I Put Together An Expensive-Looking Designer Home By Thrifting on Facebook

Stella Guan
18 min readJun 6, 2022

Learning to be relentlessly resourceful in the quest for uniqueness

As a designer, I have an occupational hazard.

Perfectly good furniture items on mass-market sites like Wayfair, West Elm or CB2 is not good enough for me. Since a few years ago, I have gotten into a vintage mid-century modern and post-modern aesthetic and couldn’t turn back.

The problem is, most of the items that are “good enough” for me are either no longer in production or extremely expensive.

After all, I am looking for unique, designer items — without a designer budget.

A corner of my current living room

What’s the solution? I turned to Facebook Marketplace, a venue that I once thought was the bargain hunter’s playground for things like a 10-dollar crockpot.

My first experience with Facebook Marketplace happened back in New Jersey, where I sold my first home before moving across the country to California. I was in a rush to get things out so I priced items very competitively. I was anticipating having to wait at least a few weeks for items to be sold.

--

--

Stella Guan

Digital nomad designer and entrepreneur between the US, Europe & Asia | CEO of Path Unbound, UI/UX design school | www.stellaguan.com | youtube.com/@stella-guan