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Home means something different to every person, and the seven trans and non-binary creators profiled by Architectural Digest describe it variously as sanctuary, self-expression, care, creative work space, and freedom from outside expectations. Their apartments and houses are not a design formula for a whole community; they are individual accounts of how surroundings can help someone feel recognized and safe. Taken together, the interviews show that a home can be built slowly through art, plants, color, tactile materials, collected objects, shared decisions, or simply the ability to control the atmosphere. The original feature, by River Davies and published June 29, 2023, is available in Architectural Digest’s interview collection.
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What does home mean in these seven accounts?
There is no single trans or non-binary definition of home in this feature. The creators describe different needs and pleasures: a refuge where external pressure falls away, a room that reflects a public identity, a place to practice self-care, a setting for work and relationships, or a landscape of objects gathered over time. Their stories are best read as distinct perspectives rather than as a survey. Seven interviews cannot establish how trans or non-binary people generally experience housing, and the feature offers no population statistics.
What the accounts do share is an emphasis on agency. Each creator points to decisions that make a space feel personally legible: selecting a meaningful painting, tending plants, painting a rented wall, choosing furniture for its texture, or negotiating a common palette with a partner and colleague. Those decisions are small in scale but significant in what they communicate: “I am allowed to decide what belongs here.”
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How can a home become a refuge from outside pressure?
For Chris Griffin, known as Plant Kween, home is a place of rest, joy, calm, lushness, and healing. Griffin, a gardener and author who speaks from their experience as a Black queer non-binary person, describes the apartment as a refuge where they can exist without external pressure. Plants and art carry memories, so the room is not merely decorated; it keeps a relationship with the past while making space for the present and future.
Griffin summarizes the visual balance as “maximalist when it comes to plants and minimalist when it comes to everything else.” The phrase is personal rather than prescriptive. It shows how a person can pursue abundance in one category while keeping the rest of a room quiet enough to rest. Griffin also describes choosing travel accommodations for their atmosphere and unpacking clothes on arrival so a temporary room begins to feel settled. In that account, home is partly a portable practice: familiar rituals can create comfort even when the address changes.
Designer Melo Davis offers a related but distinct definition: “To me, home is comfort and safety, a sense of something reliable.” Davis describes his apartment as the first home where he could make all the aesthetic decisions himself. He chose some pieces with childhood preferences in mind, treating those choices as a form of care. The calm room and low furniture are not presented as universally calming; they are the result of finally having authority over the environment.
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Writer and podcaster Rose Dommu connects a home’s visual language with both private style and public identity. After returning to New York, she found a loft-like studio with tall ceilings and large windows. She says it became the first home in which she put substantial intention into making the space feel like hers. A meaningful painting, chosen with her best friend and bought as her first major art purchase, became an anchor.
Dommu describes collecting antiques, vintage objects, and things with stories instead of filling the apartment with generic furnishings. The point is not that old objects are inherently more authentic. It is that objects with personal or historical associations can give a room a narrative that mass-produced basics may not provide. Her account also acknowledges that a private interior can be connected to a public-facing identity: the style she lives with is part of how she understands herself, not a performance imposed from outside.
Nori Reed, a comedian and writer, found a different route to the same sense of authorship. In a rented home, she painted a pink accent wall after previously hesitating to leave a mark on rental spaces. The color was tied to a long-held image of the person she hoped to become. Painting one wall did more than change the palette; it made a private aspiration visible in daily life.
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Reed describes home as the place where she can be fully herself and says she wants control over the energy in her space. She also names places beyond a literal residence where she feels welcome. That distinction matters: belonging can be created by relationships and communities as well as by square footage, tenure, or decorating freedom.
Why do objects, surfaces, and plants matter so much?
The interviews repeatedly return to sensory and material choices. Davis advises paying attention to textures and, when possible, touching surfaces before buying furniture that someone will sit on or use every day. His point is practical: a chair, fabric, or tabletop is encountered through the body as well as the eye. Comfort can depend on the feel, firmness, and temperature of a material, not only on how it photographs.
Davis’s room includes the Hem Puffy Chair by Faye Toogood, mentioned as part of his personal account rather than as a shopping recommendation. The feature gives no price, availability information, or product test for the chair. What matters editorially is the way a specific object can carry a childhood preference into an adult space.
For Griffin, plants are both living companions and memory-holders. Their presence makes the apartment lush and connects the room to an ongoing process of care. Asher Ford, founder and designer of Object Lover, also talks about plants, although she says she does not consider herself especially skilled at keeping them alive. That admission broadens the idea of a “plant person”: enjoyment does not require perfect maintenance or expert knowledge.
Ford’s company makes plant pots, but her interview is not an endorsement of a particular pot or retailer. Her comments are about the pleasure of objects, gardening, and finding a setting that supports her life. The practical lesson for a reader is optional and modest: choose a plant, vessel, or tactile item because it helps you feel at home, not because a design trend says you should.
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How do movement, renting, and permanence shape a sense of home?
Ford describes moving often, enjoying the search for a new home, and choosing Austin partly because she understood its culture to be open to queerness. A rental with a yard and a quiet garden appealed to her. Her account treats movement as a source of possibility rather than automatically as instability. The next home can be an opportunity to revise the environment and discover a different daily rhythm.
