In July, the New York Times Home & Garden section ran an article headlined “The New Antiquarians,” about the mostly youngish, wealthy-ish hipster types for whom “the perfectionism of modernism had begun to grate.” Fed up with glass buildings and long entranced by odd, spooky antiques like dressmakers’ dummies, taxidermy and apothecary cabinets, they fill their expansive lofts with all manner of objects embodying what one subject described as an “extremely previous lifestyle.” Reading it, I certainly envied some of their stuff—old suitcases, scientific illustrations, and patinaed medicine bottles just hit my sweet spots—but the whole thing also made me cringe. There were some class issues that went unremarked upon, along with the basic awkwardness of recreating a bygone era in a shiny new gentrified neighborhood, but that was predictable. Mostly, I was annoyed by the subjects’ insistence that they weren’t doing anything nostalgic—instead, they claimed, they were after authenticity. But isn’t “authenticity” just a way of pinpointing what they’re nostalgic for?

Enter Eva Hagberg, a design writer who isn’t interested in disowning this elusive but ever present longing, or casting it in the guise of something else. In her new book “Dark Nostalgia”—out today from Monacelli Press—she explores 25 contemporary spaces that have been designed with an eye to the past.

Across the U.S., with forays to London and Paris, Hagberg looks at bars, restaurants, hotels, and homes, considering their emotional resonance along with their styling. “We are recreating our own history and embracing the darkness that comes with it,” she writes in the book’s introduction. Designers are restoring this imagined past through warm, tactile materials, creating interiors that immediately evoke a time and place that feels familiar, if a little mysterious. Ultimately, “we have become nostalgic for a time that never existed.” That’s a complicated thing, something we experience in any number of ways in our personal lives. And it’s embodied by design projects that are concerned with “the layering of history,” resulting in some gorgeous, seductive spaces that beg to be explored beneath their lovely surfaces.

Hagberg, who recently relocated to Portland, Oregon, writes for The Faster Times design section, and for many other publications including Wallpaper*, Metropolis, Surface, and Wired. Earlier this month, we talked about style, memory, and nostalgia’s curiously bad rap.

How do you differentiate what you call “dark nostalgia” from regular old nostalgia?

I was interested in a nostalgia that wasn’t the candy-colored, soda fountain, pie-on-the-windowsill kind of thing. I was really interested in nostalgia as a protective mechanism from darkness…and in nostalgia about darkness. I think we don’t know how to articulate the darkness of the world right now. At first when I was working on this book, at the end of the Bush administration, things were really crazy and we didn’t really have an aesthetic language for it, and so we were looking to an aesthetic language of the past.

You’re really interested in the interplay of emotions and physical space—you write about how the best architecture and design triggers an emotional connection.

I can have an emotional connection to absolutely everything, but I think it’s easier when things look like there have been people who had emotions about them before. It’s harder to do that when you walk into a super-modernist glass house; you have to bring a lot of your own stuff to that. Projects like this, there’s so much memory entrenched in them already that it makes it easier to have an emotional connection.

How is your own emotional response to dark nostalgic design different from your response to something like modernism?

I love modernist design. I wanted to be an architect more than anything when I was in school. I saw Corbusier’s Villa Savoy and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in a book when I was 12, and got utterly obsessed. Modernism to me, is really, really entrancing—I don’t really know where the architecture is. I can’t really find the design, and I think that’s why I’m totally fascinated by it.

[Dark nostalgic] stuff is a little easier to read. And it’s as carefully done as modernism—it’s not like modernism is pure and this isn’t, but for me its easier to read just because there’s more information. The cues are a little bit easier to pick up. Like when you go into Employees Only, you kind of know you’re supposed to sidle up to the bar and order some oysters and wink at people. Whereas I’ve been to Johnson’s Glass House in Connecticut, and had a total relationship to that building because of my own memory of it—because I’d looked at so many pictures of it—but looking at it was a different experience, because it wasn’t right up against me. It was a little bit more elusive, a little bit further away, and I kind of had to chase the feeling. Whereas the projects in this book come to you.

In the recent Times article about “the new antiquarians,” people seemed to be taking pains to say that what they were doing wasn’t nostalgic. I always think its funny that people use nostalgia as a dirty word.

Nostalgia is not this sappy, protective thing. It’s this really, really important driving force that all of us experience. We all are running nostalgic scripts all the time.

There’s this very explicit collusion between the desires of these spaces and the people that go into them. I don’t know what authenticity means. It’s a hard word, too. If you’re doing something honestly, it’s going to be authentic. And if you’re honest about the fact that you’re doing something fake, then it’s still authentic. There’s a really fine line between being self-aware, and then ironic, or detached. I feel like none of these projects are detached or ironic. I tell people this is a book with no jokes.

The subjects of that article—people collecting taxidermy and antiques, and always dressing the part—are obviously connected to the things you’re writing about, but the impulses seem different.

Robin [Standefer, a designer whose homes are featured in the book] owns a piece of taxidermy, and she was saying that she has it because she’s really interested in life and death, and having a piece of taxidermy makes her think about that. I think that’s a good counterpoint to “I’m collecting taxidermy because I’m really interesting and strange.” She was exploring her own feelings about mortality, animals, collecting—everything was kind of coming out of it. The taxidermy was just the physical example of this whole line of inquiry that she lives with.

The Noho loft Robin shares with her husband and design partner Stephen Alesch is featured in your book. You write, “it was the kind of place I wish I would be able to look back on having lived in,” which I really love.

It was a weird experience to have. I walked in and I was like, this is the kind of place I want to have lived in, when I’m 85. I want this to be part of my future—but only in memory, I sort of skipped over actually experiencing it.

What would you say your own style is?

My roommate was making fun of me because my job is to write about style, and I wear jeans and Converse and a t-shirt every single day. My own life isn’t stylized at all. Sometimes I pathologize it, and wonder why. I feel slightly fraudulent being in this industry and not owning a piece of furniture, but that’s okay. But now I’ve set it up, right? Now, if I ever buy a piece of furniture its going to have to be the most amazing of all time, and supportive of a young designer, and totally perfect.

I don’t covet objects, I covet emotions. I’ve always had a slightly different approach to writing about architecture and design, which is that I want to know what the motivating factors are much more than what the particular width of a couch leg is saying. I come to the table with fewer aesthetic preconceptions, and I really want to know why people are compelled to make stuff, and to design the way that they do.

About the NYC restaurant Freemans, you write, “the deliberate but comfortable space is all either a very, very elaborate piece of performance art or utterly honest.” I thought that was really perceptive. I feel like that’s the tension in all of these spaces, and it’s hard to find the line between performance and sincerity.

My ex-boyfriend’s best friend is a bouzouki player in LA, and he’s half-Greek. He grew out his mustache, dresses in kind of funny clothes, and plays the bouzouki at this Greek restaurant. And he’s so straight about it. People see him, and they assume that he doesn’t speak English, that he’s fresh off the boat. He was born and raised in LA. And I was talking to my ex once and I asked him if what his friend was doing was an elaborate piece of performance art. And he was like, “He might be. We will never know. Because it’s done so honestly.” The line between subterfuge and total honesty, he’s constantly flipping between the two.

And I think that’s what’s going on here. The person I was, when I was going to these spaces, was a totally constructed character that I was living for a couple years. Which was really fun, but really kind of decadent and hedonistic—not like my life now. But it was honest at the same time, a performance of honesty. It’s a closed loop; it keeps going.

Cover image, Courtesy Morgans Hotel Group; Standefer Alesch Loft, Michael Mundy; Freemans, Noah Kalina.