Throw It Back
Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in today. Your space is on track to looking super fabulous, I can tell you that already. Just by pressing play on this podcast, you’re taking the time to research and educated yourself on the mysterious ways of interior designers, so bravo to you. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit on the spicy side, because listen, I spend a lot of time in the interior design internet/social media world. I look at other professional designer’s, DIYers, interior design schools and programs, real estate, furniture and material makers, I love it all. But I often see misinformation get super hot and start spreading like wildfire, and I like to do my part to prevent as much damage as possible by offering you the truth on this podcast. I see ideas, concepts, and trends that are just misleading people - sending them down the wrong path and causing lots of wasted worrying time over things that aren’t actually going to make a difference in the look and feel of your home, office, retail space, or your AirBNB income property. One thing I've noticed, not just lately, but basically for as long as I have been on this planet, is a lot of discussion about throw pillows. What's the right combination? How many should I have? What sizes? What fabrics? I’m here today to put your throw pillow worries at ease, and it may not be the kind of information you’re expecting to hear.
But this week, of course the answer to all of your burning questions can easily be solved by the color of the week. The music industry is a cruel machine, and the past week we saw Britney Spears regain her autonomy as her 14 year long conservatorship ended. And we also saw Taylor Swift release her second re-recorded album in an effort to continue to profit off her own music after her masters were sold out from under her. Taylor’s Version of Red is a slightly more autumnal, rusty looking shade. This is a big shift away from her more classic blue-based red, and I am here for it because it is perfectly aligned with the oak and cherry tree leaves this time of year, and it’s also just an easier shade to work with in your home. Our color of the week is Taylor’s Version Red, and it can help you channel your break-up best self by painting you ceiling Benjamin Moore Caliente AF-290 or scoring some Fiestaware in the color Paprika on eBay for your next BFF dinner party.
This episode is brought to you by Soft Landing Studio. If you enjoy this podcast and want to take your space to the next level, you can select from a variety of one-on-one virtual consultations about your specific home, office, or retail interior design project. Whether you want a quick brainstorming session, a series of regular check-ins during your renovation, or to work with my full interior design services; you’ll get amazing design ideas, life changing solutions to problems you’d never thought you could resolve, and a space you feel proud to call your own. And for the holiday season, you can now purchase gift certificates for the 45 minute Creative Consultation. This is the perfect gift for the design lover or brand new home owner in your life. Go to www.softlandingstudio.com to schedule your experience now. And while you’re there, don’t forget to download the absolutely free Guide to Getting Started. This fun-filled PDF quiz will orient you at the very beginning of your interior design journey. If you know you aren’t 100% happy in your space, but you don’t know what to do about it, this guide is for you. You will be directed towards big idea solutions, so you’ll know what to do, and most importantly, what not to do. Visit www.softlandingstudio.com for you free copy today.
I want to preface all of this by saying that I have loved throw pillows. I own too many of them. I remember buying a throw pillow and thinking it was really going to zest up my futon. I’ve been gifted throw pillows and remember thinking I could never have enough of them. I say this all because I'm about to tell you six reasons why you should never think about them again, at least not in the way you have in the past. I'm telling you this not only as an interior designer, but as your friend, and as a former throw pillow collector. When you are done with this episode, you will know exactly why I am now president of the coalition of interior designers against throw pillows, and why you never need to use them again. I’m of course kidding about the coalition but if any of my designer friends actually want to start that up with me, email me!
Like any good conversation, let's begin with the definition. Just for clarity purposes so we're all on the same page. Merriam-Webster defines a throw pillow as a small pillow used especially as a decorative accessory. Early in my career, when I would tell someone I was an interior designer, and I've heard this from colleagues as well, it even comes up with potential clients today sometimes: “oh so you like, pick out throw pillows and stuff?” To answer that question, in my 15 years of working in the interior design and architecture industry, so far, I think I’ve spent maybe a total of eight hours picking out throw pillows for projects. With an estimated 45 hour work week and removing two weeks each year for vacation that puts my total hours logged as an interior designer at 33,750. Meaning selecting throw pillows has taken .02% of my career. Just to state the facts.
