David Michon doesn’t see FOR SCALE, the Substack newsletter he started in 2022, as a diktat of good taste, even though—as a former editor at Monocle and Icon—he would be well within his rights to issue one. Instead, he encourages his readers to develop their own critical faculties, offering them delightfully specific taxonomies of interior design—the “screenwriter aesthetic”, “plinth culture” and “chair extremism”—as prompts. “Interior design is so important; we’re affected by spaces, psychologically and emotionally,” he explains. “But it should also feel fun. Things don’t need to be stuffy and serious.”

Celine Nguyen: What was the idea behind FOR SCALE? 

David Michon: When my husband and I moved from London to Los Angeles, we brought nothing. We were furnishing our place with vintage stuff from resellers in LA and, as I was digging around, I felt an incredible energy that wasn’t present in design magazines. It was important to me that FOR SCALE is connected to the real world. Substack was my first time writing editorially with my own tone of voice, not a magazine’s. My posts are written very fast, which means they have to be topics I’m already passionate about.

CN: People tend to think that it’s snobby and elitist to care a lot about taste. But FOR SCALE has a discerning voice that’s still open to different points of view.