5 Hilariously Snarky Design Blogs That Will Make You Feel Better About Your Plain, Normal House

Finally, someone admits that Anthro furniture is insanely, laughably expensive.

Snarky-Houses

Book fireplaces, artsy tableaus, branch hangers. Time to make fun of design! | All images via Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table.

There’s a very specific sort of hate-reading that has nothing to do with checking out your sworn enemy’s Facebook statuses or scrolling through the site of a blogger you love to hate. (I have a friend who hate-reads FashionToast regularly, but insists that she has absolutely no deep-seated affection for author Rumi Neely.)

This hate-reading is targeted to design, specifically the old-hat styling conventions that have become something like the copious-knuckle-rings of the fashion blogosphere. This is my favorite kind of hate-reading, and the sort I do most often, with Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens and the Restoration Hardware catalogs. I scoff at RH’s stupid playroom setups. Who seriously would dare have an all-white nursery strung with Christmas lights? (Me! Me! I would! It’s so gorgeous, like a fairy land of dreams!) 

There are the design tricks and trends that have become so ubiquitous they’re laughable: the fireplace filled with books. The chalkboard wall. The faux-eclectic gallery wall that you, too, can have with one quick Pottery Barn spree. Mid-century modern everything. We make fun of these—I make fun of these: “Let’s all pretend we’re crafty and take the book jackets off our books and display them spine-in!” (Full disclosure: I actually did this back in high school and my parents made fun of me for years for it.) But secretly, I love most of them, and hate-read to laugh at myself (I have a chalkboard wall in my breakfast room; I am a walking cliché) and to get inspiration.

What’s even more fun than hate-reading by yourself? Doing so with others! Here are some of the funniest, snarkiest design blogs and posts out there. Read, and then go—run!—and find a worthy branch off which to hang all your jewelry.

Anthro

The freakout. (Chalkboard rugs are pretty stupid.) | Image via L.G. Tumbletown.

1. Let’s Make Fun of Anthropologie Furniture, Part 1.
This Tumblr post was written a year ago, but it’s recently started making the Facebook rounds. It’s spot-on, and hilarious. Why are those $3,000 tattered denim love seats staged in a weird decaying barn?

A sneak peek: “If you choose to purchase a piece of Anthropologie furniture, it will only really look right in one of three settings: 1. An alternative gallery space six weeks from opening, 2. An urban cabin with faulty electrical wiring, 3. A crumbling Southern plantation (soon to be deemed “the new loft” by the NYTimes).”

2. Let’s Make Fun of Anthropologie Furniture, Part 2.
The second installment, and jut as hilarious as the first.

Catolog-LIving

Never feel bad about your lack of place cards again. | Image via Catalog Living.

3. Catalog Living
Its tagline: “A glimpse into the exciting world of the people living in your catalogs.”

Seriously, though, who doesn’t envy the fabulous lives of the idiots throwing perfect dinner parties in West Elm catalogs? I hate these people, and I don’t even know them and they don’t even exist.

 

 

 

 

4. Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table
Things this blog hates: Books in empty fireplaces. Vintage pennants. Branch clothing racks. Failure to hide wires. Terrariums. All. Terrariums.

Unhappy-Hipsters

Sigh. | Image via Unhappy Hipsters.

5. Unhappy Hipsters
Ever flipped through a copy of Dwell? This makes fun of pretty much every space ever featured there. Stark modernism critique at its (hilarious) finest.