You can have the nicest house but if you don’t own it, they don’t care about you
Why I think the Interiors Industry is extremely classist
If you’ve ever wondered why it is that as renters it doesn’t seem to matter how cute our homes are, they almost never get the double-page spreads in home magazines and are rarely shared on the grids of big interiors Instagram pages, it’s because of classism.
The exclusion of renters from the most popular interiors pages is a result of classism. They don’t care how hard you’ve worked on a small budget to get your space to where it is, if you couldn’t afford to buy the four walls you exist within then apparently, you’re not worth it. You can have the nicest house but if you don’t own it, they don’t care about you.
Me and my partner made a house account over a year ago because we were extremely proud of our journey to making our flat into the space we feel most at home in. Since joining we’ve become immersed in the world of social media interiors and for the most part, we love it. We have made countless interiors friends and we love seeing their content, swapping skills with them and we love the support we have for each other.
Looking through magazines and interiors pages I started noticing that there were seldom any renters featured. Despite so many renters having such impressive spaces, they do not often get featured. I started paying more attention and quickly realised that most platforms only share the stories of those who own their own homes.
On the one hand, I understand that homeownership is something that so many of us aspire to and that these online and magazine spaces are a peek into the lifestyle that a lot of us dream of having access to. On the other hand, I see it as a way of gatekeeping whose skills can be recognised. To expand on this, a large majority of us do not currently own our own homes and for a lot of us, that is something we know we may never actually achieve. For those of us who are of the diaspora, especially those of us who are first and second-generation immigrants, we often do not have the generational wealth that our white counterparts in this country have, many of us do not have the possibility of inheritance to fall back on, a lot of our parents do not even own their own homes. It can often feel like rejection living in this society as someone who is Black or a Person of Colour who doesn’t come from money, being erased from the interiors scene because you lack the wealth to own your property right now.
The bottom line is that your rented space could look just as nice, if not nicer than a space someone owns but as soon as it’s known that your space is rented, it is decided that you are poorer, less established and less creative than those with perhaps more financial stability than you. The interiors industry often feels like a very elitist game that only the white and wealthy seem to win at.
I think within the interiors scene, those who know they manage and influence the biggest platforms need to recognise their privilege. They need to understand the messages they’re sending to their readers and followers when they skim past renters to only feature those who own their own homes because it’s not a good one.
Despite already following loads of rented interiors accounts, I would love to see even more rented spaces on my feed and featured in magazines and on big platforms. I have purposely made it so that we follow a lot of renters because it is amazing and inspiring to see what people can create under restrictions, I encourage everyone to do the same.
House account: Casa de Modelei