Is Instagram Making You Hate Your Own Home?

I can spend an embarrassing amount of time looking at other people’s homes on Instagram. Occupational hazard, I suppose. I love seeing beautiful interiors, discovering unusual furniture and finding clever ideas I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of myself.

But occasionally, I’ll come across a particularly gorgeous living room and find myself looking around my own house with a slightly more critical eye. A house I was perfectly happy with about five minutes earlier, I might add.

And I suspect I’m not the only one doing this. You can genuinely love your home, have spent years getting it exactly how you want it, and still find yourself questioning things after a little too much scrolling. That lovely sofa suddenly looks a bit ordinary, the kitchen you’ve always liked could perhaps do with updating, and the colour you spent weeks choosing doesn’t seem quite as interesting anymore.

Nothing has changed in your house, of course. You’ve just been looking at somebody else’s.

When Inspiration Starts Making You Dissatisfied

The trouble is that the supply of inspiration is practically endless.

Instagram is a fantastic source of interior inspiration, and I’m certainly not going to pretend otherwise. I’ve discovered wonderful designers, furniture brands and ideas through social media, and I’ve shared plenty of my own home in return.

But there’s a difference between seeing something beautiful and appreciating it, and seeing something beautiful and immediately wondering whether your own home measures up.

The trouble is that the supply of inspiration is practically endless. You might have finally found the dining table you’ve been looking for, only to see another one you like even more three days later. You’ve just finished decorating your bedroom when someone posts a completely different style that looks equally gorgeous.

Even if you’re confident in your own taste, it’s difficult not to occasionally wonder whether you should have done something differently.

And Instagram is particularly good at making you want things you didn’t know you wanted. You weren’t remotely interested in replacing your kitchen taps until you saw those beautiful aged brass ones. You’d never considered painting your ceiling until a particularly convincing reel made it look like the most obvious design decision in the world.

Before you know it, your perfectly acceptable home has developed an impressive list of imaginary shortcomings.

Instagram is particularly good at making you want things you didn’t know you wanted.

You’re Comparing Your Entire Home With Someone Else’s Best Angle

As someone who photographs interiors regularly, I know exactly how much work can go into making a room look good in a picture.

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of waiting for the right light, but often it involves moving furniture, rearranging accessories and removing things that don’t look particularly attractive. The pile of paperwork on the table isn’t going to make the photograph any better, so naturally, it disappears.

The dog might be sleeping in the most inconvenient place imaginable, and the cushions have probably been adjusted more times than anyone would care to admit.

None of this is particularly dishonest. It’s photography, and people have been styling interiors for magazines long before Instagram existed. But when you’re scrolling through hundreds of beautiful images, it’s easy to forget that you’re looking at selected moments rather than the full picture.

You’re comparing the house you actually live in, complete with laundry, cables, everyday clutter and that one corner you still haven’t finished, with somebody else’s carefully composed photograph.

And then there’s the matter of scale. A beautiful kitchen might look enormous because of the camera angle, or a living room might appear wonderfully uncluttered because half the furniture is standing just outside the frame.

You don’t know whether the layout works particularly well, how much storage there is or whether that stunning sofa is actually comfortable. You just know it looks fantastic, and suddenly your own perfectly functional living room seems a little less exciting.

Even Knowing How Instagram Works Doesn’t Make You Immune

You’d think being an interior designer would make me reasonably resistant to all this. I know the difference between a good photograph and a good design, and I understand that a beautiful room isn’t necessarily a practical one.

I also have a fairly strong sense of what I like, which means I’m not particularly interested in changing my home every time a new trend comes along. And yet, I can still see something wonderful and start mentally rearranging my furniture.

I think that’s partly because appreciating design and wanting it for yourself can become rather tangled. I can admire a minimalist home with pale timber floors and beautifully restrained furniture without wanting to live in one.

I can love a dramatic, dark interior while knowing I’d miss the daylight in my own house. But after looking at enough examples of a particular style, even things that aren’t really you can begin to look strangely appealing.

There’s also the simple fact that Instagram rarely shows us the boring parts of design. Nobody is particularly interested in a reel about spending three weeks comparing nearly identical paint samples, discovering the expensive sofa doesn’t fit through the doorway or realising that the gorgeous dining chairs are deeply uncomfortable.

We see the finished result, usually accompanied by lovely music and flattering light. It’s rather easy to fall in love with the outcome when someone else has already dealt with all the annoying decisions.

The Never-Ending Possibility of Something Better

One thing I’ve noticed is that social media makes it increasingly difficult to feel finished with anything. There is always another beautiful room, another clever idea or another piece of furniture that might have been an even better choice.

And because interiors are such a visual subject, you don’t need to be actively shopping or planning a renovation to encounter them. They simply appear between holiday photographs, funny dog videos and whatever else the algorithm has decided you need to see.

I sometimes wonder whether having so many options is making us less satisfied with the decisions we’ve already made. Years ago, you might have chosen a sofa, loved it and happily lived with it for the next fifteen years. Now you can see fifty alternative sofas before breakfast, many of them styled in rooms that look considerably more impressive than your own. It’s not that your taste has suddenly changed, but you’re constantly being reminded of everything else you could have chosen.

Of course, changing your mind isn’t a bad thing. Our tastes evolve, our circumstances change, and sometimes seeing something new genuinely helps us recognise that an existing room isn’t working as well as it could. I’ve made plenty of changes to my own home over the years, and I don’t intend to stop.

But I do think there’s a difference between wanting to improve something because it bothers you and wanting to improve it because you’ve just seen somebody else’s version.

Do You Actually Want That, or Do You Just Like Looking at It?

This is a question I find myself asking more often, particularly when I come across an interior that’s very different from my own. I might absolutely love the photograph, save it for inspiration and then realise that almost nothing in it would suit my house or the way we live.

Perhaps it’s the beautiful natural light I’m responding to rather than the furniture. Or the architectural details, the proportions or simply the fact that somebody has managed to photograph a room without a single everyday object getting in the way.

It’s worth separating those things because a beautiful photograph can make almost any design decision look convincing. That enormous sculptural chair might be wonderful in a spacious architectural home but completely ridiculous in an ordinary living room. A kitchen without upper cabinets might look incredibly elegant until you remember how much stuff you actually own. And a bedroom styled with approximately seventeen decorative cushions might be lovely to look at, but somebody has to put them somewhere every night.

I also think we sometimes forget that we can appreciate a style without needing to adopt it. I love seeing interiors that are nothing like mine, and I wouldn’t want Instagram to become an endless collection of rooms that all reflect my personal taste.

There’s enormous pleasure in looking at beautiful design simply because it’s beautiful. We don’t need to turn every photograph we admire into another project for our own homes.

Would you live here?

Perhaps Your Home Was Fine Before You Opened Instagram

I’m not suggesting we should stop looking at interiors online. That would be a rather strange position for someone who spends a considerable amount of time sharing them.

And I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone should stop decorating, renovating or buying beautiful things. I love interiors far too much for that, and I suspect I’ll always find something in my house that I’d like to change.

But I do think it’s worth occasionally questioning where that sudden urge to change something has come from. If you’ve been unhappy with your living room for months because the layout doesn’t work, that’s a perfectly good reason to reconsider it.

If you loved it yesterday and only started having doubts after seeing somebody else’s spectacular renovation, perhaps the problem isn’t your living room.

I’ve spent years making my house feel like mine, and there are plenty of things about it that wouldn’t necessarily make sense in somebody else’s home. That’s rather the point. I don’t want to lose sight of the things I genuinely love simply because the internet keeps showing me other possibilities.