INTERIOR DESIGN IN THE 21ST CENTURY

In the spring of 1988, I was in the eighth grade at St. Luke’s School in the West Village, still six months from high school. Ronald Reagan was president, which meant little to me at the time, except that my dad was pleased. I wore Doc Martens, jeans scrawled with peace signs and patched with bandanas, and my grandfather’s oversized houndstooth trench coat. My yellow Sony Walkman played Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret on repeat. Downtown New York — SoHo, specifically — beckoned. It was alternative and rich.

The Nancy Reagan aesthetic — a buttoned-up formality anchored by “Reagan red” under the guise of Hollywood glamour — formed the visual backdrop of the era. Nancy enlisted Beverly Hills decorator Ted Graber, whom she’d known for years, to help her restyle the White House in red, white, and gold (Lenox china included). The result was a lavish pastiche of 18th-century French Rococo, Hollywood Regency, California casual, and a soupçon of chinoiserie applied generously to the building’s American Federalist bones — like too much rouge on high cheekbones. This was the era of excess. Too much was the point.

At the same time, social conservatism and the return of the “traditional family” were being dialed back up. The Equal Rights Amendment had been shelved; the pro-life movement gained traction; AIDS was met with government inaction; and a heteronormative traditionalism crept back into American life. In 1987, Fatal Attraction neatly illustrated what was purported to happen to women who chose career over wifedom.

I was being raised, unwittingly, as a prime-time Gen Xer, shaped by Postmodernism, questioning everything that came before, staring down an uncertain future, and sensing instinctively that nothing around me had been built with me in mind. Forced to cut my own path, I took diligent note of the film characters who spoke to my secret future self: artists, musicians, freaks, losers, punks, and — most often — gay men, or failing that, their fag hags.

Enter Delia Deetz.

Released in the spring of 1988, Tim Burton’s original Beetlejuice tells the story of a recently deceased couple who enlist a crude, chaotic bio-exorcist to scare the new occupants — Delia Deetz and her goth teenage stepdaughter — out of their home, unleashing a manic force that turns both the afterlife and the living into gleeful, anarchic mayhem.

Delia, played by the late comedic genius Catherine O’Hara, is a sculptor and conceptual artist who wastes no time transforming the dead couple’s beloved Victorian house — straight out of L.L. Bean Home — into a Postmodern extravaganza. With the help of Otho Fenlock, her interior designer and amateur occultist friend, Delia strips the house down and rebuilds it as something resembling a SoHo loft on the inside and Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House on the outside. The traditionally proportioned Victorian building is deconstructed on the exterior to suggest Peter Eisenman’s House II (in reality, a plywood façade perched on a hill in Vermont), while the interior evokes the opening credits of Tony Scott’s The Hunger.

The rooms, built entirely as sets on a Culver City soundstage, reveal themselves throughout the film as shock, horror, and comedy: Floral wallpaper and an Arts and Crafts fireplace give way to a Brutalist oxidized-copper hearth with a narrow slit of an opening. A humble Shaker kitchen is replaced by an Yves Klein-blue box outfitted with industrial steel appliances. The living and dining rooms retain their Victorian doorway only to be reimagined as the 80s New York nightclub MK: granite-slab dining table, bar stools à la Ron Arad, and a wavy red-lacquered bar.

Beetlejuice is a comedy, and the house and interiors are meant to land as a joke. Except it wasn’t a joke to me.

I write this not as an interior designer — though I am one, by way of fashion and production design — but as a participant and observer of both low and high culture, past and present. While I take diligent note of the past, I am most interested in the contemporary, in what the fingerprints we leave behind will say to our future selves. Today, just like in the 80s, the contemporary looks suspiciously like the recent past — a traditionalism steeped in nostalgia for comfort. At what cost?

The rooms of Nancy Reagan’s White House were blueprints for a long game: the re-germination of America’s Puritan values, adorned with a big Adolfo red-taffeta bow. Close cousins of those rooms — velvety interiors in muted jewel tones — today line the pages of America’s shelter magazines. And not the publications already devoted to history, but the mainstream ones meant to trickle décor down into our living rooms.

So what happens now? A quarter into the 21st century, America has a décor crisis to match its constitutional one. Our contemporary spaces look like the past — earnest, literal, and reverent, with little reinterpretation. The TV production design of The Handmaid’s Tale perfected this aesthetic with terrifying precision, not a hair out of place. A friend recently described a restaurant interior she found so themed it felt like cosplay. But isn’t it all cosplay? The spaces we inhabit are scripts for the selves we want to project — the sets, props, wigs, makeup, and costumes we use to become who we want to be. So who do you want to be?

Delia Deetz, with Otho Fenlock by her side, understood this instinctively. Her crime was not bad taste but misbehavior — treating history not as something to be preserved, but something to be used. Her Victorian house in Beetlejuice was not erased; it was sampled, spliced, dragged through downtown New York and art-school theory, and spat back out as something messy and living. It showed us that sampling the past can be nostalgia, but it can also be authorship. The distinction matters. One embalms culture; the other keeps it in motion.

In moments like ours, when décor reaches backward in search of comfort and safety, Delia Deetz reminds us that the future has always belonged to those willing to risk disrespect.