How should I make my apartment seem pretentious?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m moving into a new apartment in the University District soon, and I want my place to seem really pretentious to match my pretentious personality. I have asked a few friends. These are the suggestions so far:

  • Take a blurry photograph of an old banana and frame it.

  • Steal all the art from some cafe and put it up in my room.

  • Get a wine rack and keep lots of fancy-seeming wine on it.

Obviously, I need other suggestions. How should I make my home the ultimate concentration of bohemian high-brow snobbery?

2

Instead of a stereo have a record player with a bunch of prog rock records next to it.

3

Buy classic posters from the Sixties, classic risqué postcards from the Twenties, classic art nouveau pieces from the turn of the 20th century, etc, and frame them. Essentially, place High Bohemian art on a pedestal behind glass and worship it. 'Cause getting down and dirty with it and making your own art under its influence is soooo déclassé.

Oh, and sprinkle your speech with lots of French words and look down your nose at people who don’t know what they mean. But use them correctly, or the pretentiousness will crack.

4

You need a stereo to play the prog rock.

5

Have a collection of 1970s sitcom commemorative plates, ironically.

6

Have a collection of seats that are bizarrely shaped and are uncomfortable to sit. Something like the third down.

7

“They’re not chairs <rolleyes>. They’re ‘seating options’!”

8

You need to fill it with modern furniture. (The rest of the site also contains good suggestions.)

9

Get rid of the TV in your living room (keep it in your bedroom instead, where no one will see it). And when people ask you where yours is, explain that only plebs watch TV. Conveniently ignore the hypocrisy that is owning TV shows on DVD whilst insisting you “don’t watch TV.”

10

Put a basket or other suitable container for reading material in the bathroom and fill it with literary magazines like Granta.

11

The complete works of David Foster Wallace in the bookshelf.

12

[bolding mine]

I love that! It is like my favorite pretentious thing ever because the pretentious people are too pretentious to realize how crazy it sounds.

13

Basically, watch any of the recent Saturday Night Live sketches featuring the Schoeners. These feature Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph as avant-garde art dealers with weird furniture. I’ve been trying for the last ten minutes to find an example, but there don’t appear to be any on the SNL website.

14

Bring back the cravat. Amass large collection. Display prominently.

Props to Australian Masterchef’s Matt Preston for inspiration.
“I’ve learned that people think wearing a cravat is pretentious, but I say “Au contraire”.” – Matt Preston.

15

Every single successful artist’s apartment I’ve visited in the last few years features some variation of that chair. I want one.

16

What I want is the Eames lounge chair. The stereotype of modern furniture is that it’s uncomfortable, but that chair looks really comfortable. Someday I want an apartment or house where I have the room for it.

17

Fancy-seeming wine demands total commitment to fancy-seeming description.

Open a bottle and let it breath for a couple of hours. Then pour a little into the glass. Swirl it around a bit. Find a suitable similie for its clarity, like “as clear as the Ionian waters just off the coast of Zakinthos”. (If it’s opaque, just substitute ‘opaque’ for ‘clear’.) Sniff the wine and tell everybody the aroma is reminiscent of sweet woodruff and mermaid essence, mixed with prunes. When you taste the liquid, marvel at the subtlety of the combined flavours it offers, such as cherry, licorice, wild hay, plastic and damp raincoat.

Memorise details of the vintage. Whatever you do, don’t forget to add some details of your own. It is essential to know on which side of the vinyard the grapes were grown (I always say it’s from the north side, where growing conditions are far superior to other sides of most vinyards.) Knowing when the grapes were picked, the prevailing weather at the time of picking, and the names of the people who did the picking would be an added bonus.

You get the picture.

18

Play Sims on your Mac. Have your apartment exactly match your Sims apartment. Dress like your Sim. Speak Simlish.

19

You need one of these Keep Calm and Carry On signs.

I actually think it’s a charming thing, but the first time I ever saw one it was on a website (featuring apartments? houses? design? I don’t remember) and paired with the observation that every pretentious tit out there has these up on their walls and that they are just seen everywhere in this (housing? apartments? design?) sector of the internet. Or something like that. So it’s stuck in my mind as pretentious even though I like it, and I certainly could NEVER be considered pretentious. Oh no. (We never watch TV on our TV either though, as it isn’t hooked up to the outside world. We watch DVDs on it. And we watch TV on the computer.)

Anyway, while googling to see if I could find the original reference that cemented Keep Calm & Carry On with pretentiousness in my malleable little mind, I came across this. Books as decoration have always bothered me, as as all white decorating schemes. So this pigeonholes nicely.

Also, see if you can find an old typewriter at a thrift shop, preferably with its little case. Cover the case with stickers for bands that no one has ever heard of, and leave the typewriter out with a half finished e.e. cummings style poem on Crane paper.

20

Have posters or DVDs of movies from the following directors:

Lars von Trier
Andrei Tarkovsky (bonus points if you claim to have enjoyed Andrey Rublyov)
Jean-Luc Godard
Paul Verhoeven