Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Instagram feeds are a bit like flea markets. Tip everything out into one place, stand back, and see what catches people’s fancy. Like the best flea markets, social media algorithms don’t assume too much about what “interesting” means. Simply present the contents of an estate sale, junk and all, and then let browsers do the sifting work for themselves. Car boot sellers think the same way. The shamrock-shaped lamp with a broken teasmaid? You never know, someone might have a home for it.The problem — if you can call it one, in the context of interior design — is that where flea markets and car boot sales provide one-offs, social media algorithms are capable of compound learning, feeding us more of what we already like. And so we become annoyingly overfamiliar with our own design tastes, and everything is templated, repeated and copied (spare me another “relaxed farmhouse” kitchen or scalloped lampshade, even if I hypocritically own one).Browsing is the wrong word for social media: after a while, everything is found for you. Listening to a podcast recently, I heard a bougie renovator in Manhattan explain that his company was experiencing delays because lots of clients want exactly the same materials — the veined marble backsplashes, the priciest sheets of wood. The other day I came across (via an Instagram ad, of course) the home exchange site Kindred, which asks prospective users to define the look of their property from a rota of set styles that are fast becoming like those old advertising billboards that never get torn down — painfully familiar.Like the best problems, this one is pretty shallow and apparently solvable. What we need is to mount a strategy for an Instagram resistance in interior design.Keep images of your home private. The use of non-disclosure agreements in top-tier interior design is apparently becoming more commonplace. This puts a nix on any photos of the building site, in progress or completed, from surfacing online. While it’s fun to virtually tour celebrity homes, it does mean that Roche Bobois Bubble sofas have been “seen” a zillion times, although I’ve yet to lay eyes on someone sitting on one in the flesh. (Curious to know if they are as uncomfortable as they look.) Stop thinking like a photographer. Don’t think about how rooms look, or how they will come across online, but concentrate on how they feel A fully zipped interior design project is arguably more chic than one that permanently drills a peepers’ hole in the wall by virtue of an Architectural Digest tour. Mystery is valuable, as witnessed by the hammer prices of Joan Didion’s estate sale (she rarely allowed anyone to photograph her apartment).Watch out for unusual auctions. Beyond the brown furniture bargains you can find at auction, industrial sell-offs can also provide some weird, prime pickings. Peaker Pattinson, for example, has cleared out office contents for the BBC, John Lewis Partnership, plus airports and county councils. I’ll admit, you’ll be straining to pick out gems in this seam, but the odd one comes along, and it’s almost guaranteed to be a one-off. Heritage Auctions, meanwhile, is still auctioning off the set contents of HBO’s Succession, including Logan Roy’s humidor, starting bids at around $10,000. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and architect Linda Brettler (his ex-wife) also sold off some of their estate recently with in-person viewings at their historic Hollywood home. Much more entertaining than hours going smooth-brained on Instagram.Rummage through the archives. In interior designer Rita Konig’s second and newish Create Academy course, she discusses the Instagrammabiquity issue candidly. When thousands are spent on fabric patterns and wallpapers, perhaps the last thing you want, she observes, is for a friend to come over and say they have exactly the same thing. In refurbishing her own apartment in London, she went to fabric houses to look through the archives to find something special. More affordably, I think subtle versions of classics can look pretty, such as Morris & Co’s Pure Morris heritage collection of sheer and textured takes on William Morris’s Strawberry Thief, Acorn and Willow Boughs motifs.Make mistakes. Twenty years later, I’m still able to laugh at a friend’s disastrous lunchtime shopping trip to a marché aux puces, when she was doing a fancy internship at the OECD in Paris. Having fallen for what was later widely agreed to be a hideous lamp, she couldn’t resist plugging it in back at her desk, short-circuiting the entire building and causing an all-staff fire drill evacuation. I’m not exactly sure of the moral here, except to say that safe decorating choices will probably not net good stories. For similar reasons, people rightly love to boast about their Facebook Marketplace adventures.Stop thinking like a photographer. This is another Konig tip (in so many words). Don’t think about how rooms look, or how they will come across online, but concentrate on how they feel. The visual rewiring that Silicon Valley has done to our brains is verging on the profound at this point, so this one is perhaps the hardest to achieve.Real flea markets still exist. I once browsed the flea market at Tiergarten on a trip to Berlin, walking past trestle tables of tin-coloured cutlery and crockery dealers, admiring gaudy carriage clocks and a vase in which a one-eared teddy bear sat like a flower arrangement until, suddenly, I found a glass pendant light, in the shape of cascading petals, on sale for €50. I took it home with me on an easyJet flight, attracting sideways looks for the clanking noise coming from my hand luggage. If the flea market was my Instagram feed, and I had “liked” the lamp, I’d be seeing the same mid-century aesthetic (the piece turned out to be from East German 1960s factory Narva Leuchtenbau) for the rest of time. Which is fine, sort of, but it’s much nicer to have a more complete memory of the things I didn’t buy, too, and wonder where they ended up. The Narva “chandelier”, meanwhile, still lights up in my home.Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
