In this episode of the Uploft Interior Design Podcast, I share how unexpectedly energized I’ve been by diving into TikTok for the first time, using it as a creative outlet for design inspiration, trend commentary, and playful content creation, before answering a listener’s question about whether French bistro–style X-back dining chairs are a fad (they’re not—I love them and consider them a timeless, practical choice, especially for families). I then pivot to pop culture and unpack my long-anticipated but ultimately disappointing experience watching Netflix’s Secret Mall Apartment. If you have questions for me, make sure to submit them here.
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Design inspiration, real life makeovers, and the latest in pop culture. This is the Uploft Interior Design Podcast with Betsy Helmouth. >> February is here. Things are stretching out before us. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of winter
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being over. But what’s keeping me warm? What’s keeping me inspired? This dark winter season is Tik Tok. I have been Tik Tocking for 2 months now. I hired a local college girl who loves Tik Tok and we’ve been cranking out videos. We’ve been visiting HomeGoods. We’ve been in
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my living room. We’ve been um sharing my thoughts on Heated Rivalry and all these different things. She’s been showing me the trends like when designers rate this room or when they give their top three musthaves for any living room, top three must haves for any bedroom. Um, of
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course, a trend report. It has been so much fun. We are literally meeting tomorrow at HomeGoods for an hour and are hopefully going to do like 15 videos. Some of them silly, some of them serious, all of them informative. I’m having a lot more fun than I thought
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I would. If you want to check out the videos, I would love that. Just head over to Tik Tok and we are Uploft Interior Design. There’s a wealth of videos to watch and even more coming day by day. But I’m glad to say that they’re really getting a lot of traction. But
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I’m even more excited to say that they have been super inspiring. I’m enjoying myself and it’s been really energizing, especially because I don’t spend time on TikTok. I spend so much time on Instagram and a moderate amount on Facebook that I just don’t want to add
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another thing to my algorithm. But Instagram is feeding or sort of mimicking Tik Tok in so many different ways and then feeding off of what Tik Tok is doing that I figured I’m already kind of in it. I already understand what’s going on and it’s been really fun
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to contribute to the conversation. So, I hope you like the stuff. I hope you find it to be inspiring. If there is a room that you want me to rate, all you have to do is write to uploft.com/mpodcast. Once again, uploft.com/mpodcast. There you’re going to see a button and
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you can write me with your personal design dilemmas. You can ask me to make a Tik Tok about your room. You can ask me to talk about your room on the podcast. So many different ways to get interior design advice and to get my thoughts on your space. I hope you’re staying inspired. I hope
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you’re not spending too much time on social media. I have a problem. I have a problem. So, I’m definitely trying to cut back. But when I am not on Instagram, I am designing for clients. And I am reading your questions as they come in. And I have a question that’s
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got that’s come in this week. So, let me check it out here. It is from Jillian. And Jillian writes, “Hey Betsy, I need to know, are the French beastro style dining chairs, the Xbacks, like, oh gosh, sorry guys, I just had a little tickle.” Luckily, I almost always have a cup of
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coffee nearby. All right, let me start again. Jillian, hi Betsy. I need to know, are the French beastro style dining chairs Xback like the Rhouse House Cadence or the Ballard Constants, for example, a fad or are they a classic design option for the new
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dining set I’m trying to pull together? I don’t want to make a too trendy decision, but I appreciate how this style done in metal can be very forgiving with four young kids. Thanks, Jillian. So, let me describe the French beastro chairs for those of you
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wondering sort of what she’s talking about. They do have the X back and they usually have sort of prominent hardware whether it’s a screw or a nail that’s visible from the front or back. Sometimes the back, the X piece is in metal. Sometimes it’s in a same wood or
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similarly stained wood as the rest of the chair. And then the bottom is usually woven. So, it can be kind of like a basket weave or a caning. It can be a solid
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Submit your design questions and room dilemmas
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base or sometimes people even tie a cushion on it. Are these trendy? That’s your question. Absolutely not. These are not going anywhere. These have been around for eons and they will work with your set depending on your style. I would not call these modern.
