The trouble with tasteful

Dillon Deegan started SickHaus in 2022 because he'd watched the UK quietly paint over its own personality. Four years and thirteen thousand customers later, he still thinks beige is a choice; and the wrong one.

Issue 01 · Glasgow · Summer '26

There is a particular kind of room that took over the UK somewhere around 2020, and you already know it without being told. Grey sofa. Bare walls in a shade with a name like Elephant's Breath. A eucalyptus stem in a ribbed vase. It is pleasant in the way a waiting room is pleasant, which is to say it was designed very carefully to provoke no reaction at all.

Dillon Deegan has a name for it.

"Sad beige," he says. "It spread like a pandemic. Everyone's flat started looking like a showroom nobody actually lives in. And the mad thing is nobody chose it — they just weren't offered anything else."

SickHaus began, in 2022, as an argument with that.

The volume problem

The frustration was specific before it was philosophical. Deegan wasn't objecting to minimalism as a style; he was objecting to it as the only option on the shelf.

"Every shop had the same eight things. Different logos, same eight things. If you wanted colour — actual colour, not sage — you were either paying designer money or you were out of luck."

What he'd walked into was a supply problem wearing a style's clothing. Affordable homeware moves through a small number of factories and a lot of buyers trained, reasonably enough, to avoid risk. Risk means unsold stock. Unsold stock means neutral.

"Nobody in that chain is doing anything wrong. They're all making sensible decisions. It's just that a thousand sensible decisions in a row give you a very boring shop."

"Tasteful is not a compliment"

Deegan is unusually direct about what he thinks the industry got wrong, and it isn't a colour.

"Tasteful is not a compliment. It's what you say about a room when you can't think of anything else to say about it. It means nothing in there offended you."

His argument is that safe furniture is the expensive option, not the cheap one. Buy something you feel nothing about and you'll replace it inside two years, because you never actually liked it.

"Your home should have a pulse. It should be as loud and as unapologetically yours as you are. We don't sell homeware — we curate dopamine."

It's the sort of line that sounds like marketing until you look at the range and find he means it fairly literally. A mushroom lamp in eight colourways. An eight-ball rug. A duvet set in a checkerboard so large it functions as architecture.

None of it is tasteful. A lot of it is very good.

From a Glasgow flat to thirty countries

The first year was, by Deegan's own account, unglamorous.

2022 — The spark. Fed up with beige, he launched. Small range, direct sourcing, a lot of evenings.

2023 — The first thousand. A thousand customers, which he describes as "the point where it stopped being a hobby and started being a responsibility."

2024 — Going global. Orders shipped to more than thirty countries.

2026 — Today. Over thirteen thousand customers worldwide.

Growth like that raises an obvious question about how a small Scottish operation gets a mushroom lamp to Melbourne, and Deegan doesn't dodge it.

"We work with manufacturing and fulfilment partners overseas and ship direct to the customer. That's how a business our size can offer this range at these prices and still get it to you. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend there's a warehouse in Glasgow with everything in it."

The trade-off he accepts is speed. The trade-off he won't accept is what goes in the box.

Saying no

The part of the business Deegan is most animated about is the part customers never see.

"We reject far more than we accept. Most of what we turn down isn't bad — it's fine. Fine is the enemy. You already own enough fine things."

Samples get treated with a suspicion bordering on rude. Things get sat on. Things get put in a room and looked at for a week. Things get bounced for reasons that would sound petty in a buyer's meeting.

The rule, as he states it, is not complicated: if it wouldn't go in my own place, it doesn't go in yours.

"It's a narrow rule and it costs us money constantly. We've turned down things that would have sold. But the second you start stocking pieces you don't believe in, you're just another shop with eight things in it."

Who's actually buying

The picture Deegan describes of his customer is not the one the industry tends to assume.

"It's people in their first proper place. Renting, usually. They can't knock a wall through, they can't touch the kitchen, and they've been told for a decade that the way to make a rented flat nice is to make it neutral." He laughs. "Which is the worst advice anyone's ever given anybody."

His counter-argument is that the pieces you can take with you are exactly the ones worth having an opinion about. You can't paint the walls. You can absolutely put an orange mushroom lamp on the side table.

The standards

The rules SickHaus buys against.

01 — Relentless curation. We reject more than we accept. Every product earns its place.

02 — Quality without compromise. If it doesn't meet our standards, it doesn't make the cut.

03 — Real people, real service. Questions answered in hours, not days.

04 — Hassle-free returns. Changed your mind? No problem — returns are processed at our Aberdeen office.

05 — Trusted worldwide. Thousands of customers across more than thirty countries.

06 — Packed with care. Every order wrapped properly, delivered safely.

Four years on, the pitch hasn't really changed. It fits on a line, and Deegan says it like a man who has said it a lot.

"Your home, unfiltered. That's it. That's the whole thing."

Shop the pieces that made the cut →