A dental clinic called Tend provides “curated, seasonal toothpaste” in what’s billed as “The Brushery”: a “swishy, swirly room just for freshening up” (it has marbleized turquoise concrete sinks). There’s a place to do laundry that looks like a spa, a place to get therapy that looks like The Wing, a boutique newsstand that sells scented candles and has an app. Swipe for a selection of other clean, white, curvilinear interiors. So in lieu of an audio tour, mounted nearby there’s a replica rose-gold iPhone 7. The future museumgoer would naturally require some sort of digital experience - some screen - to fill in the view from that couch. (Discontinued 2017, following a viral essay titled “Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much?”) 2015): A mid-price offering from the chain retailer West Elm, the model’s name evoked the heroine of popular television drama Mad Men, widely admired for its re-creation of the previous century’s design. An interior filled with recognizable products. Perhaps it’s a home, or a store, or maybe the two cases blur - a store designed to look like a home, a home in which one might shop. Now imagine that the white room isn’t a dream it’s behind a velvet rope in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even the palette faintly suggests a medicine cabinet: powdery pharmaceutical pastels, orange pill bottles, Band-Aid pink. The ambience is palliative - simple but not severe. There’s not a lot of distinctive taste, but still, it’s hard to resist when you’re on a permanent search for ways to feel better. This room functions more like a CBD seltzer, something you might buy in a salmon-pink can. Maybe it is a dream, this room you do and don’t know, assembled from cliché and half-recollected spare parts a fever dream - or, no, that’s too much. IT WAS ALL A DREAM, says a neon sign in schoolgirl cursive. Maybe the pillows were succulent-print maybe the ceramics had boobs. Swap out the monstera leaf for waxy red anthurium, WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE for GOOD VIBES ONLY. And there, in the round mirror above the couch: It’s you. It’s so clean! Everything’s fun, but not too much fun.

You sense - in a way you could neither articulate nor explain - the presence of a mail-order foam mattress somewhere close at hand.Īll that pink. In the far corner, within the shrine of an arched alcove, atop a marble plinth: one lonely, giant cartoon jungle leaf, tilting from a pink ceramic tube. Above a bookshelf (spines organized by color), a poster advises you to WORK HARD & BE NICE TO PEOPLE. It holds a succulent in a lumpy ceramic pot, a scented candle with a matte-pink label. Upon the terrazzo nougat of the coffee table, a glass tray trimmed in brass. Circles of faded terra-cotta and pale yellow mint-green and mustard confetti white, with black half-circles and two little dots - aha. Before you is a couch, neatly tufted and boxy, padded with an assortment of pillows in muted geometric designs. You’ve entered a white room.Ī basketlike lamp hangs overhead other lamps, globes of brass and glass, glow nearby.

Yellow terrazzo tiles