HOUSE OF NOIR
House of Noir is a creative studio built around interiors, art, objects, and the things we choose to live with.
We believe good rooms come from having something to say. That means looking beyond whatever is currently being sold as good taste and building a much wider set of references, from paintings, old houses and fashion to museums, film sets, furniture made a hundred years ago, and things being made by someone in a studio right now.
The more you look at, the more you have to work with. It changes what you notice, what you choose, and eventually, what you make.
That curiosity doesn’t stop with interiors. It’s also behind A Life Well Lived, our publication about art, design, history, and the other things worth knowing more about, and Novi Home, the art and objects side of House of Noir. It all comes back to the same idea: look at more things, follow what catches your attention, and bring the good stuff home.
You become what you consume.
I’m Karie, founder and principal designer of House of Noir. I started in interiors, but I’ve never been particularly good at staying in that lane.
I’m interested in why things work, where they came from, and what happens when you look outside your own field for ideas. So I spend a lot of time looking at paintings, architecture, fashion, old houses, film, books, and whatever else has caught my attention.
It’s changed the way I design. I don’t think another designer’s living room is always the best reference for your living room. Sometimes a painting is more useful. Or a film set, a building, a dress, an old chair, even a museum you visited three years ago.
That’s really where House of Noir came from. I love beautiful things, but I’m not very interested in a room that’s beautiful because everything in it is the “right” thing.
I’m much more interested in the painting you can’t stop looking at, the chair you bought because you’d never seen anything like it, or the ridiculous little object someone bothered to make beautiful. You don’t have to know everything about what you’re looking at.
But I think life gets a lot more interesting when you bother to look.
That idea has taken House of Noir well beyond interiors.
THE FOUNDER
