The quiz called you Eclectic

It ran out of boxes.

There's a comment under Bobby Berk's style quiz I keep going back to.

A woman took it, answered everything honestly, and the quiz told her she was Eclectic. What she wrote underneath was roughly this: eclectic was probably the best result she could have gotten since she likes things from almost every style, except it doesn't actually help her when she's picking something out, so she just buys what she likes and when it doesn't go together she tells herself well, I'm eclectic. Then she typed HaHa.

She went into that quiz looking for a reason to trust herself. She answered everything honestly. She came out with a word that means she likes too many things to be sorted, repackaged as a result, handed back with a "better luck next time."

That's not clarity. That's the quiz admitting it couldn't find her and printing something anyway so the results didn't stay blank.

Eclectic isn't a style. It's what happens when a sorting machine runs out of boxes and still has to produce an answer.

She laughed. I didn't.

That specific laugh, the one that says I know this is broken and I've decided it's funnier than it is infuriating, is the sound of someone who went in honest and came out with a placeholder she'll use as a punchline for the next three years because at least it's something to say when someone asks.

I built this whole practice around that laugh. Not because I think she's wrong to find it funny. Because I think she deserves something better than funny.

The BB Edit

Ten styles because ten collections

Bobby Berk made ten interior design collections for Tri Pointe Homes, which is one of the large national builders. The BB Edit, they call it. You walk through a model home he designed, and then when you're actually buying, you go into their design studio and choose from his finishes. That program was set to roll through all fifteen metros the company builds in.

The word in the materials for that step is personalize.

You personalize your home by choosing one of ten collections at a builder's design studio.

I don't think Berk is a villain in this. It's a good-looking program and I'd guess buyers come out happier than they would picking finishes cold off a board with a sales agent hovering. But look at what it says about the categories.

They're not a taxonomy of human taste. They're an inventory system. Somebody had to organize a warehouse. A showroom floor. A filter menu on a website. A wall of samples at a design studio. Eight or ten groupings, because eight or ten is about what a catalog can carry before shoppers give up.

Then that inventory system got handed to you as an identity, with a quiz stapled to the front of it, and you've spent however long trying to work out which shelf you go on.

There isn't a shelf. It was a warehouse.

Image | Unsplash

Remember modern farmhouse

Somewhere around 2016 a whole lot of people found out they were modern farmhouse. It was on every show, every feed, every builder's spec sheet. Shiplap, black windows, a sliding barn door on a room that had never been within nine hundred miles of a barn. People committed. Whole houses.

Then it aged, the way these do, and now it's a punchline. There are entire accounts whose only job is making fun of it.

Those people didn't develop worse taste between 2016 and now. They took a category seriously as an identity, and the category had an expiration date on it that nobody mentioned while they were buying.

We're still doing it, just faster. Cottagecore, coastal grandmother, sad beige, cluttercore, whimsigothic. Each one gets named, gets a hashtag, gets a product line, gets its eighteen months, gets mocked. And every one of those names was invented by somebody who needed a word so a thing could be sold. That isn't a conspiracy, it's just how naming works, and no designer wants to say it out loud because we're the ones who do well out of the cycle.

Then there's whatever your phone is doing with all of this.

The second you tag yourself as a style, you get shown more of it. Then more. After a year and a half of being served one narrow slice of everything that exists, you feel genuinely certain that's who you are, because the evidence is overwhelming and the evidence was assembled by a system that had to sort you before it could serve you.

That isn't taste sharpening. That's a recommendation engine narrowing, and you mistaking the narrowing for self-knowledge.

A label does this even when it's accurate. The day you decided you were minimalist, you started getting rid of things you liked, because people like you don't keep things like that. The day you decided you were traditional, you passed on the modern piece that was right for the room, because it didn't belong.

So the quiz didn't just fail to give you a direction. It moved an editor into your house, and the editor doesn't work for you.

The woman who got Eclectic dodged all of that. Nothing to obey, no norms, no expiry date. She also got nothing to work with. A shrug with a name on it.

Image | Unsplash

The rooms that would fail the quiz

Think about the most finished room you've ever stood inside. An actual house, not a screen. The one where something happened to you before you could explain what you were reacting to.

I'd put money on it not being one aesthetic. Something old next to something new. Some texture with no business being in there that somehow holds the whole thing down. A picture on the wall that nobody could justify and that is exactly right.

That room would score terribly on a quiz. It couldn't answer the questions.

What's holding it together is one person's attention turning up over and over across years of unrelated decisions. Those rooms get edited by time, by the unglamorous business of living with things long enough to find out which ones ask too much of you and which ones just hold the day.

Image | Unsplash

Sometimes it was never about style

This comes up constantly and it almost never gets diagnosed right.

When somebody tells me they've lost their style, something in the life usually moved first. A move, a relationship that rearranged everything, a stretch where the pace changed and the house didn't change with it. The place starts feeling like an echo of whoever used to live there, and style is the closest available word for what they mean, which is: this doesn't feel like me anymore.

That's a timing problem wearing an aesthetic costume, and no quiz ever built can detect it.

Better question. Not what am I. What does this room need to do for the person I am right now, this year, in this life, rather than the one who bought that sofa three years ago or the one who'll have it all sorted out eventually.

Your style was never lost and it was never confused. It just doesn't have a name and it was never going to get one, because the names were invented to sort a catalog, and you were never in the catalog.

What I do instead

I don't ask about style. Not the first conversation, not the second, not until we've gone somewhere else entirely and the answer has already become obvious.

I ask about a closet. Specifically the section you reach for without deciding. Not the recent purchases or the aspirational ones. What has survived every move, every phase, every version of yourself you've tried on and quietly set back down. The pieces you've never questioned. The ones you couldn't explain to anyone but would replace immediately if they disappeared.

That record is more accurate than anything you've ever saved. It tells me what quality of material your body trusts. What level of visual weight your eye has been calibrated to across years of decisions made before the algorithm had a chance to narrow them. What you actually reach for when nobody is watching and you are not trying to have taste.

I call it the True Filter. It's not a style. It's not a label. It's a set of parameters that were already there, already proven, already yours. Built from behavior rather than stated preference. The quiz gave you a category and moved an editor into your house. The True Filter gives you something you can carry into a store, hold a pillow up against, and know in four seconds whether it belongs.

Nobody builds it in a conversation about aesthetics. But two hours is enough, and none of those hours involve the word transitional.

If you'd rather find the pattern than the label, that's what Design Mood is. Two hours, one room, not one question about which aesthetic you are. It's for the person who wants to know what she's already been choosing.

If what you want is a category and a shoppable list to go with it, the quiz is free and it takes four minutes.

And I mean that with only the tiniest drop of sarcasm.