The interior design star, ceramics artist and owner of seven super-chic home-accessories stores on two coasts ruminates about “mantiques,” when more is more and why a home should be like a first kiss.

You have said that a person’s home should be like a good dose of Zoloft. What do you mean by that?

What makes a chic home a happy home?

A chic home is filled with things that you love and that make you happy—it’s not filled with uncomfortable furniture and art that you don’t understand. Coming home should be an antidote to the troubles and traumas of everyday life. It should be like hearing your favorite song on your car radio, a first kiss, running into your ex-boyfriend and he’s fat, being the 100th caller. It shouldn’t feel like Sunday night, doing your taxes, eating fiber or getting your teeth cleaned. Good home decorating can be the equivalent of years of therapy.

What are the signs that a room is seriously depressed? Is there a cure?

The symptoms may include fatigue, boredom, excessive appropriateness and complete loss of joie de vivre. If you’ve got a case of Seriousitis, pop style can be just the electric shock therapy you need to exude enthusiasm. Pop is about clean lines, bold colors and a sense of humor. It’s the antidote to taking yourself and your life too seriously. Paint a wall orange; needlepoint ornery messages onto pillows; cancel your subscription to The Wall Street Journal and pick up MAD magazine instead.

Are you saying good taste has a downside?

People err on the side of tastefulness rather than boldness, often with negative consequences. Got a small apartment? Name it Worthington Arms and emblazon the name on everything—matchbooks, stationery, Tupperware. Rococo house? Buy mod furniture. No money? Take a cross-country road trip. I don’t want to look back on my life and think about the things I should have done. Of course, you might say that home décor isn’t going to make or break you psychologically, and you’d be right. I encourage you to be bold in every arena of your life.

What’s your position on mixing and matching?

Don’t be tentative with patterns. If you keep your color scheme restrained, you can approach pattern with wild abandon. When in doubt, repeat, repeat, repeat.

When it comes to chandeliers, I assume you believe more is more. Right?

Chandeliers are a sublime opportunity for immodesty, and I’m obsessed with them. Chandeliers should always be bigger than you imagined, a little bit glitzier than you’re comfortable with and a little bit more expensive than you can afford. I especially love vintage chandeliers—the more over-the-top, the better. I like to use large, oversize bulbs in them.

You’ve said that a bedroom should feel like the most luxurious hotel room in the world. Can you explain?

When you start decorating it, imagine checking yourself into a world of opulent fabrics, gorgeous surfaces and expensive presents. Take your bedding to the limit. Luxuriate in matching linens, drapes and headboards. Pamper your paws with fluffy carpet. (What’s so great about wood floors anyway?) People who deny themselves comfort and luxury baffle me. Why punish yourself?

Does style have to be democratic?

Virginia Woolf wrote that every woman needs a room of her own. But bit by bit, women have taken over the home decorating world and put their imprimatur on the entire house. I think it’s time for men to take back the night, at least in a small way. The perfect place to do that is in the den, where every man should have a comfy and masculine place to hang out, filled with what I have come to call “mantiques”: suits of armor, leather Chesterfield sofas, brass valets, shades of brown and red, and dark wood paneling with erotic pop art on top of it. Ultimately, it’s where the women will want to hang out, too.

Describe yourself in 124 words or less.

I opened my first store in SoHo in 1998, then moved to bigger digs in 2004. Many design stores are off-putting (“Don’t touch this,” “No kids or dogs allowed,” “You’re not cool enough to shop here”), but in mine we always try to be welcoming. “Enter our groovy world,” which is written on the wall in the SoHo store, is an invitation to tuck in to my maximalist design aesthetic, in which different looks—Palm Beach, Hippie and Mod—coexist in an idiosyncratic mix. I now have a website, www.JonathanAdler.com, and seven stores—SoHo, Madison Avenue and Greenwich Avenue in New York City, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco—and am poised on the brink of taking over the world with happy chic.

From My Prescription for Anti-Depressive Living by Jonathan Adler. Copyright © 2005 by Jonathan Adler, Inc. and Melcher Media, Inc. Used by permission of Regan Books, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.