The Unlivable Instagram Room: Designing for Life, Not Just for 'Likes'

It was a Monday in late June, the air in my Thong Lo office thick with the promise of another evening downpour. The client sitting across from me—we’ll call her K. Anya—was sharp, successful, and articulate. She slid her laptop across the polished concrete table, the screen glowing with her vision for her new condominium.

“This,” she said, her voice confident, “is the feeling I’m going for.”

The screen was not filled with architectural plans or material samples. It was a perfectly curated grid of squares. A digital mosaic of someone else’s life, or rather, the performance of it.

In my line of work, this has become the new brief. Not a collection of tear sheets from magazines, but a folder of Instagram screenshots. K. Anya’s folder was a masterclass in the dominant aesthetic of the algorithm: a sea of serene beige, minimalist living rooms bathed in an ethereal, perpetual golden-hour light. There was the viral arched mirror, the pampas grass in a ceramic vase, the bouclé curved sofa, the artfully-draped-but-never-to-be-used throw blanket.

Every room was stunning. And every room was exactly the same. They were beautiful, silent, and utterly devoid of life. As I clicked through the images, I felt a familiar professional chill. My job, as I see it, is often one of translation—translating a client's soul into the three-dimensional space they will call home. But the soul I was being asked to translate here wasn’t K. Anya’s. It belonged to the ghost in the machine: the Instagram algorithm.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and it was. “Tell me about this room. What do you love about it?”

She pointed to a particularly austere space. “I love how clean it is. Calm. No clutter.”

“Okay,” I nodded. “So, when you come home after a long day, where do you drop your keys and your bag?”

She paused. The image on the screen offered no answer. There was no entryway table, no hook, no bowl. To have one would be to admit that a person actually entered this room, burdened by the messy ephemera of the outside world.

“And this sofa,” I continued, gesturing to a cloud-like creation of white fabric. “You mentioned you love having your friends over for wine and movie nights.”

“Yes,” she said, a little less certain now.

“It’s a gorgeous piece,” I said gently. “But it feels more like a sculpture than a place to curl up with a glass of Malbec and your two best friends. It’s a sofa that’s afraid of a spill. It’s afraid of a footprint. It’s afraid of a life.”

This is the central dilemma we architects now face. We are being asked to design not for human beings, but for their digital avatars. We are being asked to build showrooms for a life, not homes for a living. The pursuit of a flawless aesthetic, one that performs well on a 6-inch screen, is actively killing the very essence of what a home is: a sanctuary of comfort, personality, and beautiful, chaotic reality.

What happens to design when every object is chosen for its photogenic quality over its function or sentimental value? You get a house full of props. The books are chosen for their neutral spines, not their content. The ceramic pot is chosen because it completes a vignette, not because you love gardening. The guitar in the corner is a sculptural element, its strings never touched.

These spaces are designed to be scanned, not inhabited. Their primary function is to serve as a flattering, neutral background for the main subject: the person posing within it. The home becomes a stage set, and every day becomes a performance.

I asked K. Anya another question. “Before you started collecting these images, what was the one piece of furniture you own that you truly love?”

She looked away from the screen, her eyes losing their focus for a moment. “That’s easy,” she said, a genuine smile finally breaking through. “My grandmother’s old teak cabinet. It’s from her house in Chiang Mai. It’s dark, and a little scratched, and the carvings are probably too traditional. It wouldn’t fit in any of these rooms.”

“And why do you love it?” I asked.

“I don’t know… When I open the doors, it still smells faintly of the herbal medicines she used to keep in there. My hand fits perfectly in the worn spot on the door where she opened it a thousand times. It’s… her.”

And there it was. The soul. Not in the pristine, beige lookbook, but in a scratched, dark, and 'imperfect' piece of wood that held a memory in its very grain.

Our entire design process shifted in that moment. We started not with an aesthetic, but with a story. We started with her grandmother's cabinet. The color palette for the living room was drawn not from a trending filter, but from a vibrant painting she’d bought on a trip to India and hidden in a closet because it was “too much.” The sofa we chose was a deep, welcoming blue, made from a durable fabric that invited lounging, not policing. We designed custom, clever storage to hide the daily clutter, allowing the special, personal items to breathe.

The final result was not the “Instagram Room” she first showed me. It was better. It was hers. It was a space that couldn't be captured in a single, sterile square. You had to walk through it. You had to feel the cool, solid weight of the cabinet handle, see how the intense Bangkok light played on the textured surface of the blue sofa, and sit down to truly understand it. It was a home designed for all five senses, not just the fleeting glance of a follower scrolling by.

So, how do we reclaim our homes from this tyranny of the perfect image?

We must start by giving ourselves permission to be imperfect. Permission to have a stack of mail on the counter. Permission to own a comfortable, ugly armchair because it’s where you feel most at peace. Permission to hang your child's chaotic, colorful art instead of a minimalist line drawing.

We have to consciously choose function over form, and sentiment over style. Ask yourself not “How will this look online?” but “How will this make me feel every day?” The most vital, soulful, and beautiful interiors I have ever had the privilege of designing are the ones that could never be fully captured on camera. They are beautiful not because they are flawless, but because they are true.

Look around your room right now. Find the object that doesn't fit the aesthetic, the one that wouldn’t get any ‘likes.’ The mug you’ve had for a decade, the worn-out book, the faded photograph. That is where your home truly begins.

That is where your life is. Don't let anyone, least of all an algorithm, convince you to design it away.