functional objects as worthy of real aesthetic consideration, and the & Other Stories approach to ceramics and tableware sits squarely within that tradition. Their pieces tend to have a handcrafted quality — slight variations in glaze, forms that are not perfectly uniform — that marks them as distinct from the smooth, anonymous perfection of mass production.

Mugs, bowls, small plates, pitchers: these are objects that most of us use every single day, and the quality of our daily experience is quietly shaped by whether they are beautiful or merely functional. The & Other Stories ceramics lean toward the beautiful without sacrificing the functional. A mug feels good to hold. A bowl is the right depth and width for the way most people actually eat from a bowl. A small dish works equally well as a ring holder on a bedside table or as a vessel for olive oil on a dinner table.

The glaze colors tend toward the earthy and the organic — matte terracotta, grey-green celadon, off-white with slight warm undertones — which complement a wide range of interior styles. They look at home in a very contemporary kitchen and equally at home in a more traditional, aged-looking space. This adaptability is a significant part of their appeal.

Storage and Organization: Beauty in Utility

The intersection of beauty and utility is where & Other Stories perhaps makes its most quietly radical argument. Storage objects — baskets, boxes, trays, organizers — are often treated in retail as pure function, with aesthetics as an afterthought. The assumption is that if something is for storing things, it does not need to be beautiful because it will be tucked away.

& Other Stories rejects this assumption. Their storage pieces are designed to be left out, seen, used as part of the visual composition of a space. A woven basket on a shelf is not just a container — it is a texture, a color, a reference to natural materials and craft traditions. A lacquered tray on a bathroom counter is not just a practical surface — it is a small moment of order and elegance in what can easily become a cluttered space.

This approach to storage is genuinely useful in a practical sense, too. When your storage objects are beautiful, you are more motivated to maintain the organization that makes them functional. A gorgeous basket invites you to fold and stack things neatly rather than shove them in roughly. A well-designed tray encourages you to edit what sits on your surfaces rather than letting them accumulate clutter.

The material palette in the storage category tends to echo the rest of the collection: natural fibers, organic materials, muted colors, considered forms. There is nothing in these objects that would clash with other things, which makes them genuinely easy to incorporate into an existing home without a full overhaul.

How to Style & Other Stories Home Accessories

One of the practical pleasures of the & Other Stories home accessories range is that it does not require a wholesale commitment. You do not need to redecorate your entire home to incorporate these pieces. They are, almost by design, easy to layer into existing spaces because they are calibrated to complement rather than dominate.

A few principles tend to guide the most successful styling. First, grouping by material rather than by color produces results that feel more natural and less prescribed. A linen cushion, a cotton throw, and a woven basket in three different neutral tones will feel more cohesive than three perfectly color-matched items in different materials.

Second, odd numbers tend to be more interesting than even ones when grouping small objects. Three candles of different heights feel more alive than two. A cluster of five small ceramics on a shelf feels like a collection rather than a matched set.

Third, mix the & Other Stories pieces with things you already own and love. The best home interiors are not curated from a single source — they are assembled over time, from different places, different eras, different intentions. A handmade ceramic from a local market will look wonderful next to an & Other Stories candle, and the juxtaposition will make both objects more interesting.

Sustainability and Longevity

It would be incomplete to discuss & Other Stories’ home accessories without touching on the question of sustainability, which has become increasingly central to how conscientious consumers think about lifestyle purchases. The brand has been working toward more sustainable sourcing and production practices across its product lines, and the home accessories collection reflects this in several ways.

The preference for natural materials over synthetic ones is not merely an aesthetic choice — it reflects a longer view of how products move through the world. Natural fibers are generally more biodegradable than synthetic alternatives. Ceramic and glass objects have essentially indefinite lifespans if cared for. The emphasis on design that does not chase trends is itself a sustainability argument: objects that remain desirable for years do not need to be replaced when the season changes.

This is not to suggest that & Other Stories has fully solved the complex challenges of sustainable production in the fashion and lifestyle industry — no brand has. But the ethos of the home collection — quality over quantity, enduring aesthetics over trend-driven novelty, materials that age with grace — aligns naturally with a more thoughtful approach to consumption.

The Broader Appeal: A Home That Feels Like You

Ultimately, what & Other Stories offers with their unisex home accessories collection is something that is harder to quantify than thread count or burn time or ceramic glaze finish. They offer the possibility of a home that feels genuinely personal — that reflects the specific, individual taste of the people who live in it rather than the generic aspirations of a particular lifestyle marketing category.

In a retail landscape where it can feel like every lifestyle brand is selling the same curated fantasy of domestic perfection, the & Other Stories approach is notable for feeling a little more real, a little more honest about the way people actually live and the objects they actually want to live with. Their home accessories are not aspirational in the sense of being beyond reach. They are aspirational in the better sense: they represent a standard of daily living that is thoughtful, beautiful, and entirely achievable.

Whether you are just beginning to build your home, reassessing what you already have, or looking for a considered gift for someone whose taste you respect, the & Other Stories home accessories range is worth serious attention. These are objects made for everyday life, and they make everyday life better for having them in it.