The 'Performed Home' Conundrum — How Much Are You Willing to Sacrifice for an Instagram-Worthy House?

The home has never been simply private. Interiors have always communicated status, identity, and aspiration; we have long used objects and space to construct an image of who we are. What has changed is that this image now has a potentially permanent audience. Social media has turned domestic space into something simultaneously inhabited and represented. The home is a backdrop, a portfolio, a set, but increasingly also a gallery, where sculptural furniture, art, and collectible objects are composed almost as carefully as they might be in an exhibition. The home as stage and the home as gallery are not separate phenomena. They are two consequences of the same cultural shift: domestic life has acquired a public life.

Architect and academic Javier Fernández Contreras, author of The Interiors of Social Media: Architecture, Space, and Technology in the 21st Century, argues that platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and Pinterest do more than circulate images of interiors. By producing what he calls "aspirational futures", they can alter the criteria through which we judge our own spaces, increasingly turning the home into a "container for visual representation". The question, then, is no longer simply whether social media has changed how homes look. It is whether it has changed what we expect a home to do.

The pandemic accelerated something social media had already begun. Suddenly, millions of people were broadcasting from their homes every day. The bookshelf became a professional credential. The kitchen island became a television studio. The wall behind a desk acquired a new architectural function: it was a backdrop. For professional creators, the relationship is even more explicit. A home can now be residence, portfolio, and studio simultaneously. Renovation itself can become serialized entertainment: demolition is an episode, sourcing is content, the finished room is the reveal.

And yet the people living inside these spaces do not necessarily experience them as sets. Dima and Guy of creative duo The Berlin Chapters, whose interior-focused content has brought their home to a large online audience, describe a striking disconnect between digital exposure and everyday life. "It's almost impossible to fully grasp that millions of people might eventually experience the space through a screen," they say. They do not design or inhabit their home with that audience consciously in mind. For them, the practical demands of content have more to do with light and weather than furniture. "When we're not creating content, we never feel like we're walking around a set. It's our home first."

Social media may turn the home into media without necessarily turning its inhabitants into performers at every moment. But you do not need to be a creator to have internalised its gaze. Pinterest boards and the endless scroll of other people’s homes have given us unprecedented visual literacy, and an equally unprecedented awareness of how our own spaces compare. Fernández Contreras sees this as more consequential than simply having more inspiration available. “Just as social media has contributed to consolidating certain bodily ideals, it can also promote normative models of domesticity that need to be questioned,” he says.

At the same time that the home has become a film set, it has begun to resemble another public typology: the gallery. The vocabulary is familiar. Large artworks sit alone against uninterrupted walls. A collectible chair is granted enough empty space to be read almost as sculpture. Lighting becomes theatrical. Everyday objects disappear into concealed storage while fewer pieces are given greater visual emphasis.

Even the way objects occupy a room has changed. A chair isolated against a bare wall is perceived differently from the same chair around a dining table. A lamp on a plinth moves closer to sculpture. The coffee table becomes a composition; the bookshelf an installation. This does not necessarily make contemporary homes less domestic. The increasingly porous boundaries between art, craft and furniture have produced some of the richest interiors of recent years.

Few cultural platforms occupy this territory as explicitly as Objects With Narratives, the contemporary collectible design gallery founded by Nik and Robbe Vandewyngaerde and Oskar Eryatmaz, based in Geneva, Brussels, and Bruges, which has just opened a new outpost in Antwerp. Rather than approaching functional pieces simply as products, the gallery treats objects as carriers of ideas, stories and identity, often presenting them in settings that blur exhibition and interior.

It is a revealing reversal: while homes borrow the visual language of galleries, galleries increasingly want to resemble homes, a phenomenon that is on the rise in the British capital, too, as attested by numerous of its newest design hotspots. "The boundaries have become much more fluid," explain the Objects With Narratives co-founders. "Galleries want to show objects in contexts that allow people to imagine living with them, while collectors have become more confident about giving important objects space and presence within their homes."

Yet the distinction between a collection and an exhibition remains important. "A home becomes interesting precisely when it isn't too resolved," the gallery says. "A child's drawing can sit next to an important work; something inherited can coexist with something contemporary." Those contradictions are exactly what stops an interior from becoming a showroom.

Objects With Narratives has noticed a growing awareness among collectors of the home as an expression of identity, but not necessarily a desire for greater coherence. Their picks embody a more confident approach to curation, mixing periods, materials, and different financial benchmarks. "The most personal homes often contain unexpected combinations because they reflect different moments in someone's life rather than a single moment of decoration."

There are two meanings of curated. One is selection: the gradual accumulation of objects containing memories, discoveries, and obsessions. The other is editing: removing anything that interferes with the image we want to project. Social media complicates the distinction because it rewards immediate legibility. An instantly recognisable lamp, a rare vintage chair, or a collectible piece can communicate cultural knowledge in fractions of a second. Objects become shorthand for taste.

