Introducing MasculineInteriors.com

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When I was two-and-a-half years old, my father finished his Air Force commission and we left Berlin. We initially landed at my grandparents’ place in San Francisco, and there, while walking up the stairs of this strange new building, as my mother would tell me many years later, I uttered one of my earliest sentences: “Where’d my home go?”

My mother combined a master’s in Jungian psychology with astrology, which she first learned from my grandmother and later practiced professionally. She would tell me that my chart had extreme emphasis on the importance of my living space.

This is a meandering way of saying that it is with a lifelong sense of the importance and pleasure of appointing one’s living quarters that I’m pleased to announce the debut of my latest web project, MasculineInteriors.com.

It came about rather suddenly, as these things do, in a flurry of inspiration. A friend moved into a new apartment, and I helped her furnish the place. The process got me to scrutinize the parts of my own apartment, where I’ve been for going on three years, that didn’t exactly come out as imagined. What began as one simple plan to repaint a room ended up a complete transformation of my digs.

During this process my creative juices were flowing, and at some point I stumbled across the perfect combination of motivation to start a new web project: intense personal interest combined with what appears to be a hole in the market. “Masculine interiors” is evidently a popular search term, but save for some Pinterest and tumblrs there doesn’t seem to be a main site for it — and certainly not the kind that I envision.

So I hope to bring to the topic of men’s spaces the approach I’ve taken with style blogging for the past decade: variety and flexibility among a narrow topic (the topic of traditional golf clothes, if you’re wondering about GolfStyle.guru, turned out to be a little too narrow, though it was certainly great fun to do).

I plan to celebrate all the places where men make themselves comfortable in an elegant and stylish way, from bachelor pads to college dorms, high-rise offices to fraternal clubs, drawing on cinematic sets as much as real life, the traditional as well as modern, from British Colonial style in India to the swingin’ pad of Don Draper, and eras from the 19th century through the Art Deco and Midcentury Modern.

The ultimate goal of all the mish-mash will be curated inspiration for the reader. And it’s inspiration you can get on the go, as the site is responsive to whatever device you’re using, be it tablet or smart phone. That’s a change we’ll next have to make at this place. — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD