My hate, I’ve realised, is often shame. I’ve hated a lot of things in my life, especially about my house: the lined glassware, my mum’s aggressively floral bed sheets, our overcrowded kitchen counters, and the fact we can never sit on the couches in the formal sitting area.
Even when I was little and lived in Pakistan, I hated inviting my friends to my house. I always chose to go out. My house always felt bland and flat to me. This got worse when I came to Australia. I’ve only ever had my POC friends over, and even then, I tried to shove things in the closet and brighten the house with blinds pulled completely up and lamps all turned on. I apologised for the mess and how boring my house was . I felt ashamed because no matter how much we tried, our house always felt …brown. Bland, and outdated.
The one thing I hate the most about our house is all the Persian rugs. They were expensive, but I hated them. I begged my mum to buy a different rug when we moved houses again. I could never understand why we had to get such an outdated, aggressively bright rug.
I didn’t understand where my disdain came from. I grew up with those rugs, sat on them, played on them, and ate on them. My grandma’s house was adorned with those rugs, and on Eid my cousins would all sit and eat and talk on them. My brothers and I would play board games on the ones at my house. I would get my mehndi (henna) done on them when everyone came over to watch the news for the moon sightings in anticipation of Eid. Plenty of times, I had lounged on them while my parents and grandparents sat on the couches. I would look up at them and listen to them talk and tell stories. But I only hated them more now that I live in Australia.
I’m not the only one. My Pakistani friend apologised for how her house looked when I visited her, but she sighed in relief when she came over and realised my house looked like that too. I didn’t know how to describe what fault or failure we saw in our homes. But the feeling always came to life when I remembered how other people’s houses didn’t look like that. My other friends had shiny, white-tiled homes with cream couches and the perfect hotel-type bedspread. Why couldn’t our house look modern like everyone else’s? I wanted fur rugs, all-white bed sheets, and odd minimalist trinkets. I wanted those cool neutral-toned rugs in every Pinterest house decor picture.
That was the question. Why is it that I idealised this particular, bland, and sterile style so much that I hated how my and my people’s homes looked? This particularly became a question once my Pinterest feed became filled with aesthetic, modelled photos of Persian rugs from Western creators. For some reason, the rugs looked nicer to me when models posed with them. This contradiction in my perspective intrigued me. I decided to explore the roots of the rugs; to understand what the fuss was all about. I stumbled on art, photographs, and lovingly written pieces about the rugs.
I willed myself to stop and actually stare at the red, white, and green rug in my living room. I noticed the intricate patterns and the way the colours mingled and danced within themselves, embedded in the cultural fabrics of its homeland. From Iranian cultural narrations, I learned that the variations of the floral motifs, the playful borders and the bold medallions all represent the reflection of the weaver’s soul. The designs hold meaning and tell stories; for example, a tear-drop-shaped motif is known as the boteh; a sign of life and eternity, while the colours red indicate happiness, while blue represents solitude and peace.
Persian rugs, or ‘farsh’, have held history and important roles throughout the Persian and Ottoman Empires, as well as in South Africa and India. From symbols of wealth, culture, and power in royal palaces to centrepieces in weddings, social events, and gatherings, these rugs held their importance. In Iranian custom, they are used in religious ceremonies to create a clean, sacred, and special prayer space. In homes, their roles varied from defining sacredness to adding beauty to being a place of rest and peace. Therefore, much love and care existed for Persian rugs as they were often passed down generations as family heirlooms, carrying the memories with them.
Learning this made me center myself and understand my hatred as shame, and my shame as a product of something even more utterly gross. We often forget that our likes, dislikes, styles, and aesthetics derive from greater meanings and deeper perceptions; these ideas aren’t derived from a vacuum. What we deem “modern” and “stylish” are often deeply tied to colonial legacy; it’s a reflection of Eurocentric ideals and power dynamics from their colonial past. This is funny, considering that European “good taste” has always relied on the appropriation of products from their colonised regions. Our widespread standard of what “good” interior design is supposed to be — clean, balanced, minimalistic — holds the legacy of colonialism and their attempts to “improve” and “modernise” local environments whilst appropriating and commodifying indigenous culture. These ugly histories create ideologies that associate a lack of adherence to Western colonial concepts of cleanliness and style or too much “culture”, to be definitions of “failure”, “lack of style” or being “out-of-date”.
Western design has a habit of taking from other cultures, stripping context, and repackaging elements as “modern”, only when detached from their origins. Think of Moroccan tiles and patterns, Southeast Asian rattan furniture, or even Persian rugs, once seen by colonial powers as excessive, loud and an item of unsophisticated culture, now rebranded as “boho chic” when placed in Western homes. The same happens with colour palettes: while traditional Indian or African interiors were historically dismissed as “too loud” or “unrefined muted versions of these same aesthetics become trendy once filtered through a Western lens.
Beyond just appropriation, colonialism and Westernisation dictate that style itself is tied to whiteness. The dominance of minimalist, neutral-toned interiors, often associated with “clean”, “sophisticated”, and “timeless” aesthetics, reinforces the idea that anything too bold, too colourful, or too culturally specific is excessive or outdated. This aesthetic bias is racialised, linking Western whiteness with modernity while positioning non-Western styles as cluttered, chaotic, and primitive. Even in the fashion and design industries, terms like “elevated” or “refined” often refer to how much a style aligns with Western simplicity rather than its cultural significance. In this way, Western concepts of “good taste” are not just about design; it is about reinforcing colonial hierarchies of whose aesthetics are worthy of admiration and whose are not.
I pondered over how my shame for my home came from a place of not feeling like my house was “white” enough. When really the stylishness of my house exists outside the “modern” concept of style. My house is amazing because it’s different. I loved the colours present and bouncing around my home. I now believe that my mum’s floral bedsheets are lively, and all the ‘excess’ stuff displayed across every room is a story telling of the Pakistani culture present everywhere, of how my home is a safe space between the culture and time of Pakistan and Australia.
So now I sit and trace the patterns of the Persian rugs laid out in my home. I imagine all the people who came before me, who danced, played, talked, and slept all on these rugs. Who weaved these arts and who found a home in them. These rugs adorned the homes of so many people with rich histories, with long stories and deep conversations. These rugs heard their struggles and their laughs and felt their warmth. These rugs, their sisters and their brothers, held a place in history.
