Home Design For Anarchists.

Feng Shui, the ancient study of the relationship between human beings and their surroundings, now has a noteworthy counterpart – Punk Shui; the art of creating chaos in your home. The interior design movement from New York City wants to liberate people from commercial aesthetics and is working to make the Punk Shui lifestyle more acceptable. Interior designer Josh Amatore Hughes believes, non-conformity in your home will free your creativity and originality.

Forget everything you know

Hughes promotes the distressed look. With his profession comes a strong dislike for chain store furniture (in particular from IKEA), sponge-art walls and floral wallpaper. He suggests to shoot at your gear, slash your couch or curtains and get creative with blowtorches, machetes or screwdrivers; even better; destroy your entire apartment. For the perfect finishing touch, throw away any form of air freshener and replace with cigarette soup. You will feel a lot better about being broke once you embrace disorder and say farewell to the illusion of good taste. Avoid anything you would find on Martha Stewart or in Boutique Target and think outside the box. Relocate your alarm clock, bathroom items, kitchen utensils, then decorate your pad with trophies from your latest dumpster dive. Think precarious wall hangings and odd furniture placement.

Punk Shui also helps you to apply these principles to your yard, party, business and life.

No Kitsch Allowed

Hughes does not like kitsch. He has zero tolerance for animal or flower decorations, cute figurines as well as cheesy presents from mums or neighbors. He does allow pot plants though and cats and snakes are totally cool.

I wonder, isn’t a cactus in the sink and a hand sticking out of a toilet a rather kitschy bathroom set up? Displaying your guns on the wall seems more Midwestern than Rock & Roll. Hanging your bike from the ceiling is not very convenient and moving the bed next to the window to hear the sirens better is really not my cup of tea. All this destruction seems somewhat unnecessary and the results are not incredibly kid-save. For an author who lives off take-away, it is easy to suggest to move your spices out of the kitchen.

When this book was published, Josh Amatore Hughes lived in New York City and had a yard. By profession, he has clients like Mike Watt or couples that redo their loft. Clients that pay him. Clients with houses big enough to make up for the lost functionality of one of their toilets. Clients that might like to just transform a room or two.

Maybe you will find a more authentic version of Punk Shui in the houses of students or starving artists. You can be all anti-establishment in your own home if you like but once you broke all your furniture, where do you put your books? Hughes’ call for creating rather than consuming is the essence of this book. He wants to free us brainwashed, zombielike creatures, tortured by capitalism, to reconnect with our creativity. Hughes creates chaos in his home to hide from the bad outside world, which sounds a lot like comfort behavior. Perhaps someone who screws a broken guitar on the wall and collects old furniture, has a nostalgic, kitschy streak?

Recommended for: the 30+ crowd and old punk rockers.