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Reed’s pink wall shows the opposite tension: renting can make people hesitate to leave a mark, even when a small change would make the space feel more personal. Her decision to paint challenged that hesitation. The story does not imply that every renter should repaint, or that every landlord permits it. It shows how control over one visible element can carry emotional weight when a person has spent years adapting to spaces that were not theirs to alter.
Griffin’s practice of unpacking in temporary accommodations offers another model of mobility. Rather than waiting for a permanent address, they create continuity through routine and atmosphere. Across these accounts, permanence is not the only route to belonging. Roots can come from collected objects, repeated rituals, chosen colors, or the knowledge that a room can be changed again.
Can a home support work, partnership, and public life?
Yes. Home in these interviews is not always sealed off from professional or social life. Kylo Freeman, an actor and founder of For Them, and Em Chadwick, the company’s chief creative officer, describe a SoHo home that also functions as a workplace. A basement office supports the company, while the upper floors hold living space. The arrangement makes the home a working environment without reducing it to an office.
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Dommu’s story similarly connects private comfort with a public-facing style, while Reed points to welcoming places outside the home. Together, the accounts resist a strict public-versus-private split. A home can be restorative and outward-looking, a place for solitude and collaboration, or a backdrop for the work through which someone is known.
What patterns appear across the interviews—and what should we avoid assuming?
Four useful patterns emerge, although they are editorial syntheses rather than categories the creators themselves claim. First is sanctuary and restoration: Griffin’s refuge and Davis’s reliability place safety and calm at the center. Second is movement and reinvention: Ford’s enjoyment of moving, Griffin’s portable settling rituals, and Reed’s changed rental show that belonging can be rebuilt.
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Third is material self-recognition. Dommu’s storied objects, Davis’s attention to texture, Griffin’s plants, and Reed’s pink wall make identity tangible without reducing it to a single style. Fourth is shared or public use: Freeman and Chadwick’s combined home-office, Dommu’s link between private style and public identity, and Reed’s wider sense of welcome show that home can connect to other people and activities.
None of these patterns proves that trans or non-binary people prefer maximalist plants, pink walls, vintage furniture, low seating, or any other aesthetic. Nor does the feature establish that a particular city, room type, ownership status, or decorating budget creates safety. The responsible reading is person-specific: ask what a creator says a choice does for them, and do not turn that choice into a community-wide prescription.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How can you use these ideas without copying someone else’s style?
Start with the feeling you want a room to support, then choose one change that serves that feeling. If reliability matters, Davis’s attention to surfaces suggests sitting on or touching furniture before committing. If memory matters, Griffin’s plants or Dommu’s objects with stories offer examples of letting personal associations guide selection. If visibility matters, Reed’s painted wall demonstrates how one deliberate color can mark a turning point, subject to rental rules.
People who move frequently can create continuity with portable objects, a familiar arrangement, or the ritual of unpacking. People who share a home can identify a common palette or divide zones so each person has meaningful control, as Freeman and Chadwick did. Someone who is not confident with plants can choose a low-maintenance variety or simply use a pot, photograph, or other object that evokes greenery; Ford’s comments make clear that affection for plants does not require expertise.
Safety may also involve factors decoration cannot solve, including housing discrimination, privacy, finances, accessibility, or conflict with other residents. The interviews focus on meaning and atmosphere, not a substitute for legal, medical, or housing support. A room can help someone recover and feel recognized, but it cannot by itself guarantee security.
What is the central lesson of the feature?
Home is an ongoing act of authorship. Griffin calls their space “a love letter to my past, present, and future self” and says they are writing it patiently and intentionally. Davis names comfort, safety, and reliability. Dommu, Reed, Ford, Freeman, and Chadwick each show other routes: collecting, coloring, moving, sharing, working, tending, and choosing.
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The strongest conclusion is not that one design looks especially queer or trans. It is that a person should be able to decide what their surroundings mean, at the pace and budget available to them. These seven accounts make that principle visible through very different rooms and routines.
Source and scope
This article draws on River Davies’s “7 Trans and Non-Binary Creators Share What Home Means to Them,” published by Architectural Digest on June 29, 2023. The source is an interview collection, not quantified research or a representative sample.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these interviews a survey of trans and non-binary housing experiences?
No. They are seven personal accounts from designers, artists, performers, writers, and founders, with Kylo Freeman and Em Chadwick interviewed together. The feature includes no population statistic, so its examples should not be treated as representative.
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The stories do not require ownership or major renovation. Portable art, plants, textiles, furniture placement, unpacking rituals, and objects with personal meaning can change how a room feels; any alteration should follow the lease and local rules.
Do I need an elaborate decorating style to feel at home?
No. The creators’ approaches range from lush plants and collected antiques to calm rooms and a single accent wall. The common thread is personal control and meaning, not expense, maximalism, or a particular visual trend.
How can partners or roommates make a shared home feel equitable?
Freeman and Chadwick describe working toward a shared palette in a home that also houses their company. A practical starting point is to identify decisions each person controls, agree on genuinely shared elements, and preserve some space for individual objects or routines.
Can a place outside my house count as home?
Yes. Reed talks about places beyond a literal residence where she feels welcome, and Griffin describes creating familiarity while traveling. Belonging can come from people, routines, and atmosphere as well as from a permanent address.
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