The crazier a succulent looks, the better to Molly Quan, owner of Portland, Oregon’s urban plant and home accessories shop Life+Limb. Quan is on a quest to fill her shelves with “weird and sculptural” flora. A regular aloe vera is great, but a variety that’s hugely out of scale is better. Prickly and maybe toxic? Better still. So perhaps it’s fitting that her 1956 ranch in the Cully area (one of two neighborhoods real-estate agents steer buyers away from, she jokes) is filled with her own collection of the weird and sculptural from off-kilter art to vintage-modern furniture to succulents.

For Quan, 32, and boyfriend of four years Louis Carlton, 44, there are no rules when it comes to how you decorate. “I love mixing it up. It feels more lived in,” Quan says. There’s no certain science to her style. In homage to salon-style galleries, she fills the walls with artwork from friends and funky found frames in casual groupings. A framed collection of MRI printouts from Quan’s ACL surgery (she injured herself in a skateboarding accident) hangs next to a frame of Carlton’s judo certificate and a found-at-garage-sale sketch of a cowboy on a bucking bronco. “We don’t try for anything,” Quan says. “We just put things out that tell our story, and they usually work together.”