I was talking a little bit about this last week in the episode Every Picture Tells A Story and I'm going to expand on it a lot more today. You can also listen to the episode Call Me Maybe that discusses the differences between an interior designer and an interior decorator. When I get questions about throw pillows, I think of how when I was really young and I used to watch the winter Olympics with my family and I think it was my grandfather or someone in my family would always say when we watched ice-skating that the skaters made it look like it's just as easy as walking. And if you've ever tried to ice skate you know that it's more difficult than walking. In fact it's considerably more complicated. And I love watching figure skating! I love seeing the ease that different skaters display while they're competing, it's like magic. I love their costumes with all the glittery sequins, and the music they choose for their routines. But at the end of the day, we are watching athletes perform – these are people who have trained competitively for the majority of their lives on a daily basis, rehearsing, practicing, repeating, and finessing the same moves over and over again. If I took an ice skating lesson and the first thing out of my mouth to my instructor were questions about what my costume is going look like, prior to ever touching the ice, that would be ridiculous. But it’s the exact same scenario when someone asks me a question about throw pillows in their home.
1
Accessories are wonderful and beautiful and they catch your eye right away when you walk into a room. You can have so much fun with them because they are so easy to swap out and noncommittal, and there are lots of inexpensive options available. But if you happen to get the ear of an interior designer, for whatever reason, asking questions about throw pillows is a major waste of an opportunity because these are people who are dealing with the psychology, function, sustainability, and durability of space. So the first reason you don’t need worry about throw pillows is that they don’t change the quality of your space. You could have the best, most pristinely designed apartment, and then have a bunch of really hideous throw pillows in a few places, and frankly it wouldn't ruin it. The space is still going to function well. Likewise if you have a horrible space and you pick awesome throw pillows, they aren’t going to save the day. When we talk about interior design we have to get used to treating interior designers like space puzzle solvers. What's more important is that if you are paying attention to your space’s interior, if you're worried that something isn't working, if you feel like your home needs improvement, it will not be solved with throw pillows.
2
In fact, throw pillows masquerade as being more functional than they actually are. Throw pillows are almost completely decorative. They look like they're adding comfort to a space and they can warm up a space that feels empty by literally taking up unused area. Whether it's your bed, your living room sofa, an entryway bench, even patio seating. If you feel like your piece of furniture needs throw pillows, it’s likely that it isn’t sized correctly. You may have a sofa that is actually way too deep to be comfortable without throw pillows. Or your bed might not have a very prominent headboard and so you add throw pillows, but what you actually need is a more eye-catching headboard. Maybe you have a bench in your entryway or foyer, that doesn't really get used or it's too big and there's only one small section that actually gets sat on, so you cover it with throw pillows. A cluster of throw pillows in your home is a good indication of where your planning may need some extra attention and reassessment. That means something may need to be rearranged, resized, or removed. If your sofa looks bad without throw pillows, it's because you have a bad sofa. You can put frosting on a burnt cake, but you're still gonna taste char when you bite in it. If your sofa is giving you agita, you have many options to remedy the situation. You can buy a slipcover, you can trade sofas with your neighbor or cousin, you can take your sofa to a reupholsterer and tell them to hack it up make the cushions feel better and cover it in a fabric you can actually stand to look at every single day.
3
I mentioned throw pillows can add the look of comfort to a space, but they aren’t actually that comfortable. Rarely are they sized to accommodate the human body. I might be able to put one under my knees to help support my back if I'm laying down or stack them under my head if I need to prop myself up to binge watch The Great British Baking Show. But those are all things that can be accomplished with standard size sleeping pillows as well. And if you've ever made a bed with throw pillows, you know that they are taken off the bed when it's time to go to sleep. And half the time they come off the sofa when it's time to actually snuggle up and watch a movie because they're just taking up room. If they were comfortable the way a throw blanket is, we’d be snuggling up to them, wrapping our arms around them, and dozing off on a rainy day. But instead, they end up pushed to the side.
4
If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it 1,000 times. Somewhere along the way, someone said that adding throw pillows with color is a great way to have an accent in a space. Society as a whole has to move on from the the fallacy that a good way to add a “pop” of color in your space is with throw pillows. If you have a beige space and then you add a colorful throw pillow to it, you still have a beige space. If you want to inject color into your space, you have to commit. Color is not meant to be an apologetic blip taking up 1% of a room’s visual real estate. Color is expressive, it's tapping into a primal part of our humanity - the part that seeks daylight, plant life, water, and abundance. To patronize the idea of color in a space with something as inconsequential, something as arbitrary as a throw pillow is an insult to the idea of color in the first place.
If you feel drawn to color, it is OK to bring your personality and the things you love into your space in a big, bold, substantial way. You do not have to shrink yourself down to the interior design size equivalent of a postage stamp and let that be the only pepper in an otherwise completely bland meal of a room. And if you feel intimidated by color, that’s something, like any other fear, that needs to be addressed head-on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients who think they want all beige or white spaces and end up regretting it when they realize they are living inside an endless desert of blandness. Nothing to catch the eye, no where for the eye to rest. It’s actually more stressful on your brain to have a bland room with no color. Rather than going the throw pillow route, try bringing in color through an area rug or a giant photograph of a landscape that you love. Try bringing in color through painting your ceiling, adding an accent chair in your living room. Using these larger, more substantial surfaces as vehicles for color, allows them to act as true anchors in the space, creating depth, dimension, and visual weight via color. It's important to remember that what we call attention to with visual cues like pops of color, are important elements. Meaning if I highlight something with color, people look at it first. So if I have an oatmeal room and I have colorful throw pillows, are the throw pillows the first thing I want people to see? Or is it my beautiful view of my backyard? Maybe it's my gorgeous mantle that I just had re-done in beautiful stone. Maybe it's the gorgeous carpet I just spent a small fortune on. But chances are it's not your throw pillows.
5
High quality throw pillows are expensive. I've seen throw pillows upwards of $300 at relatively large, well-known home stores here in New York City. And cheap throw pillows are bad. And I'm not necessarily talking about the look of them but the insert inside the pillow cover. We are talking about low quality, low density foam (if there's even any foam in there at all and it's not all just batting that you could buy a giant bag of from the sewing store for $12). These will not last. They will become misshapen, lumpy, bumpy, stained, and smelly and you will not want to cuddle up with them and they will not make your space look cute. You will spend countless hours zhuzhing the order, angle, and fluffiness of your throw pillows - to no avail. You will chop them on their heads in an effort to make them look fuller only to find they then become too low and stocky.
6
There is nothing, I repeat nothing sustainable about throw pillows. Anything additional and unneeded in your space, that you cycle through quickly is not sustainable. Anything that you're going to get sick of, even if it's "easy” to change out, is a waste. When you decide to get rid of them, let’s be real - nobody, I mean nobody is buying throw pillows at Goodwill. It’s got that ick factor. I rarely even see throw pillows by themselves at Goodwill. That means throw pillows have a short lifecycle, which makes them pretty darn bad for the environment.
So you may have a few throw pillows that you really, really love. You can totally keep those, but drop the rest of them. Most importantly, don’t buy any more! If I can deter you for just buying any MORE throw pillows, my job is a success. So, now that you’ve taken away almost all of your throw pillows, what exactly should you do with them? Because you know that sustainability is the name of the game here at Soft Landing, let’s talk about a few ways you can repurpose your throw pillows now that you know your sofa looks fine without them.
My favorite trick is to use the stuffing inside a throw pillow to plump up any other throw pillows you are keeping, or any detachable sofa or chair cushions. Just unzip the cases and perform a stuffing transplant. This will be life changing if you have a saggy sofa. If your pillow has a down insert, these feathers can be composted. If you love the fabric of the pillow cover, repurpose it in a craft like quilting. Imagine transforming all your random throw pillows into a giant cozy quilt that actually serves a purpose in your home! Amazing. If you don’t love fabric of the pillow, cut it up and use it as cleaning rags. And if you don’t feel like performing surgery on your pillows, you can always use them as knee protectors for gardening work or insulation in your attic.
That’s all I have for you today, you can now consider yourself released from the clutches of throw pillows. Enjoy your new found freedom, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
