Interior design magazines like Architectural Digest have long featured homes that are almost annoyingly perfect, with their just-waxed tables and floors, couches upholstered in the latest fabrics, antiques restored with obvious labor to the most handsome versions of themselves - homes so stagnant they’re practically film sets. Missing from these interiors are the focus-stealing elements common in contemporary homes, like dangling cords and dust bunnies and the clutter that speaks of our general weakness for stuff.

What it takes to pursue this aesthetic is money, and the difficulty of achieving such perfection has kept generations of interior designers, antiques dealers and fabric purveyors in business. So what to make of the recent buzz over the photos taken by Todd Selby? His website - theselby.com - features lofts spread with chipped furniture and broken lamps, walls decorated with original artwork affixed by scotch tape, books stacked in precarious towers on the floor - and has caused such a flurry of interest that design aficionados now log on with ferocity. Selby photographs real homes and their actual residents, who are artists and graphic designers, writers and models and musicians sprinkled from Sydney to New York to Paris to Los Angeles, and they are beautiful (both homes and residents) - impossibly so - in part because they’re fearless. Like our beloved Holiday Golightly, who guilelessly entertains some of New York’s wealthiest socialites in an apartment crammed with unpacked boxes and devoid of furniture (and who is twice as attractive because she simply can’t be bothered), each of these homes exudes an effortlessness foreign to even the most liberal of design magazines - even Dwell and Domino and the website apartmenttherapy.com. There is clutter, there are cords, and the cardinal sin seems to be any evidence of trying too hard.

Now here’s the twist: this ideal is as impossible to achieve as anything out of Architectural Digest. But it feels achievable. That’s part of the attraction. The necessary ingredient is no longer money, it’s taste - combined with style - and who doesn’t think they have those? But the people Todd Selby photographs are at the top of their fields, plus they’re endlessly social and well-connected and fascinating - the best and brightest, per Selby’s specific aesthetic, their cities have produced. In short, making messy chic takes talent.

The homes on Selby’s site haven’t been touched by professional interior designers - that would be, in some unspoken but implied way, cheating. Money isn’t going to get you on this list.

So how do you get your apartment, and yourself, featured on The Selby? Start by being talented, magnetic and irrepressibly creative, then spend a few years out and about. Add a dash of luck and you’re partway there.

For most, it’s probably easier to land in Architectural Digest, just like it’s easier to buy a Jean-Michel Basquiat than to become Jean-Michel Basquiat.

At the end of the day, Todd Selby is a curator of humans as well as a documenter of their homes, and, like some of history’s most discerning gallerists, in choosing, he assigns value. He’s showcasing a lot more than enviable interior design—he’s showcasing enviable lives. And perhaps that’s why the appeal of Selby’s site has been so enormous: given the choice between buying a work of art and being one, what would you choose?