Designing a Lacquered Vanity: How Beauty People Build Their Home Corner

The vanity, in 2026, is a corner. Not a piece of furniture, not a room, not a built-in — a corner, with a surface, that someone has chosen. We wanted to know how beauty professionals — people whose work is the body and the face — build the small, private, lacquered corner of the home that holds their work.

We visited five of them. The five corners are very different. The five surfaces, surprisingly, are not.

1. Camille Marchetti — Independent perfumer, Paris 11e

Camille’s vanity is the kitchen table, on Tuesdays. The rest of the week, it is a small enamel tray on a bookshelf in the studio, next to a stack of smelling blotters. On Tuesdays, she is at home with her daughter, and the kitchen table is the only surface large enough to lay out the day’s forty or fifty blotter strips.

The tray is a plain, navy-lacquered piece from a kitchen shop on rue de Bretagne. The lacquer is, by Camille’s description, the most important surface in my professional life. The reason is simple: a porous surface absorbs the smell. A glazed surface does not. A blotter that has been smelling on a wooden table for forty minutes is a blotter that has been smelling on a wooden table for forty minutes.

Camille’s corner, when it is in the studio, also has a single light source, a clamp-on LED, pointed at the tray. I need to see the colour of the liquid, she says. The colour of the liquid is half the language of the perfume.

2. Mathilde Aubin — Facialist, Lyon

Mathilde’s corner is a converted bathroom. The bath has been kept — I will not be the aesthetic who takes the bath out — but the counter is now the working surface. The lacquer is a high-gloss white enamel applied directly to the existing tile. I sanded the tile once, washed it twice, and rolled the enamel on with a small foam roller, she says. It took a Saturday and half of a Sunday. The enamel cost thirty-eight euros.

The corner has three things on the counter, only three: a small magnifying mirror on a stand, a ceramic dish for the day’s tools, and a folded towel. Everything else — the cleansers, the serums, the masks — is in the medicine cabinet above, retrieved as needed. I cannot work in a cluttered corner. The corner is a face. I work on one face at a time. The corner should look like one face, not forty.

The light is the ceiling light, supplemented by a daylight LED bulb Mathilde bought online for nine euros. She is, in her own description, a functionalist about the corner. The corner is for work. The rest of the flat can be a mess.

3. Sara Bekele — Makeup artist, Brooklyn

Sara’s corner is a chest of drawers, lacquered in oxblood. The chest was an IKEA piece — the four-drawer Malm — that Sara, in 2022, took apart, sanded, primed, and repainted in a deep oxblood alkyd enamel. It took a week of evenings. I am not, by nature, a person who paints furniture. I am, by nature, a person who paints faces. I needed the chest to look like the colour of a really good lipstick, so I painted it like one.

The top of the chest is the working surface. The drawers hold the kit. The lacquered top has the property Sara values most in a vanity surface: it shows me when I have dropped something. A dropped brush on a lacquered oxblood top is visible. A dropped brush on a wooden top is invisible. The visibility of mistakes is, in Sara’s practice, a feature.

The mirror is propped against the wall above the chest. It is not attached. I want to be able to move it when I need light from a different direction. The corner is a working site. The light on a working site has to be movable.

4. Jin Park — Hair stylist, Seoul

Jin’s corner is the smallest of the five. It is a single drawer in a hanok — a traditional Korean house — that has been converted into a salon studio. The drawer is, technically, a Western-style dresser drawer; the hanok was renovated in 2019 and a small bedroom was fitted into the back of the building.

The drawer holds Jin’s working kit — combs, scissors, a single clipper, a small jar of pomade. The lacquer on the drawer is a deep, almost-black green. Green is the colour of hair, Jin says, before it is a colour. It is the colour of the dye vat.

The corner is not, primarily, a working surface — Jin works on clients, not on a mirror. The corner is a preparation surface. The drawer is where the kit lives between clients. The lacquer’s job is to keep the kit clean and to keep the corner visually quiet. I do not want my kit to be the most visible thing in the room. I want my client to be the most visible thing in the room.

5. Olivia Chen — Beauty editor, Los Angeles

Olivia’s corner is the most ambitious. It is a built-in, along one wall of a small guest bedroom, lacquered in a soft warm grey. The built-in was designed by Olivia and her partner, in late 2024, when they converted the guest bedroom into a half-office, half-vanity. The lacquer is a Farrow & Ball colour — Pavilion Gray, slightly warmed — applied in three coats by a local painter.

The surface is wide enough to hold a small laptop, a stack of three magazines, a tray of samples, and a small mirror, all at once. The lacquered surface is the desk and the vanity in one.

The reason I wanted a lacquered surface is not aesthetic, Olivia says. It is that I write at the same desk where I do my makeup in the morning, and I do not want the desk to be a place where the morning’s powder is embedded in the wood. The lacquered surface wipes. I do not have to think about whether I have wiped it.

What the five corners have in common

The five corners are very different in scale, geography, budget, and aesthetic. The five surfaces have three things in common.

They are all lacquered. Every one of the five surfaces has a sealed, wipeable, slightly reflective finish. Camille’s tray, Mathilde’s tile, Sara’s chest, Jin’s drawer, Olivia’s built-in. The lacquer is the answer each person, independently, arrived at.

They are all private. None of the five corners is in a shared or public space in the home. Each is, in its own way, a small zone the person has marked off for their work. The corner is, in 2026, a kind of territorial claim — a small room-within-a-room that the home, and the people in it, know not to disturb.

They are all under-provisioned. Every one of the five corners is, by the standards of any major beauty retailer, small. None of the five has a Hollywood tri-fold mirror. None has a counter-height stool. None has a magnifying ring light. The five corners are workmanlike. The workmanlike is the point.