When it comes to interior design, these Coloradans want you to get weird
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DENVER — Lily Walters doesn’t know the name of the man she sees in her house every day. With a thick white beard and long hair pouring out from a combination cap, he appears to be a ship captain. He always has a pipe in his mouth.
He is also oil on canvas, dating back to about the 1960s, Walters thinks.
She bought the artwork on Facebook Marketplace. The purchase is an example of her walking the walk.
A Denver-based interior designer, Walters encourages her clients and followers to reject the stale and inoffensive — often labeled as “timeless,” she said — and act on their gut feelings when it comes to interior design.
“Finding those pieces that really speak to you, speak to your soul — the ones that you get so excited to see every time you come home — that’s timeless,” she said.
The nameless skipper now hangs above the fireplace in her midcentury modern Virginia Village home.
Walters moved to Colorado when she was 8 years old. Now 28, she has more than one million followers on social media. Her videos, including a series called “your home isn’t weird enough,” have amassed tens of millions of views. Her work puts her in the company of a growing number of designers, influencers and homeowners decrying the cookie-cutter aesthetics of flipped homes and instead leaning into historic, eclectic and downright odd design.
“We’re all so worried about doing our homes right that we forget to make them weird,” she said in part one of her “weird” series, which she posted in June. Her third installment, in which she recommended, among other things, an alligator toilet handle and a “staircase that tells a horse story,” received 11 million views on Instagram and TikTok. "Seriously," one of the top comments on the post reads. "I’m so over this grey washed Airbnb aesthetic that everyone has."
“I just think that we’ve kind of lost the plot in terms of homes,” Walters said from her dining table, her scarlet sweater popping against the room’s dark wood wall paneling.
“I don’t know who started the trend that you need to remove all character from your home for it to be great.”
The answer might lie with house flippers, landlords and cable TV.
Amanda Mull, in a 2022 article for The Atlantic, chronicled the HGTV-fueled proliferation of gray laminate flooring, white subway tile backsplashes and sprawling barn doors — hallmarks of the house-flipper aesthetic.
“They’ve chosen these things just as much for what they aren’t as for what they are — inoffensive, inexpensive, innocuous,” Mull wrote.
Since 2022, roughly 8% of all home sales in the United States have been flips, many with this same aesthetic. “These houses aren’t necessarily designed to be lived in,” according to Mull. “They’re designed to go into contract.”
Today, Walters and her followers are ready to lean into eccentric, historic and, yes, weird design.
According to Jorgen Jensen, a broker with the real estate company Fantastic Frank who has worked in Denver for 18 years, Coloradans are increasingly in search of the “true nature” of a home, especially in historic parts of Capitol Hill, Uptown and Curtis Park.
“Homeowners and buyers are less interested in the generic ‘flip’ product and more drawn spaces that tell a story, spaces that feel like they were designed intentionally to have some longevity,” he said.
Many of the city’s historic properties, Jensen said, have an almost-tangible “soul” that people are “resonating with more now more than ever.”
One of Jensen’s recent listings is a two-bedroom apartment in the Perrenoud, a 1901 building in the heart of Uptown that wears its history proudly. The lobby includes marble stairs and one of the city’s only operating birdcage elevators. The building’s fitness room is in the former ballroom, and is likely to be the only gym in Denver in which the treadmill faces classical wainscoting and decorative molding.
The apartment unit has built-in cabinets and stained glass windows original to 1901. These elements are things to celebrate, not shy away from, Jensen said, even if they don’t complement the “Millennial Minimalist” aesthetic that dominated much of the last decade and a half.
Many of Denver’s historic properties, such as the units at the Perrenoud, come with a luxury price tag. Only so many people can afford a two-bed, one-bath for $650,000. Plus, high-quality or vintage furniture that fits the aesthetics of these properties can cost thousands of dollars, even if they’re second-hand, a reason many people turn to the cheaper particle board furniture of big box stores and online retailers.
Walters recommends investing the most money in pieces that get a lot of use, such as couches, rugs and bedframes. Furniture that doesn’t get as much wear-and-tear, like barstools, can be a place to save money. It’s the same price-per-use mentality that is common in buy-it-for-life forums.
Cost, however, is just one factor preventing the quirky curious from pulling the trigger on redecorating their homes. Roughly a third of Coloradans are renters, and landlords and property management companies often have strict rules against painting, let alone changing out countertops or backsplashes.
In other words, a lot of people want to make changes to their homes; they’re just not allowed to.
People who own their homes have much more flexibility when it comes to renovations, if they can afford them. As The Washington Post reported earlier this year, some homeowners are going so far as to “unflip” their homes.
Homeownership remains out of reach for many Coloradans, even as prices are showing signs of a downturn. Those who do buy homes often have no intention of living in them; in the second quarter of 2025, real estate investors purchased a third of all single-family homes sold in America.
If the investors — many of whom own multiple properties — have a goal to maximize profit either through leasing the space or flipping it, then there is little incentive to use high-quality (or unique) materials, part of the reason materials like gray vinyl flooring are omnipresent in rentals across the country.
“Hardwood floors were out of my price range. Anything with any character at all was out of my price range,” a renter in West Hollywood told the Los Angeles Times last year.
“Once they [gray floors] go out of style, I’ll swap them for the next thing," an LA landlord told the paper, "as long as it’s cost-effective.”
“Once they [gray floors] go out of style, I’ll swap them for the next thing," an LA landlord told the paper, "as long as it’s cost-effective.”
Walters was quick to point out that she is a renter, and that many of her home’s fixtures, including a sprawling chandelier above her dining table, are renter-friendly (i.e., they don’t require cutting holes into the wall and hardwiring). The garnet backsplash in her kitchen are peel-and-stick tiles. Walters advocates for small, lease-compliant changes to things like curtains or cabinet hardware that can make a big difference in the personality of a room. (Door handles that look like mustangs, anyone?)
Whether someone is looking for pocket-sized tchotchkes or expansive wall art, Walters sends them to one place: the Brass Armadillo, a vast antique mall off I-70 in Wheat Ridge. Walters recommends calling out sick from work, packing a lunch and spending all day inside the 45,00-square-foot mall.
Tina Sutton has sold furniture at the Brass Armadillo for the past 17 years and follows home decor trends closely. She first got set up with a booth at the mall when “shabby chic” — some call it cottagecore — was all the rage. That gave way to farmhouse styles, and now midcentury modern is in vogue.
Sutton thinks the next big trend is eclectic homes. She’s even seen signs of it from HGTV mainstays like Joanna Gaines, a leader of the modern farmhouse movement.
“Nothing in my house matches,” Sutton said. “It's decorating from your heart and being unique. I see the new homes. I have a niece in Castle Rock. Everybody's house looks the same: gray floor, white walls, white cupboards. I don’t want that.”
Oil paintings, particularly landscapes, are becoming more popular among younger buyers, Sutton said. A few stalls down, Gary Stover confirmed as much. Stover, whose stall is set up right in front of the Brass Armadillo entrance, has been in the art and antique business for more than 50 years. Many of the paintings he sells — often landscapes and portraits — come in ornate frames. Walters’ captain painting would fit right in.
“I've lived a life where I've always thought it's better to be surrounded by the stuff that, you know, connects with you and that is usually from a certain period,” he said. “But that's me, and there are many, many people who like to have a kind of eclectic look. And that's particularly true, I think, of young people.”
Type of story: News
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. To read more about why you can trust the journalism of Rocky Mountain PBS, please visit our editorial standards and practices page.