Between Two Worlds: How Asian-American Creatives Are Designing Homes That Tell Their Full Story

Walk into Priya Nair's Los Angeles home and you'll notice something immediately: it doesn't look like a magazine spread. It looks like a life.

A brass Ganesha sits on the entryway shelf, not tucked away but front and center, next to a stack of art books and a small succulent. The kitchen has open shelving where a hand-painted ceramic chai set shares space with a vintage Le Creuset. The living room mixes a low-slung mid-century sofa with a hand-knotted Kashmiri rug that belonged to her grandmother. There are plants everywhere — her mother always had plants everywhere.

"For a long time, I thought I had to choose," says Priya, a 38-year-old architect and first-generation Indian American. "Either I designed a home that looked 'American' and felt empty to me, or I leaned into my heritage in a way that felt like a costume. It took years to figure out that I didn't have to choose at all."

That realization is at the heart of a fascinating shift happening in American interior design right now.

Designing from the Inside Out

For decades, mainstream American interior design operated around a fairly narrow set of aesthetic references — Scandinavian minimalism, mid-century modernism, farmhouse chic, coastal casual. Beautiful, certainly. But not particularly reflective of the full range of people who actually live in American homes.

Asian Americans make up nearly 7 percent of the U.S. population, representing an extraordinarily diverse range of cultures, traditions, and histories. And a growing number of Asian-American designers, artists, and homeowners are pushing back against the idea that their domestic spaces should look like everyone else's.

The results are homes that feel genuinely original — not because they're following a trend, but because they're following a story.

"I think the best interiors are always autobiographical," says Kevin Liang, a San Francisco-based interior designer whose work blends contemporary American sensibility with deep references to his Taiwanese heritage. "The homes I find most compelling are the ones where you can sense the person who lives there — their history, their taste, their contradictions."

Kevin's own apartment is a study in that philosophy. Clean lines and neutral walls — he loves the sense of calm that creates — but the space is anchored by a large ink-wash painting his father made in the 1980s, a collection of Yixing teapots arranged on floating shelves, and a dining table he commissioned from a woodworker using a joinery technique traditional to Fujian province.

"None of those things shout 'Chinese American,'" he says. "But they tell you exactly who I am."

Heritage as Design Language, Not Decoration

There's an important distinction that comes up again and again in conversations with Asian-American designers: the difference between cultural decoration and cultural language.

Decorative approaches treat heritage as an aesthetic layer — a set of patterns, objects, or motifs applied to a space to signal identity. Cultural language goes deeper. It's about how a space is organized, how it functions, what values it embodies.

For many Asian-American homeowners, that means rethinking fundamental questions about how domestic space should work.

Mina Cho, a Korean-American interior stylist based in New York, grew up in a home where the kitchen was the center of everything — not just cooking, but conversation, homework, connection. That memory shapes every home she designs.

"In a lot of Western design, the kitchen is something you're supposed to hide or minimize," she says. "But in my family's home, the kitchen was where life happened. So when I design a space, I think about how to honor that — how to make the kitchen generous and open and welcoming, not just functional."

She also thinks carefully about the concept of nunchi — a Korean social awareness, an attentiveness to the emotional atmosphere of a space. In practical terms, that means designing rooms that feel comfortable for gathering, where seating arrangements encourage face-to-face conversation rather than everyone staring at a screen.

"Good design should make people feel at ease," she says. "That's not a Western idea or an Eastern idea. It's just a human idea. But different cultures have different wisdom about how to get there."

Real Homes, Real Stories

In a craftsman bungalow in Seattle, James and Lily Tanaka have spent six years gradually transforming their home into something that feels, as Lily puts it, "like both of us at once." James is Japanese American, third generation; Lily is white and grew up in rural Vermont. Their home holds both stories without forcing either one to shrink.

The entryway has a getabako — a traditional Japanese shoe cabinet — that James built himself, with clean lines that feel at home in the craftsman architecture. The living room walls are hung with a mix of prints: a woodblock reproduction alongside a Vermont landscape painting Lily inherited from her grandmother. A low wooden table serves as a coffee table; cushions are stacked nearby for when family visits and everyone ends up sitting on the floor.

"We didn't set out to make a statement," Lily says. "We just kept asking ourselves what felt right, what felt like home. And this is what came out."

That organic process — trusting instinct over aesthetic rules — is something many Asian-American designers actively encourage in their clients.

"I tell people: stop asking what looks good and start asking what feels true," says Priya Nair. "What objects carry meaning for you? What memories do you want your home to hold? Start there, and the design follows."

The Broader Conversation

What's happening in these homes is part of a larger cultural conversation about representation, belonging, and what it means to be American.

For generations, many Asian Americans felt pressure to assimilate aesthetically — to present homes that looked "normal" to outside eyes, even if they felt foreign inside. That pressure is loosening, driven in part by a broader cultural reckoning with what American identity actually means and who gets to define it.

Social media has played a role too. Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest have made it easier for Asian-American homeowners to find each other, share inspiration, and realize that their aesthetic instincts — the ones that don't fit neatly into any mainstream design category — are not just valid but genuinely exciting.

"I used to think my taste was weird," says Kevin Liang. "Now I understand that it's specific. And specific is interesting. Specific is real."

For anyone feeling the pull to bring more of themselves into their own living space — regardless of background — these designers offer the same advice: start with what moves you. Not what's trending, not what photographs well, not what the design blogs are celebrating this season.

Start with the object that makes you feel something when you look at it. The color that reminds you of somewhere you loved. The texture that feels like home.

The rest, as Priya Nair will tell you, tends to figure itself out.