Some couples make music together. Others build businesses. For Grammy-winning musician Jon Batiste and his wife, writer and visual artist Suleika Jaouad, their latest creative collaboration is a little more personal. The couple is inviting the world into their wonderfully eclectic universe with their first home collection for Anthropologie, a 46-piece assortment that brings their shared love of art, culture, storytelling and a good dose of maximalism into the home.
The collection, appropriately titled Tunisiana, has been a year in the making and takes its name from the imaginary country the couple created together. It’s a marriage of Tunisia, where Jaouad traces her paternal roots, and Louisiana, where Batiste’s musical heritage runs deep. Add in a little Swiss influence from Jaouad’s background, and you have a design language that feels less like a traditional home collection and more like a passport stamped with memories, family history and a whole lot of personality.
Imagine a North African courtyard meeting a New Orleans parlor. Colorful patterned tiles, mismatched dishes, decorative ceramics and enough fringe to make even the most committed minimalist reconsider their decorating choices. It’s the kind of home where the piano is never too far away, flowers fill the tables and an invitation for cocktails can easily turn into dinner followed by an impromptu dance party.
Price: $130
For Batiste and Jaouad, that’s precisely the point. Their approach to decorating isn’t about achieving the perfectly curated home that dominates social media. It’s about creating a space that actually feels lived in, where every object has a story and nothing needs to match to belong.
“To me, home is a three-dimensional autobiography,” Jaouad writes in her introduction to the collection. It’s a philosophy reflected throughout Tunisiana, where the couple’s affection for handmade objects, unconventional details and pieces with a collected, timeworn quality takes center stage.
Price: $80
The collection’s origins are especially meaningful for Jaouad, who spent two weeks in Tunisia during the early design process, returning for the first time since before the pandemic. While there, she explored the country’s architecture, photographing intricate wrought ironwork, decorative tiles and the saturated colors that define its landscape. Deep blues, dusty pinks, vivid ochres and mossy greens became part of the collection’s visual vocabulary.
She also spent mornings painting in her mother’s studio overlooking the picturesque village of Sidi Bou Saïd. Those watercolor paintings eventually became the foundation for some of the collection’s ceramics, transforming intimate moments of artistic expression into objects intended for everyday use.
And while Jaouad’s visual artistry plays a significant role in the collection, Batiste’s musical sensibility is equally important to the world they’ve created. Their home is a place where instruments coexist with paintbrushes, books pile up alongside records and creativity doesn’t necessarily stop when the workday ends. It’s a shared artistic language that moves between music, painting, design and the ordinary rituals of living together.
What makes Tunisiana particularly appealing is its rejection of the idea that a beautiful home requires a complete aesthetic overhaul. Jaouad approached the collection with the intention of creating pieces that might resemble something discovered during an unforgettable trip or inherited from an impossibly chic relative. Objects that can comfortably exist alongside what you already own rather than demanding an entirely new living room to accommodate them.
At a time when interiors can feel overly concerned with pristine surfaces and perfectly coordinated furniture, Batiste and Jaouad are making a compelling argument for something with a little more soul. Their collection celebrates the beauty of collecting, the freedom of mixing cultural influences and the emotional value of surrounding yourself with things you genuinely love.
After all, the best homes aren’t necessarily the ones that look like showrooms. They’re the ones that tell you something about the people who live there. And with Tunisiana, Batiste and Jaouad are giving Anthropologie shoppers an opportunity to bring a little of their colorful world into their own.