Inside the 'Time-Poor' Aesthetic Trend — Or How, in Today's World, Messy Homes Became "the Interior That Reveals the Most About You"

Welcome to The Meaning of Home, the new Livingetc series asking the big questions that shape, undo, and rewrite the way we live, think, and feel between our domestic walls. Through essays, interviews, and personal stories grounded in design, each piece explores what our spaces say about us — and the concealed universes they embody — by tapping into culture, psychology, history, politics, storytelling, and economics.

"Your bed looks a mess," my friend Sarah says, as she steps into my new east London flat for the first time. "But it's deliberate, isn't it?"

She's right, of course. Those stone-washed Tekla sheets haven't exactly styled themselves. Nor have the stack of papers, postcards, old magazines — last weekend's HTSI or an archived edition of Casa Brutus from my last trip to Tokyo — that sit in studied disarray, topped with a rustic Guatemalan jar and stick of palo santo, on the neighboring hardwood floor.

If you ask the algorithm, you'll find it's a growing trend — the 'time-poor' aesthetic. Not simply maximalism, and not simply messiness, the style is a domestic rebellion against the hyper-organized, 'everything-in-its-place' home that took over the 1990s and struck again in the 2010s.

Once locked neatly away in a bathroom cabinet, the latest Byredo fragrance is suddenly a dining table paperweight; that blown-glass bracelet, thrifted in Venice, joins a spread of jewelry, pride of place on the mantelpiece; a scribbled-on sudoku is abandoned, in a scattered pile of receipts, and a crumpled exhibition leaflet on the seat of a dining chair — a Tibetan tea-towel thrown over its backrest.

"For me, it's about shaping environments — rather than just spaces," explains Charlotte Taylor, an artist and interior designer whose unabashedly untidy, object-laden rooms immediately come to mind.

In Copenhagen, at last year's 3daysofdesign, where much of the design world — in typical Scandi style — was reaching for restraint, Taylor was piling on: stacks of books and careless scribbles, shirts and blankets tossed roughly about, leftovers from breakfast on the kitchen table.

The designer's apartment for the week, which doubled as a 'showroom' of sorts, invited passersby to make themselves at home: "people were laying on the bed, playing chess, reading books — I was making instant coffee in the kitchen — so it felt like you were really walking into someone's house."

In Taylor's own words, her installation was an act of deliberate revolt — against the city's showrooms that often err on the side of "intensely curated".

Revolt seems central to this messy look. My beloved copy of Kyoichi Tsuzuki's 1993 cult classic book Tokyo Style reveals the 'real Tokyo' — untidy, lived-in, often micro, spaces — to challenge the archetypal notion of Japanese minimalism. A recent reprint, three decades on, is unlikely a coincidence; imperfect interiors are, once again, in demand.

That demand is spreading fast online. At this point, I think it's safe to say we've all been tempted in by a TikTok — like David Költgen's monthly color palette — that feels 'real' through its cozy informality: clothes crumpled on a bed, dishes in the sink. Is it too obvious, or even cliché, to suggest that we're simply craving authenticity?

Beyond Taylor and Tsuzuki, it's hard to ignore the sense, however, that there's a different, greater kind of rebellion going on here. At a time when technology is supposed to be giving us time back, it seems, increasingly, that it's actually taking it away — stealing our attention with the mind-numbing ease of a simple scroll.

Digital distractions are all around us; don't ask me about my screen time — it's a sensitive subject. But while we're seeing, reading, and watching more than ever before, technology is leaving us markedly unsatisfied, explains Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford.

In his 2020 book, Sensehacking, the professor — who admits to appearing on a list of the world's messiest academic offices — writes about a sensory imbalance in society. A digital overload of auditory and visual information has made way for the "neglect and understimulation of our more emotional senses," he explains. Of these, touch is an important one.

Spence refers to 'touch hunger', a term coined by developmental psychologist Dr. Tiffany Field, whose research found that a lack of daily interpersonal touch is harming us — and leaves us wanting.