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I wouldn’t even call them contemporary. I’m thinking that this is a rustic choice, a transitional choice. It’s casual. So, for me, it’s not even a traditional choice. It’s something a little bit more laidback. I could see it working with an eclectic style. I could
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see it working with an industrial style, especially if that Xbox was in metal. For me, these are such a go-to chair. I especially like them in colors. You don’t just have to stick to a wood stain. They offer lots of them in white or green or red or blue and it can be a
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really classic pop for any area whether you use it as a desk chair or a dining chair. I love these and you truly cannot go wrong as long as the style word aligns with the style of this chair. Love it. Love it. Now, is it the most comfortable dining chair? For instance,
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you know, I have a space in my kitchen, a little eaten area, and that area is very transitional due to the cabinetry, due to the finishes that were already there long before I moved in. And this would be the perfect type of chair for my casual Eden set there. However,
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they’re not all that comfortable. They do have that sort of hard back. They do have the cushionless seat unless you tie on a cushion. And so for me, I would pick something that’s a little bit more comfy that’s maybe got a fully upholstered back and seat. That’s my
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only hesitation here. You find these typically in a French beastro or in a New York City coffee shop or somewhere where they may not necessarily want you to linger a super long time. That being said, great with kids. Just an overall amazing chair. Highly recommend, Jillian.
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Well, that was a quick question, guys. You might have questions that you’ve been thinking about, that you’ve been wanting to send me, and you’ve been on the fence. Well, get off that fence and get into my inbox. Head over to uploft.com/mpodcast and you can write me a question. I love
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it when you send me pictures as well because then I can really speak to your situation and give you lots of detailed advice. All right, let’s move in to something I have been so excited to watch. Something I was waiting for with baited breath. It finally released. I convinced my son to
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watch it with me last weekend. Let’s talk about it. It’s Netflix’s
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Are French bistro X-back dining chairs classic or trendy?
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Secret Mall Apartment. This was actually an indie documentary that was released, I don’t know, a year or so ago, and I have been waiting for it to come to a format where I could see it because it was on like the um festival circuit. I think it was at Sundance or something
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like that. I’m not sure if it won any awards, but it had been around in terms of it being on my radar, and it is just my thing. First of all, it advertised itself as this group of young adults who move into the mall. They basically are located in Providence, Rhode Island. There’s this
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big mall that opens up and they find these little pockets that are not used by retail spaces that um the mall is kind of this odd shape. So they’re like, “Well, this part is rounded, but the actual storefront is square. What happened to that curved piece? What’s
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going on in there?” So they got into the back of the mall and shimmyed through all these super small crevices and basically found a large void that’s 750 ft. And in that void, they decided to build an apartment. I was intrigued, fascinated. I’m like, “How did they go
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to the bathroom? Where did they get food? How did they move around after hours? How are they not seen on camera? All of these things came to my mind and I was really excited to get the answers. So, when I saw it drop on Netflix, I said to my son, “This will be something
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a teenager might have fun with.” Because, you know, it is a little irreverent. It is a little um subversive to take a mall type space that’s meant for capitalism and retail marketing and all these different things and use it in a free way. And it was even more subversive than I thought
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because as we started watching the story, in order to build the mall, they had to tear down a lot of housing. housing that was used by artists and people who um had limited income. And all of a sudden, these people were displaced by this big capitalist
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behemoth. And these artists, I didn’t realize at the time that they were artists, but this group of artists, a lot of them from Risy, which is right by Providence, Rhode Island, were reclaiming this area as their home, but doing it in this way. However, I found
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it to be very um well, let’s just call it false false advertising because they didn’t actually live there. These pockets that they found, including this very large 750 ft pocket, were not heated or cooled. They also didn’t have any windows, so it was very hard to
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actually live there. The most time they ever spent there in 4 years was 4 days straight. In fact, usually they just used it as a place to meet or convene, almost like an artist salon, where they would talk about future artistic projects. They would talk about how to
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make this apartment a little bit more of a scene in terms of the best ways to bring up furniture, the best ways to kind of get electricity to the space, the best ways to invite other people to the space while still being relatively incognito. but nobody actually lived there. So for
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me that was kind of a bummer. And they showed so much about sort of the idea behind the space. They showed a lot about how the sort of ring leader Michael who was also a teacher at Risie and then he looped in some of his most um dedicated students and they lived here
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with him because it was eight artists who wound up really claiming the space as their own and having keys to the space. So anyway, they showed his other works and other subversive kind of art installations he created out of public spaces that weren’t being fully used. In
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other words, under a bridge, he wound up making a huge installation with these mannequins and nets and really finding public spaces that were underutilized and turning them into private spaces. And then also he did a lot of work with painters tape and making temporary
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installations and murals in hospitals and other things that actually granted him access schools with the painters tape. So they spent a lot of time on his other artistic initiatives and really for my taste and for my son’s taste, not enough time on the actual logistics of
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the mall. Sure, we learned like how they got into the mall, how they got out of the mall, but it was really that daytoday that we were seeking. It was that sort of um how do they not get caught by the cameras? How do they not get caught by security guards? And there
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was a touch of that, but I really wish they would have gone deeper. I really wish that they were actually living and sleeping there versus just kind of using it as a gathering spot because even secret mall apartment leads you to believe that it is someone’s apartment.
