Six Ways to Move Your Apartment Past the Bachelor Pad Stage

The idea that in 2016 furniture can still be gendered (a “masculine” couch, a “feminine” chair) seems antiquated, an unpleasant flashback to the days when boys were obliged to like blue and girls, pink. Yet the concept of a bachelor pad—an entire apartment that is somehow imbued with manliness—remains.

Multiple decorators from Homepolish, an interior decoration service that pairs interior designers with clients, say they regularly encounter apartments that are unmistakably (and deliberately) the domicile of single men: A bachelor pad is “a lot of heavy matching furniture,” said Guinevere Johnson, a decorator based in Chicago. “It’s a mix of black leather and chrome metals, just sort of heavy and cold,” said Will Saks, a decorator in New York. It’s “an apartment without style, a minimal amount of furniture, where things are cheap and mish-mashed,” said Haley Weidenbaum, a decorator in Los Angeles.