When it comes to interiors, there's evidence of that very hunger in our growing keenness to be surrounded by things, objects, textures.

In the design of architect Nathaniel Mosley's family home, for example, a layered approach — which builds over time, not overnight — brings touch and tactility firmly into focus.

Shelves in the entrance hall become host to found objects: rocks and pebbles, old flint, a timber block from a factory in Detroit, a terracotta chimney pot.

"Whenever the kids and I go to a pebbly beach or on a countryside walk, we have half an eye out for a beautiful thing to be brought back," Mosley says. "It's a bit like building an art collection."

In the case of curator and design collector Alex Tieghi-Walker, his Manhattan loft takes that concept just a little more literally. His live-in gallery is an ever-evolving showcase — no artwork or furnishing too precious to be used or handled.

Mosley and Tieghi-Walker both tap into a demand for leaving collected objects on display, an evident rejection of the all-too-tidy.

"There's a growing awareness of the house as biography — an accumulation of all the things we are," adds Sonia Solicari, Director at Hoxton's Museum of the Home.

Despite the mess, our homes are "often highly curated spaces", she explains. In our current moment — which swings, once again, away from a pared-back look — the curator connects with the "power of narrative and personal stories".

The best designers are taking that opportunity for narrative seriously. In a north London home, O'Sullivan Skoufoglou has followed an almost archaeological design approach; traces of the previous owner — a pianist — have been retained, layered, and exposed, from old joinery and picture rails to an original fireplace and doors.

Driving the wider trend here is an uptake in 'second-hand chic', another revolt against that perfect flat-pack chest of drawers or that boxy, white, landlord-special bed frame. Once — not long ago — a niche corner of the internet, the furniture resale market is thriving.

As a (newly-anointed) east Londoner, I have only to wander up to Aelfred in Hackney Wick, or Two Columbia Road in Shoreditch, to see where the demand is coming from. But for the time-poor amongst us, 2nd Home, IntOndo, Vinterior, and MCF Select are the designer's choice of online marketplace for tracking down a storied classic.

But the look isn't all simply 'in with the old'; the most time-poor amongst us reach for whatever we can find.

Think: Martino Gamper's Arnold Circus Stool, paired with a thrifted rug and topped with a tumbled plate from Ferm Living that holds it all — keys, an old business card, a collection of rings. Or the latest homeware from Gustaf Westman's eclectic series that holds down a pile of magazines and sits, as a statement, on a twentieth-century table, found on Facebook Marketplace.

Even the messiest of styling is rarely an accident. Our homes, as portals into the "inner workings of ourselves" are often responsive to contemporary debate, and shaped by wider political and socioeconomic realities, explains Johanna Agerman Ross, Conran Foundation chief curator at the Design Museum.

Early minimalism, for example, Ross credits to the legacy of the First and Second World Wars — noticeably marked by material scarcity — while minimal interiors in the 90s channeled an understated sleekness that deliberately "broke with the extravagance of postmodernism and 1980s opulence."

Perhaps the present-day equivalent is the rise in renting — thirty-five per cent of UK households now rent — and the way our meaning of home is increasingly 'borrowed'.

A new book, by the founders of multi-location London concept store Earl of East, unpacks this; in Home for Now, the writers visit more than 40 rented homes, interrogating how people style a sense of belonging without ownership.

I'd argue it's no coincidence that the time-poor aesthetic has taken hold at precisely the moment we feel most dispossessed — of our attention; of our walls, painted by a landlord we'll never meet.

Technology tells us what to watch, where to go, how to optimize our early mornings. The rental contract tells us what we cannot change, nail into, or brush over.

In a day-to-day increasingly managed by forces beyond our control, the home — however borrowed, however small — becomes the one space left to push back.

"A friend and I always joke: if you want to pop in and see me, come anytime," photographer Ola. O Smit tells me. "But if you want to pop in and see my house, give me five hours."

It's instinctual — our compulsion to tidy up before a guest arrives at the door. But the messiest home — an interior that reveals the most about you — is the one that I would always, without fail, much rather step inside.

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