Many of Esteban Go’s followers on Instagram and TikTok are surprised to discover that he studied Law instead of Architecture, but no one doubts that this 26-year-old Colombian could have had an excellent career as a judge. Their design verdicts are pretty harsh. Of Nordic minimalism, for example, he said that it is like “being inside a refrigerator but without the emotion of finding food”. In another video he dismissed the Panton chair by saying that although it proposed the future in the 1960s, “the only thing it gave us was tingling in our legs”. A building is stylish liberty style if it seems “designed by a French caterpillar”. And we believe in the Sputnik lamp mid-century but he only manages to look like “a bad curly soldier”.
“Since there are people who sometimes get angry with my videos (and my hair), last year I gave them the opportunity to buy my silence,” Esteban explains in a telephone conversation from Medellín. “It wasn’t a joke, the payment link on my site really works.” But for now no one has paid the monthly installment of 20 million pesos (around 4,300 euros) that it costs to join his offer of “digital silence and visual peace”. At the time of our posting, he is followed by more than half a million Instagram and TikTok users, where many no longer expect him to direct his cutting epigrams only against Le Corbusier or the “narco-baroque” but also against the things they show him in photos: thanks to him, the owner of a living room with the right number of tables and chairs in white and gray now knows that what he has in his house looks more like the office of “an official who tried to live and gave up the three pieces of furniture.”
“I don’t know if they care about my opinion or they just like hearing that there’s someone on the other side,” Esteban says in that taciturn tone he usually uses in his videos. “Disappointing” is his favorite adjective for the homes and furniture of his fans. According to him, he had his first impression of this kind when he was 15 years old in Medellín. At the time he was walking with his girlfriend to see the buildings. “Here you go down the street and, except for one like Rogelio Salmona’s, everyone you see is either extremely ugly or taken from Revit models. The first criticism I remember making was: ‘What shitty buildings.’
When it came time to choose a career, he was more interested in how society is set up than a lamp or a house and chose to study law, but after graduation he signed up with an advertising agency specializing in interior design and discovered how good he was at making design judgments. In 2023, his clients needed a video that “caused a sensation” on the networks and Esteban approached them with his first roast viral, a video in which he criticized famous chairs. “For us who grew up with the Internet it’s different, but in Colombia we don’t talk much about designer furniture, also because it’s very expensive to import it. It took me a long time to pay for my Eclisse lamp by Artemide, which was the first thing I bought when I started to learn more. I had it at night and slept on a mattress on the floor.”
A year later and already in his own profile, he had become a fearsome guest to bring home for the first time. A girl with an Armen Butterfly chair, for example, will assume that it is a “influencer those who do Shein troll”, while I could go out with the owner of a Tulip but I would be careful in case she said something “half fascist”. “These red flag I start looking for them on the ceiling. “Whoever installs LED ceiling lights hasn’t spent a single minute on it.”
As a child, his grandfather’s house full of things made him believe that when he grew up he would have preferred to live in a tidier house, but how connoisseur he ended up finding his great nemesis in minimalism millennial: specifically, in that variant of gray laminate floors and adhesive marble walls that has been so popular over the years. “Now people live in a adhesive. In Colombia, which is such a varied country, all these homogeneous styles bother me even more, they are scandalous,” he reproaches.
In his particular version of Nolan’s graph (instead of ideologies he classifies styles according to their degree of pretentiousness and quantity of things), he says that right now his tastes are in the coordinates of the colonial, a type of decoration (“unpretentious, many things”) that he didn’t like before but which he now sees has at least embraced local color. He hopes that, whatever happens, his criteria don’t vary so much that he ends up with one of those “button tumors” that is the Chesterfield sofa, his most hated piece of furniture. After saving a lot, he just bought a Herman Miller Aeron: “In The Simpsons “It comes as the chair that God uses,” he finally says enthusiastically. He will watch over us.