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Was it worth watching? It is highly critically acclaimed on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 98% tomato meter score. That’s pretty impressive. For me, it was somewhat slowm moving. For me, the focus was more on this Michael Townsen person and sort of his artistic philosophy and less on the
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actual and for me more compelling promise, which is this is going to be all the details of the apartment. One thing I thought was a little bit kooky is because they could no longer access that apartment once they get kicked out. And I won’t reveal any more spoilers,
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but they did eventually get kicked out after 4 years inhabiting this space for the documentary. They built out a fake space. So, they replicated the mall apartment as much as possible. Um, they tried to recreate the cinder blocks out of foam. They tried to recreate the
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furniture, all these different things for the film and then they recreated some scenes of things that they had done in there. That was not a successful piece for me. These guys are obviously not actors. They are artists. So, as they were doing the
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recreations, it felt somewhat cheesy. It felt contrived. I would have maybe liked to hear from the security guard’s point of view or
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Comfort, kids, and when bistro chairs do (and don’t) work
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even the mall’s point of view. I just felt like if you needed to bulk up this story with other footage, which it’s obvious that they did, there were other kinds of roads you could go down other than just recreating this space and doing these little silly reenactments that for me
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fell flat. But in this day and age when malls are sort of going out of favor, when there’s less foot traffic, when there’s more empty storefronts every time you go, and when you do hear of people, developers turning old defunct malls into, you know, communal living spaces,
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whether it’s retirement spaces or just true apartments. This is a fascinating concept that’s being explored in a real residence type way and I hoped that this film would kind of bridge the gap between what’s happening now and what they were doing back then and by back
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then it was like the early to mid odds. Do I give this movie a 98% on my tomato meter? Absolutely not. My son and I had a hard time getting through it during the last 25 minutes. I mean, we stopped and started several times. And during the last 25 minutes, I was basically
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like bribing him to stay and watch it, just like, “Let’s finish it out.” But we were looking at each other being like, “Okay, let’s let’s get to the mall apartment.” Um, so this movie that I’d literally been waiting for for months definitely let me down, but I’d love for
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you to watch it. And if you’re a lover of doiciles like I am, I could really see myself in that space thinking about what I would do with it, how I would get the furniture up there. I would definitely want to watch this. I would just never watch this a second time, but I’m so
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intrigued by the premise that I would probably still watch it um even knowing that I wasn’t the biggest fan. All right, guys. Go out and see it if you like and pass along any other recommendations you have for me. I love sharing my latest listen, my latest
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watch with you all. And of course, I always need new ideas for new watches and listens. Keep me posted. Fill me in. Uploft.com/mpodcast. Until next week. Bye.
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My take on Netflix’s Secret Mall Apartment
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A big thanks to our producer Jeremy Young and to Eton and the Embassy for our theme music. And shout out to our parent company, Uploft Interior Design, your trusted source for expert interior design. Visit uploft.com to explore our services and book a consultation with
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for tuning in and we’ll see you next week with more pro tips and pop culture dish.
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