What if the reason so many homes look alike today has nothing to do with taste—and everything to do with algorithms?

That question sits at the heart of Select’O Paris, the increasingly influential interiors account founded by Ombeline, a French creative director, entrepreneur, and fashion designer living and working in Paris. While the platform is often mistaken for yet another source of beautiful interiors, its creator sees it differently.

“Select’O is a cultural publication disguised as an interior account,” she says.

The distinction matters. Scroll through the account and you will find richly layered rooms filled with books, velvet, art, leopard print, antique lamps, and an unmistakable Parisian sense of drama. But beneath the visual seduction lies something more provocative: a critique of contemporary taste itself.

Why Are Our Homes Starting to Look the Same?

The coffee table that thinks it’s a library. The starting point for Select’O was always this: a room that reads. The coffee table buried under art books, catalogs, monographs — that’s not clutter, that’s a point of view. Tom Ford’s private spaces in New York and Marrakech had this exact quality — the sense that the objects had been accumulating for decades and were not going anywhere. In Paris, we don’t style a table. We just stop moving things.

For Ombeline, the answer is surprisingly simple. “We are decorating by algorithm.”

When everyone shops from the same online platforms, saves the same Pinterest boards, and follows the same handful of accounts, individuality slowly disappears. Homes begin to resemble one another not because their owners share the same personality, but because they are presented with the same references.

“The algorithm doesn’t ask what you love,” she explains. “It asks what performed well last Tuesday.”

In her view, unlimited access to inspiration has created an unexpected problem. Rather than expanding visual culture, it has compressed it. The endless stream of images leaves little room for the slower process through which personal taste is formed.

“Taste requires resistance,” she says. “The friction of searching, waiting, not finding, reconsidering.”

That friction—once essential to developing an aesthetic point of view—has largely disappeared.

The result is a landscape of interiors that feel increasingly optimized rather than inhabited.

A Room Should Tell a Story

The lamp with a body That lamp base — a female torso in black ceramic — is the kind of object a room earns, not buys. It echoes the figurative obsession running through Balthus, through Giacometti, through every gallery on rue de Seine. The velvet poufs in mismatched colors (raspberry, lavender, sage). Select’O has always believed that fashion and interiors speak the same language. The room and the woman dress each other

If algorithms encourage sameness, what creates character?

According to Ombeline, personality is never purchased. It is accumulated.

A room with genuine presence reveals something about the person who lives there. Not their budget. Not their ability to follow trends. Their history.

The vintage lamp discovered at a flea market. The kilim rug carried home in a suitcase. The ceramic piece made by someone’s hands. The artwork chosen not because it matched a color palette, but because it sparked a feeling.

“The objects that matter are the ones that could not have been chosen by anyone else.”

Throughout Select’O’s imagery, this philosophy appears again and again. Coffee tables disappear beneath towering stacks of books. Gallery walls mix abstract paintings with photographs and found objects. Marble fireplaces coexist with velvet sofas and inherited curiosities. Nothing feels overly coordinated. Everything feels personal.

One of the account’s most striking images shows a living room where books cover nearly every surface, transforming the coffee table into something closer to a private library. As Ombeline puts it, “A room that reads.” The scene reflects a recurring Select’O belief: books are not styling accessories but evidence of a life lived in ideas.

The French Art of Living With More

A zebra skin on the floor — Tom Ford knew this instinct, the animal presence in a room that is already too much and therefore exactly right. The gallery wall above is chaotic in the best possible way: fashion photographs, colorist paintings, small framed works that no one will ever properly hang.

Much of Select’O’s visual world feels like a direct response to contemporary minimalism.

Where modern interiors often celebrate openness, neutrality, and restraint, Ombeline embraces mood, asymmetry, and intensity.

She believes many contemporary spaces suffer from a fear of making mistakes.

“Beige is not laziness,” she says. “It is risk management.”

Perhaps that explains why Select’O’s rooms often feature rich velvet curtains in burgundy and forest green, walls crowded with art, sculptural lighting, stacks of books, and furniture that seems collected rather than purchased all at once.

One image, showing a faded green library room with overflowing bookshelves and books stacked directly on the floor, perfectly captures this philosophy. The room feels neither renovated nor curated. Instead, it feels deeply lived in—a quality Ombeline values far more than perfection.

The Anti-Beige Room

This philosophy eventually led Ombeline to create The Anti-Beige Room, an ebook that has resonated with readers who feel strangely disconnected from their own homes.

The guide was inspired by a simple observation: people were following every decorating rule and still ending up dissatisfied.

“They did everything correctly,” she says. “Nothing is wrong—and yet nothing is right.”

