Hannah

The secret to keeping elves interesting is to remember they're supposed to be the fairfolk, fey creatures halfway between this plane and another. If the defining characteristic of elves in your writing is "snooty and superior" you're just writing an officer of the British Imperial Navy, they should be straight up autistic and slightly out of sync with human spacetime.

It's just that the center of the bell curve is what humans would consider "autistic". The elves who go off adventuring with humans tend to lean a little more allistic by human standards, since they never quite fit in at home. They couldn't ever sustain enough interest in the minutiae of a single topic to spend the hundreds of years required to become an acknowledged master, and they struggled with the blunt explicitness of elven communication.

On the other hand, it's not just a keen sense of aesthetics that make elven dwellings so calm and relaxing—many elves just can't handle loud, sudden noises or distracting visuals, so the culture has grown towards a baseline of minimal extra stimulation. Although rumor has it that there are elves who crave stimulation instead, who build meticulously soundproofed rooms and throw raves that would knock a human stone dead on the spot.