I think for two reasons. First, the prices for great art and great design tend to be high, which can make most people—even if they have great taste—feel like it’s a club they’ll never be able to get into. There’s more high-quality affordable art out there than ever, but not everyone knows where to find it, and in design, there’s less that’s affordable because of the hard costs of labor and materials. So, that causes people to turn away from even trying.

Second, I think people feel intimidated because there’s SO much out there, and investing in a piece of art or design is a substantial commitment, so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. How do you know what you like? How do you choose something you’re ready to pay a lot for and live with for a long time? That’s often why people of means hire decorators and art advisors—it’s really hard to summon that level of confidence and decisiveness. Collectors spend years honing it.

Our book addresses both issues. The whole point of the book is that you should forget about the idea that only expensive status objects are worth having, and buy what you feel drawn to, what feels meaningful to you, and what expresses your personality, period—whether it’s a vintage teapot found at a garage sale for $1, or an investment piece made by a young maker you love. The same goes for art, of course. We also coach our readers on the best ways to develop their taste and train their eye and counsel them to acquire things very slowly and serendipitously, so they don’t have to stare up a mountain of choice.

We generally tend to avoid trying to define the difference, because we don’t think it matters that much—one of the biggest developments in design and art in the past two decades is the dissolution of the boundaries between the two. They’re so fluid now, and creative people increasingly feel free to work across all sorts of mediums and genres.

That said, we do have a passage in our book’s introduction that addresses this question in a very basic way, just as a foundation from which to understand what we’re talking about when we talk about objects: “Can an artwork be an object? Yes, especially in the sense that artists make functional pieces like vases or plates from time to time. There’s also quite a bit of overlap between the design and art realms when it comes to sculptural forms that don’t have a specific function but have an object-like feel. That said, you’ll find that most of the objects in this book are by people who identify themselves as designers rather than artists, with the distinction often being that the process of making—with its attention to materials, techniques, shapes and details—is more important to their practice than an overarching concept or narrative.”

The most important thing is probably learning how to create balance, which we address over and over again in the book. You never want too much of one thing. If you have a lot of vintage furniture, it’s nice to throw in some contemporary objects. If everything on one shelf is feeling too geometric, it’s good to mix in something with a more organic shape. If the art on your walls is all one medium—say painting— it’s nice to hang something more sculptural that has a bit of dimension. There are also a lot of fun tips in the book about color—like how to pair “jolie laide” colors with saturated brights to make both look better, or how to use a hit of acidic color in an otherwise relatively monochromatic room.

The short answer is, confidently! That goes back to our book being less about perfectly coordinating and decorating your space and more about filling it with whatever you love and letting that be enough. That said, if you want to find visual harmony in your space, which is always a nice goal, there are many ways to do it—you just need to mix pieces that either share a subtle common thread, like a color or a concept, or juxtapose totally contrasting pieces that nonetheless feel balanced in terms of texture, proportion and color. It’s an intuitive process and can sometimes entail living with things for a while and slowly moving them around your home as you get to know them, testing arrangements until they feel right to you. That’s a much more interesting and personal approach than decorating a room all at once and then never touching it again.

As for the works we chose in our guest curation, that was also an intuitive process—we know we love color, abstraction, and mid-century influences, so we made a mood board of artists and artworks we loved, and the assortment evolved from there.

Honestly, one of the things people get stuck on most is the fear that they’re going to “make a mistake.” As we said, a home should be a living, breathing thing, not something static that you put together and then ignore for the rest of time. If something doesn’t work where you thought it would, try someplace unexpected, like a bathroom or a kitchen. It’s fun to rearrange and recontextualize things, and it makes it easier to incorporate new things if you’re willing to experiment.

There are a ton of rules in interiors that I think people get nervous about when it comes to the placement of things in your home—like how big should your rug be, or how much space you need for certain arrangements of furniture—and those are worth sticking to; there are often guides available online. But one of the things we proselytize in the book is the notion of living with objects or art that’s confusing or that makes you slightly uncomfortable if it’s in the name of a higher artistic idea. Maybe it’s a chair that looks like it might collapse when sat upon or an object in the shape of a faintly grotesque body part. If you love it, no matter how inexplicably, it’s probably worth bringing into your home because it will be much more interesting and conversation-starting than something that is merely pretty.

Scale is massively important because it affects the visual balance of a space, which is something humans are instinctively dialed into and affected by. The human brain craves symmetry and harmony, which is why symmetrical faces are said to be more beautiful, and why artists and photographers throughout history have put so much focus on finding the most pleasing balance of positive and negative space in their work. If you’ve ever encountered a room or an artwork where the balance of space was wildly off, you may have even felt physically uncomfortable as a result. So, if you can pay attention to the way objects are placed in a room, how they fill space, and how nice it is when large objects are complemented by medium and small ones, and how that enables your eyes to move across them in a more relaxing way, you’ll be able to create a space that’s inherently more pleasant to be in.

We have specific tips for how to achieve that in the book, like using pedestals or extra-large floor vases for height variation throughout the room, and when it comes to surfaces like mantels or consoles, pairing something wide and squat like a vase with something taller and thinner, like candlesticks. If certain objects you love feel too small, like they’re getting lost, you can group a bunch of them together to give them more weight.

Trends are by their very nature cyclical, so we’re not sure we’ll ever break free of the pendulum that swings back and forth between minimalism and maximalism, and the tendency for many people to copy, note for note, what they see in an image. But there is a healthy shift in interiors toward being more intentional in your purchases and making things more personal in your home. In design, that trend is mimicked over the past decade in the whole-hearted embrace of handmade objects that show the hand of the maker. We can’t imagine ever going back to where we were in the earlier part of this century where things were unbelievably sleek and machined—but of course, we probably will at some point!