“Joy drenching” may be the latest interiors expression, but the idea behind it is timeless: forget the imaginary audience and fill your home with colors, objects and lights that make you happy.
Interior design has acquired a new expression: “joy drenching”. It’s a little buzzy, but really it just means decorating for the person who actually lives in your home.
This should hardly be revolutionary, but the odd thing is that we absorb so many other people’s rooms: in magazines, on Instagram and so on, that an imaginary ‘audience’ can begin to creep into our own decisions.
We might even start worrying about what a hypothetical future buyer would make of the wallpaper...
Joy drenching offers a useful corrective because it insists that you worry about nothing except a very simple question: Do you like it?
The pleasure of pleasing yourself
Decorating for yourself does not mean abandoning all judgment, but rather, allowing pleasure to count as a serious consideration.
Perhaps you have always loved red, despite being told it is “difficult”. Perhaps you feel an inexplicable pull toward scalloped edges, striped lamp shades, or the combination of pink and green. Perhaps a slightly eccentric lamp makes you smile every time you pass it.
Well the idea of joy drenching is that that little response tells you more about what belongs in your home than any number of mood boards.
The happiest rooms often contain choices that are difficult to explain through design theory, and they can be very personal. You might love a color because it’s carried over from childhood. Or an object might have been bought on the best vacation you ever had. These are the things that give a home its life.
Joy does not have a house style
Now, the term “joy drenching” may bring to mind rooms filled with bright colors and clashing patterns. And yes, that can certainly be joyful, but it is only one version of it…
Your particular form of joy might be a deep olive green, or something very simple and elegant, like a beautifully shaped wooden lamp base. Or it might be the warm gleam of antique brass.
Lots of color and pattern doesn’t automatically make it truly expressive. A restrained room assembled slowly from things its owner genuinely loves can be very joyful indeed.
Follow the little spark
You know that feeling, when you see something and immediately want to look at it again, even if you can’t say why or where it will go, and it may be unlike anything else you own. Still, it has caught your attention and set off a little spark.
This is where personal style often begins, even if the sensible voice will always ask whether it’s practical or coordinated with the curtains etc. But sometimes that voice should be ignored: a home chosen entirely according to what can be justified risks becoming curiously impersonal.
That first flicker of delight is generally worth following. Some of the best rooms are built around things their owners could not quite resist: the beautiful oddity arrives first, and the room gradually makes sense around it.
Start with a lamp
Lighting is an especially forgiving way to trust your instincts, because unlike a sofa or a wallpaper it can simply appear in a room and begin changing it immediately with its color, shape and style. And if you change your mind, move it.
A traditional pleated shade might sit beautifully on a glossy contemporary base, while a vivid color base may be exactly what an otherwise neutral-ish room needs.
This is one of the pleasures of Pooky-style mix-and-match lighting: lamps and shades don’t have to come pre-approved, they just need to make each other interesting to you. Mix first, rationalize later!
A home that could only belong to you
Joy drenching may be a new name, but decorating for yourself is a timeless idea.
Perhaps the most useful thought within joy drenching is that your home does not need to prove that you understand interiors, represent the latest style perfectly or win the approval of an imaginary panel of style judges.
It just needs to contain all the things you love and give you pleasure when you walk through the door.
Browse our collection and find the lamps and shades that fill you with joy.