Rather than offering another shopping guide, the book begins with questions. Why does the room feel flat? What is missing? Which decisions were made out of genuine preference, and which were made for approval?

Its underlying message is refreshingly direct.

A home should be evidence of a life.

Not a performance of one.

The Objects Select’O Always Returns To

Certain elements appear repeatedly throughout Ombeline’s interiors.

Velvet is everywhere in Select’O’s interiors

The Haussmann salon The boiserie walls. The marble fireplace. The brass candlesticks. And against all this classical architecture — color swatches pinned directly to the wall, an unframed photograph of a forest, a red table lamp, a sculpture of a woman in bronze. This is Tom Ford’s porno chic rewritten in stone and velvet: the 19th century as backdrop for something altogether more dangerous, the grandeur of Haussmann held in deliberate tension with the body, the flesh, the now. The pink velvet sofa and the leopard ottoman don’t apologize for the boiserie. They seduce it.

Not synthetic velvet, but heavy cotton velvet that shifts with the light and gains character through use. Her fashion background informs this obsession. Materials, she argues, are never merely decorative. They shape the emotional architecture of a space.

Animal prints are another recurring theme

Leopard print, especially, appears throughout Select’O’s interiors—not as a trend, but as a classic. Leopard-upholstered ottomans, velvet poufs, and patterned cushions punctuate rooms otherwise grounded in traditional Parisian architecture.

One bedroom scene features a leopard-print bench beneath layers of framed artwork and dramatic burgundy curtains, demonstrating how pattern can feel timeless rather than trendy when used with conviction.

Books, unsurprisingly, are everywhere

The library room. This is the image that explains everything about Select’O. Candles on a marble mantelpiece. Books stacked directly on the floor because the shelves have long been overwhelmed. A faded green wash on the walls that suggests someone painted it in 1987 and never felt the need to repaint. This is the Parisian interior as it actually exists — not renovated, not curated for Instagram, just lived in so intensely that it becomes beautiful.

Not color-coordinated books. Not decorative books.

Books that have been read.

Shop the Select’O Look

Vintage lamps

This is perhaps my deepest sensitivity. The ones I love most are imperfect, warm, slightly eccentric — André Cazenave is a perfect example.

His lamps from the 1960s and 70s have this quality of controlled strangeness: the light they cast is never harsh, always intimate, always a little melancholic in the best possible way. I find them on 1stDibs, occasionally au Puces.

A great vintage lamp is the fastest way to make a room feel like someone actually lives in it. Overhead lighting, by contrast, is something we do not discuss at Select’O.

The Porter toast rack by Sophie Lou Jacobsen

A polished silver toast rack defined by its sculptural symmetry and refined simplicity — and an object I find quietly thrilling.

Elegance at that scale — small, functional, exact — is very difficult to achieve. Sophie Lou Jacobsen achieves it.

Printed and velvet ottomans and poufs

Select’O has a firm position on ottomans: they should be upholstered in something that commits.

The pouf or ottoman is where a room shows its character — it is too low to be formal, too present to be ignored.

The ones visible throughout our images have been chosen for exactly this reason: they sit at the intersection of comfort and conviction.

Sculptural wall lights and busts

A sculptural wall light or a bust brings something that no painting can truly replicate: it introduces a physical presence into the room. A presence. Select’O is particularly drawn to figurative wall lights. They bring character in the most literal sense of the word. A room where a bust takes pride of place is a room that has a mind of its own. We find that very reassuring.

Check out the Select’O 1stDibs curated selections here: Select’O x 1stDIBS.

Imagining Interiors That Don’t Yet Exist

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Select’O is that none of the interiors featured on the platform actually exist.

The rooms are visual creations developed by Ombeline herself. While contemporary creative tools—including AI—are part of the process, she sees them simply as instruments.

What matters is the creative direction behind them: the references, materials, colors, cultural influences, and emotional atmosphere.

“I’m not documenting interiors,” she says. “I’m imagining the ones I wish existed.”

And perhaps that is why Select’O resonates so strongly right now.

In an era obsessed with optimization, neutrality, and consensus, Ombeline is making a case for something far less efficient: individuality.

Not the performative kind.

The real kind.

The kind that accumulates slowly, one lamp, one book, one questionable flea-market purchase at a time.

If Ombeline’s philosophy resonates with you, you can explore more of the Select’O universe through her Parisian Interior Guide, We Don’t Do Beige—an ebook that expands on the ideas behind her distinctive approach to decorating—or browse her curated Select’O x 1stDibs collection, featuring vintage and contemporary pieces that embody the Select’O aesthetic.