I've been interviewing people who have beautiful homes about how they decorated them, and the biggest surprise is how they almost all insist that good design is more about taste than money. Yes, it costs more to buy a great sofa than a bad one. But there are plenty of millionaires living in homes that feel like an airport lounge. The actual limiting factor is taste and time. The taste to know what looks good and the time it takes to find what you're looking for. What's key is that the second-hand furniture market is quite inefficient. To be sure, there is a spectrum: at one end, you have thrift stores (cheap, chaotic, and unvetted). At the other, you have Sotheby's (curated, clean, and highly vetted). The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. So how do you find pockets of glorious inefficiency? One way is to make friends with people who own antique shops. I have a friend in San Francisco who knows a few collectors in town. They know her taste, and when something comes in that matches her style, they call her. And because of this, she never has to wait 17 weeks for a backordered couch from CB2. Here's the key point: If you have a strong sense of taste and understand the game, you'll consistently spend less to design a house that feels alive and uniquely yours. Good design, it turns out, is a byproduct of taste and attention, not money.