When reading magazines or staying in expensive hotels, I always admire those minimal, refined spaces in tones of ivory, pale beige and dove gray; rooms sparsely but tastefully furnished, with a well-chosen statement piece here and there, a vase with white tulips in the living room and a beautiful book on the Saarinen coffee table. I’m not being ironic, I do like this style, I just cannot live in it for extended periods of time.

Elegant minimalism requires tidiness and restraint, two qualities I almost entirely lack. I would obscure the clean lines with my books and clothes and clutter and I would never be able to stick to a colour scheme that includes no real colour. I imagine I would love it for a month, ruin it in two and be suicidal in six. I’m not sure I could even stick with a more forgiving theme – like Midcentury Modern or Aristocratic Decadence – simply because it would require picking one theme only.

As I don’t own 10 different places to live that I could decorate in pure, distinct, clearly defined styles, I need a different solution that would overcome the deficiencies of my personality. The general framework needs to be sufficiently flexible to allow for pretty eclectic choices. One thing I have found helpful is to keep the walls and ceiling white in every room – this unifies everything somewhat and also allows you to do different things against background (although I LOVE grey walls, and emerald ones, and poder blue, and also wallpaper…). The other trick is to always include something eccentric, something silly. This will signal very clearly that the playfulness is intentional, that the interiors are meant to be diverse. It will also just brighten up the room by being unexpected and fun.

In that spirit, I have just procured a flamingo. It’s not alive or life-size, it’s about half a meter in height (but it has feathers!). There was a bigger one in the store too, but I was unsure about my ability to get it home. Flamingoes bring an instant dose of camp to everything, be it furniture, clothes or dinnerware. They seem to be in the air this spring too (for many seasons, in fact) as MAC for example has a flamingo-themed collection. I’ll also use this opportunity to pronounce the slightly orangey, vivid pink of flamingoes the colour of the season. Or at least one of them.

It doesn’t need to be a flamingo, of course. Maybe you display your bug collection, maybe you like whimsical fabrics, maybe you enjoy furniture made of old toys. Birds seem to work well, though. I’m still sad I was too late to get a parrot-shaped jug from Zara Home last autumn. When I enquired after it, the SA said: “Oh, the strange parrot? It’s sold out. Everybody seemed to like it for some reason.”