Raw Opulence: The Interiors of the Lesbian Bachelor Pad

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As Jenna Lyons, draped in khaki silk and tears of diamonds, escorted fellow Real Housewife Erin Lichy through her home on the latest season of Real Housewives of New York, Erin took note “What a pad - it's a pad!” It is, a loft useful only to Jenna Lyons where the shoe closet is half the bedroom, and bedroom half the apartment. Exceptional in its media coverage, Jenna’s home is defined by patinated objects of affection, unlacquered brass surfaces, and incidentally draws from a design discourse of cultured consumption and the modernist imagination luxuriated in the bachelor pad.

Playboy popularised the bachelor pad amidst the sexual revolution of the ‘50s and ‘60s and glamorised alternative lifestyles for men outside of the traditional family structure. Prior to this postwar movement, a “pad” referred to small, transitory spaces where criminals, sex workers or similarly peripheral individuals might find a temporary place to crash. The pages of Playboy rebranded the pad as the setting for the solo urbanite of means and independence. With concealed millwork, gadgetry, bourbon and sexual conquest, Playboy brought masculinity back into the domestic sphere, and created a new class of consumers who could have opinions on lounge chairs, while its centrefolds assured its reader of his heterosexuality.

As bachelors re-entered interior design, some women reconsidering their agency were looking to escape it, and those at the periphery, to reject it. In the 1976 Dyke Quarterly No. 03 article “Nesting”, Liza Cowan put out a search of lesbian domestic space. She received no responses, noting that writing about the home was likely perceived as too bourgeois, not serious, or too frivolous for a radical magazine. The lesbian separatists may have abdicated imagining the domestic anew, but in recent decades increased visibility of lesbian and queer spaces of seduction have begun to form their own design commonality.

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The lesbian’s bachelor pad has rarely been depicted as a made-to-suit domestic space, instead is often a product of intervention within formerly manufacturing sites. Where Playboy’s bachelor pad sold suburban men a built-in modernist lifestyle with the latest gizmos of comfort and control, the raw space of the sapphic bachelor pad offers consumers confidence that a nonchalant existence is achievable through alteration and collection. It may even be acquired off-market. Aged structures; worldly possessions, artistic production: These design cues speak to contextual roots in the community’s inhabitation on the edge of societal norms, but in aggregate form a glamorous depiction of life and rules of attraction of a different milieu.

The artist’s loft offers a visual shorthand for live/work occupancy at the fringe of urban productivity. The 00’s drama Lip Service opens to Frankie’s NYC photographer’s loft where an enlarger and tripod sit beside a chromed arc lamp and mid-century leather armchairs. A string of photographs frame the scene containing a platform bed, cowhide rug, and traveller’s trunk. The freestanding fixtures and unadorned walls allude to the unstable and now iconised arts community that took place within the manufacturing zones of the city’s earlier decades when queer presenting people found place outside of corporate economies.

Sculptor Jodie Lerner’s space gets similar treatment in The L Word with a kitchen of industrial grade Uline products against the wall, baskets of fruit hanging across from painter’s  ladders, and exterior light shining through a temporarily tarped enclosure. “It's too plain for you?” An uncomfortable Jodie asked Bette who has laid a tablecloth over the worn table. “It’s my space” Jodie reinforced. For both Frankie and Jodie, the artist’s loft is both an unadorned yet highly curated living arrangement where elements of artistic production are the only acceptable décor. In a discipline where passion and work blend into cultural capital, the artist's loft is the ultimate site of appeal in a subculture revered for observation, creation & self expression.

The abandoned warehouse often hoards the queer bachelor's unlikely collection of objects connoting a travelled life. Lost Girl’s heroine Bo, with supernatural powers of seduction finds home with windows boarded up, and wall covering  faded from years of neglect. Remnants of incomplete construction remain: half-patched lath and plaster, a partially framed partition. Another traveller’s trunk, orange & chrome Brabantia stools, a drum set, a milk glass lamp, a vending machine. There is no defined programming in the space. Uncoupled by familial ties like the Playboy bachelor, these pads display its occupants’ cultured experience, but substitute the custom-made for the found object.

“The lesbian’s bachelor pad has rarely been depicted as a made-to-suit domestic space, instead is often a product of intervention within formerly manufacturing sites. Where Playboy’s bachelor pad sold suburban men a built-in modernist lifestyle with the latest gizmos of comfort and control, the raw space of the sapphic bachelor pad offers consumers confidence that a nonchalant existence is achievable through alteration and collection.”

Lucy Diamond of the 1994 camp spy comedy D.E.B.S resides in another sprawling multi-structured warehouse. The antiseptic modernist lair of the James Bond villain is forgone for a derelict one with partially bricked walls and exposed studs in Lucy’s bedroom. A crammed shelf holds (surprise) more globes and communication devices of past eras. Lucy’s room nods to the 60’s bachelor pad with a circular bed and some orange shag. Framed imagery of jewels and spolia sit on the ground, leaning against bare walls. What could be a more appropriate object of desire for a villian? For Lucy, it's the intimacy of a partner.

It seems queer villains get the most glamorous spaces, none more curated than Villanelle’s Parisian flat in Killing Eve. The sleek lacquered surfaces of modernism are forgotten for an aged apartment with exposed herringbone parquet, and muted plaster. Brass fish fixtures adorn a ’30s pink tiled bathroom. A lucite coffee table sits across a ‘50s GE fridge. Pink lamps, leather couches, teal folding chairs; a bronze mask, a cat, a Soundgarden poster: Villanelle’s appetite for couture matches her voracious consumption of idiosyncratic design, and situates an obsessive and tender fight with Eve (who just trashed the joint). After all, being an assassin is lucrative, if not isolating.

Not all single sapphics occupy a pad. Killing Eve’s kind-of CEO arch-assassin Hélène is intent on living out a dream of traditional domesticity, family, and watching reruns of Bake Off while residing in a bland apartment the colour of Solitude. And some depictions are more coherent than others. In the Morning Show, news anchor Bradley resides in a multistory space that is seemingly part SoHo REI, Dumbo House, and law office. 

Views of queer (often white and wealthy) homes are depicted more now than ever before. Ultimately, the lesbian’s bachelor pad is similar to that of Playboy as a compelling vision of economic and sexual independence that rarely manifests in reality, but a vision where objectification and domination are markedly absent. These places of intervention, collection and assembly are seductive as a styled sapphic imaginary because they appreciate what is found and what has faults. Their inhabitants don’t seek control, but share what is human: they offer intimacy, have flaws, put forward vulnerabilities.

Back at Jenna’s, upon her Paul Mcobb table surrounded by a velvet Milo Baughman couch, a 1978 braille Playboy sits out for guests to adore. A gift from a friend, and unlike its visual facsimiles, its contents must be felt to be appreciated. A remarkably appropriate object for a glamorous typology of space where everyone gets taken care of: one that can’t be found on 1st dibs.

Words: Jen Grosso