Christene Barberich and the Soft Architecture of Taste

A Home That Transitions With the Day

On any given evening in Brooklyn, the light in Christene Barberich’s apartment gradually changes as her husband, Kevin Baxter, moves from room to room, turning on lamps as a kind of ceremony. The whole home knows the day has ended with a sequence: glow by glow, corner by corner, until the apartment feels inhabited again.

“It just makes it feel like we’re home,” Barberich says. “There is a cue in there that makes me feel safe and cozy.” 

It’s a small ritual. But small rituals, she believes, are where meaning accumulates. Barberich, co-founder and longtime editorial architect of Refinery29, and now the voice behind the widely read Substack, A Tiny Apt., has spent much of her career exploring how women narrate their lives,  ambitions, and identities. These days, she writes from her 750-square-foot apartment, a space that doubles as a domestic laboratory and a philosophical testing ground. The newsletter, with more than 24,000 subscribers, reads like a personal field guide to taste: part memoir, part design notebook, part meditation on how we decide what we love.

She describes herself as a compulsive shelf rearranger, a design-book hoarder, a vintage Prada collector, a mother, but the role she seems just as devoted to is quieter and harder to title. What do you call someone who helps people learn how to trust their own preferences in a world that constantly tells them what to want?

That mission has led her to think deeply about light.

When the "Right" Design Choice Goes Wrong

Nearly a decade ago, Barberich and her husband renovated their Brooklyn apartment with the confidence of people who believed they were making the “right” choices. He's an architect. They researched. They finally installed the ideal dimmable and contemporary track lights for their space. “When I tell you this lighting was so horrific,” Barberich recalls, “it didn’t matter how you dimmed it. It was like you were getting blinded. We finally had to take it out because it was terrible.” The disappointment became a bit of a turning point; they abandoned the original idea and instead, they turned to lamps; these smaller, warmer, more flexible pockets of light.

“There is something about the ritual of turning lights on and choosing where you want light to be,” she says. “You kind of reacquaint yourself with your house at the end of the day. It’s like talking to it.” I love the idea of your apartment no longer being something to improve on in a traditional sense and instead being something to enjoy a conversation with. Barberich treats lamps like mobile instruments for initiating those conversations and shaping attention and encouraging behavior.

“I think feeling like you have the freedom to move lamps around is so key. It’s like so what if you bought it for this spot? Move it in the other room and see if it looks better in that room, and then move that lamp over here. And so many times that starts a domino effect of changes that end up being so fun and gratifying.” 

Lighting as Emotional Infrastructure

If the Brooklyn apartment is a living archive of revision and accumulation, the family’s 650-square-foot Hudson Valley cabin offers something closer to subtraction. Barberich describes it as a deliberate act of restraint and a space shaped by incremental intention. It represents a different relationship to taste. Where the apartment in the city relies on layered light, shifting lamps, and small domestic rituals, the cabin emphasizes those same things but paired with the natural rhythms of daylight, darkness, quiet, wood, and air. 

Both locations echo the underlying theme that our environments have more to offer than being storehouses for purchases.

Barberich speaks about lighting with the kind of introspection most people reserve for therapy. “I feel like we’re kind of in a crisis of lighting right now,” she says, referencing the cultural dominance of LED environments and their emotional effects. "And I think lighting companies like yours really have an opportunity to kind of re-introduce the role that light plays in our lives and how customizable it can be."

It’s an undeniable truth that bad lighting produces a kind of discomfort that feels punishing to deal with. We don’t all have the best language to articulate this in the moment, but we register it in our bodies.

Good lighting, by contrast, almost always causes us to relax and linger for a while longer.

“Because lighting is so malleable, it’s so personal,” she says. “It really kind of establishes a mood and a sense of place immediately. Think about when people go to eat at a restaurant. It doesn’t matter how good the food is,” she says. “People will not forgive bad lighting… They just don’t feel good in it.” 

Light as a Way Back to the Physical World

In one of the most moving moments during the call, Barberich describes how lighting can interrupt the hypnotic pull of screens and welcome people back into the physical world. “Lighting inherently draws you out of your own experience,” she says. “It brings you into the world… It helps us remember that we are part of something bigger;” a reminder we could all use in an age shaped by infinite scroll and algorithmic suggestion. 

Beneath Barberich’s reflections on lighting is the belief that style is not a fixed identity, but a conversation we have with ourselves and the life we live over time. She openly talks about rearranging shelves, cleaning closets, moving lamps, and changing her mind, as signals of growth instead of being signs of indecision. Taste to her is not something you discover once, but it’s something you continually renegotiate as you experience more in life.

Much of her writing in A Tiny Apt. returns to this idea that personal style is less about achieving complete coherence and more about paying attention. Can you notice what resonates? Are you allowing your environment to reflect who you’re becoming rather than forcing it to stay a reflection of who you used to be?

She dropped this gem in our talk, a line attributed to Brian Eno, “The most important thing in life is knowing what you like.” It’s a deceptively simple idea, and at the same time, a difficult one to live by because to learn what you like demands resisting external validation and requires you to pay attention to your own reactions. 

Above all, it requires patience.

The Radical Act of Knowing What You Like

It would be easy for anyone to frame Christene Barberich as a tastemaker, a media founder, or a curator of beautiful things. But the more compelling portrait for me after our conversation is of someone treating domestic life, lighting, furniture placement, and small rituals as important ingredients for a quality life; someone curious enough to consider how our living environments shape self-trust.

Her reflections resist the usual lifestyle narrative of optimizing your home at all costs and instead suggest that our homes can be a place of experimentation and that our preferences can and should evolve. 

Read more from Christene on taste and learning to listen to your preference at her Substack, A Tiny Apt.