Interior design Instagram offers a double-whammy of novelty for lockdown-fatigued homeowners.
You get an invite into the homes of others. And you get to ‘travel’ to any city in the world to see how they decorate their living spaces.
A virtual research trip on Instagram is a jolt for inspiration-seekers who find the algorithm keeps feeding the same tired ideas. But knowing where to start is the tough part. With so many designers to check and hashtags to browse (and use), it helps to have an atlas in which to stick your pin.
With this in mind, Angi crunched the numbers to find which cities and countries have the most stunning interiors on Instagram. We sampled a quarter-million posts with interior-themed hashtags and calculated the average like count for photos from each city and country. Here’s our guidebook to the most beautiful interior design cities across the world, the U.S., and the UK.
Paris is unlike any other urban center: it’s classic yet cutting-edge, risqué yet refined, and, all in all, a flamboyant working city. The average Parisian interior gets more than twice the likes of any other city’s photos, with the exception of Cologne. Parisian Instagrammers are helped by the high ceilings and generous windows of their apartment buildings, which lend scale and natural light to their pictures.
With centuries of history to reflect, the interior designers of Paris illustrate how it’s possible to mix and match eras and shapes if you remain disciplined with your color palette.
Germany boasts four of the 10 cities with the best interiors. The country that gave us the Bauhaus design school prototyped functional-yet-stylish furniture way before IKEA boxed it up. While the Parisian interiors we found on Instagram were eclectic and sensual, the designs in Cologne, Berlin, and Bremen stimulate the mind with ingenious, attractive solutions to some difficult spaces.
These countries have the highest average like count for interior-themed Instagram posts. Nine out of the top 10 countries in our study are in Europe. France dominates, but Eastern and Northern European countries are also setting interior trends on Instagram.
Ukraine surprisingly grabs the second-place spot. We found a prevalence of stark, wintry aesthetics capitalizing on a decade of industrial-themed interior trends. Ukrainian design is a good place to start if you’re working with an older home since Ukrainian stylists have learned to exploit the uniqueness of existing buildings while new construction lags behind demand.
Jordan is the non-European exception. Characterized by rich patterns and recurring motifs, the largely subdued palette of much of Jordanian interior design offers a pleasing minimalist aesthetic on Instagram. But there is plenty of color in the culture, too, and when bright hues do speak up, they can be loud!
Indianapolis nudges Knoxville into second place for the best-rated interiors posts on Instagram. The city’s interior design influencers favor a farmhouse aesthetic, pairing rustic trends with a range of homely, crafted details. Even the city’s modernist housing blurs the distinction between indoors and outdoors, and the best of Indianapolis home design is sympathetic to its surroundings.
Cities in California take three of America’s top 10 spots, with Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica all making the list. Beverly Hills leads the way, with an average of 3,472 likes for each interior-themed Instagram post. Naturally, this is the area of Instagram you’ll want to visit if you’re having trouble filling larger rooms. Zoning with big, colorful abstract art is one way to bring a spacious room to life without taking unnecessary risks with furniture or wallpaper.
The UK’s billion-pound interiors industry is just the latest manifestation of its 5,000-year history of interior design. But, just like the Parisians, it is by balancing the traditional with the avant-garde that British designers guide the world’s décor trends.
In arty Bristol, where interiors posts get 250% more likes than any other UK city, one such (anti-)trend is #slowdecor—an effort to resist the ‘must-have’ allure of influencer swag and focus on chance discovery and traditional craft.
Perhaps it makes sense that Bath (a city built by Romans to do just that) knows how to put a bathroom together. Bath’s interior Instagrammers are ranked below only Bristol and Birmingham, outperforming fourth-placed London—although you’ll find an unrivaled variety from London’s mass of designers. Perhaps that’s why followers are divided over giving London’s Instagrammers the coveted red heart.
There’s a rising aesthetic on design Instagram: digital artists’ 3D renders of impossible interiors. Smoothing the edges of the (un)real world, these unbuilt interiors offer a calm simplicity that soothes our overstimulated eyes and influences the way we decorate our homes.
But between the bubblegum space-pods and improbable uses of vapor, something is missing: culture. Life. The lived-in. Instagram’s best interior designers—the professionals and the homemakers—offer an essential piece of DIY advice: find yourself in your home.
As anyone who uses Zoom knows, making the one tidy corner of your home look effortlessly stylish yet personal is an art form in itself. Any Instagrammer who can carry it off most likely has an idea or two worth pinching for your own design project. So, why not browse some international styles on Instagram today?
To create these tables, we made a list of 25 interior-related hashtags and popular translations (including #interiorinspiration, #interiordesign #interiorlovers #interiorstyle #interiorandhome and #interiordesignideas).
We pulled 238,285 Instagram posts tagged with at least one of the interior-related hashtags, keeping only those with geotagged locations (86,440 in total). We calculated the average number of likes of top posts for each location.
We then ranked the countries, cities, and states. For country and city tables, we saved only the spots with at least 10 posts made by at least three different users.
The data was collected in October and November 2021.
