You have seen the videos: the celebrities trotting through their squillion-dollar manors on camera, beckoning towards the signifiers of their (and their underpaid assistants’) impeccable, lavish taste. If you scrunch your eyes enough, you can picture yourself living there too: among Troye Sivan’s stupidly chic tchotchkes; in Dakota Johnson’s entirely green kitchen; alongside Kylie Jenner’s inexplicable, outsize James Turrell sculpture.
Because I am a writer, my only hope is to marry rich. But that has not stopped me from trying – to the distress of many housemates – to style my hovel like these palatial showrooms, on the off-chance that I become suddenly famous and Architectural Digest decides to email me. I spend my days endlessly fussing and rearranging homewares. I like to think of myself as a Marketplace maven, except for the times I wimp out of a tough negotiation and end up getting scammed by a side table seller (actually this is every time). I tell any and all houseguests that turning on overhead lighting is like killing my firstborn. Well, no, that one is a lie. Overhead lighting would be worse.