At the same time, social platforms have made discovery radically easier. "Someone can discover a young designer in another country almost instantly," say the Objects With Narratives co-founders. "At the same time, visibility creates repetition." Their counterpoint is curiosity rather than recognition. "Perhaps that is becoming one of the greatest luxuries: owning something without needing anyone else to understand its value."

This is where performance and curation meet. The perfectly framed room is not merely being shown. It is saying something. For architects, designers, artists and other creative professionals, the home increasingly operates as an extension of the portfolio. To invite someone into it, physically or digitally, is to reveal references, taste, and cultural fluency. The interior becomes autobiography written in objects.

The Berlin Chapters complicate the idea of the creator home as a calculated personal brand. Their aim, they say, is not to follow what an audience already rewards but to contribute something of their own. "We try to be influencers in the most genuine sense of the word," they explain. "We don't want to simply reproduce what is already everywhere." Their audience is not there to determine the home, but to find inspiration in it.

Still, once an interior circulates online, its image can take on a life independent of the people who made it. The duo remembers seeing their images reshared on Pinterest and suddenly feeling as though they were looking at someone else's home. "That loss of control created a very surreal and eerie feeling." The physical home remains theirs, but its image becomes public material: saved, reposted, and absorbed into somebody else’s moodboard.

Fernández Contreras argues that digital platforms intensify a mechanism that has always existed. Homes have long communicated aspirations and social position; what changes is that the domestic sphere can now function as a "permanent showcase". The distinction between public and private may therefore no longer be the front door. It may simply be the edge of the frame.

For The Berlin Chapters, what remains outside that frame is decided less by privacy than by a simple criterion: "Is it interesting or beautiful?" A wardrobe interior or bathroom may remain unseen not because it is sacred, but because it does not qualify as content.

In a mediated home, visibility may therefore be organized less according to what is private than according to what is worth showing. And yet, as polished interiors have become ubiquitous, we have begun craving evidence that nobody has over-polished them: patina, handmade ceramics, faded textiles, vintage furniture, uneven surfaces, books that appear to have actually been read. We have, paradoxically, begun curating signs of not having curated too much, as Zac Procter wrote in these very pages in his investigation into the 'time-poor' look.

Objects With Narratives recognizes the contradiction. "Once there is a desire for authenticity, authenticity itself can become aestheticized," the gallery says. "Patina and imperfection can be curated just as carefully as polished minimalism. "But beneath that aesthetic shift may be a genuine desire for something less frictionless. As the co-founders put it, an object carrying traces of "the hand, material, or time offers something different". The problem is not curation itself. It is what happens when the image of living begins to outrank living.

It would be easy, and probably wrong, to conclude that social media has corrupted the authenticity of home. Homes have always performed. What has changed is the frequency and reach of that performance, and the fact that the audience no longer needs to cross the threshold. There are liberating consequences. Social media has democratized access to interiors, designers, and craftspeople, allowed emerging makers to find audiences outside established institutions, and encouraged millions to treat their homes as sites of personal creativity.

Fernández Contreras argues that platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and Pinterest “do not merely depict interiors but actively script new spatial types": homes that can be simultaneously "private and hyperpublic, domestic and performative, material and algorithmic". Perhaps that is the crucial shift. The digital world and the physical home are no longer separate environments. Increasingly, the contemporary home exists in both at once. So the defining interior-design question of the social-media age may no longer be, simply, "does this room look good?" But instead, "who is this room for?"

The answer does not need to be singular. A kitchen can cook beautifully and make an excellent film set. A living room can contain museum-worthy objects and still survive a party. A collectible chair can be sculpture and somewhere wonderful to sit. Performance and authenticity are not opposites. Nor are curation and domesticity. The question is whether we remain the authors of the performance.

Objects With Narratives offer one answer: the child's drawing next to the collectible work, the inherited object interrupting the scheme, the piece nobody recognizes. The Berlin Chapters offer another, disarmingly ordinary one. Asked what makes their house feel most like home when the cameras are off, their answer has nothing to do with styling or reach: "Flowers, a fridge full of food, and loud music."

Perhaps that is the point. A home can now be image, portfolio, gallery, and stage. But a photograph of a room is not the experience of living inside it. Perhaps the true luxury of home in the social-media era is having somewhere that does not always need to communicate. A home worth showing, certainly. But, more importantly, a home worth returning to when nobody is watching.

Subscribe to our newsletter for more longreads like this one, or head to our The Meaning of Home archive to browse them all in one place. Want to move away from the purely performative and find your own authentic sense of style? Our recent panel task, The Future of Taste, examined just that, and holds inspiration aplenty.