Instant Lifestyle
The pitfalls of trend driven design
“It’s all the art of living. Academically, I was trained as an architect. But I am not a mathematical architect, I am an intuitive architect. I’m not one who says, “I want to predict a new way of living.” I’m not the visionary who wants to tackle large-scale urban enclaves. I’m a little conservative; I would rather go to the essence and the art of living.” — Vincent Van Duysen
It would seem that a large sector of the interior design world is now primarily concerned with image, or rather, “lifestyle” and “lifestyle branding”. There are numerous age old suggestions for selling a home, including, the smell of baking bread, fresh coffee brewing and an abundance of yellow flowers (although chrysanthemums might be a deal breaker); indeed a recent survey found such factors could be the difference between a buyer putting in an offer or not. Indeed the latest home selling technique is a carefully “staged” pet, which apparently, some estate agents believe, might give a property a more “homely” appeal than a pet-free competitor. It’s somewhat bizarre to think that a property’s potential could be obscured by something as impermanent and easily replaceable as curtains, carpeting or clutter, but they are, indisputably, things that routinely put buyers off. Indeed the majority of those without design training (and some of those with it) are incapable of looking past the superficial, as they’re essentially looking for a property that, visually, offers them the lifestyle they aspire to. Indeed this obsession with lifestyle has led to a multitude of highly successful, and highly profitable, “lifestyle brands”, i.e. a brand that attempts to embody the values, aspirations, interests, attitudes, or opinions of a group or a culture for marketing purposes. The importance of “brand identity” in this context has filtered through to every echelon of the consumer sector; something that could first be seen most clearly in the fashion industry, with everyone from boohoo to The Row carefully curating their output so as to best appeal to their target markets. This is something which the interiors industry soon picked up on, especially with the advent and rampant popularity of Pinterest and Instagram, to lure clients with the idea of providing them with an instant lifestyle.
An interior by Axel Vervoordt, demonstrating the designers unique and original sense of scale, proportion, and aesthetics
A beautifully conceived bathroom at the home of architect Vincent Van Duysen, photograph by Jose Manuel Alorda and Kasia Gatkowska
This is of course something which is not entirely new, and for decades the worlds of fashion and interiors have been closely intertwined. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century famed designers and artists were producing commercial interiors, for e.g. the extraordinary lacquered office designed by Jean Dunand (1889-1948) for the renowned Parisian milliner Madame Agnès in her new salon on the Rue Saint-Florentin (as much in homage to its proprietor as it was a marketing tool for both Dunand and Agnès) and the whimsically surreal atelier designed by Jean Michel-Frank (1895-1941) for Italian couturier Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973). In more recent years, Andrée Putman (1925-2013) designed the original two Connolly boutiques in London’s Mayfair and storied French designer Jacques Grange (b. 1944) the interiors for the Yves Saint Laurent boutique on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré; a remarkable merger of private taste with public space (now torn out in favour of acres of brilliant white veined marble and a similarly headache inducing light level). Perhaps never more so has brand image been so important, with The Row’s new London outpost at 15 Carlos Place, designed in collaboration with architect Annabelle Selldorf (who is currently designing an expansion for The Frick Museum in New York) incorporating works by artists such as James Turrell (b. 1943) and blue chip modernist furniture from the likes of Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) and Pierre Jeanneret (1896-1967). For its core market of customers such carefully chosen art and objet are a necessary backdrop to a collection including £700 t-shirts and £2000 cashmere-blend sweatpants.
In this private residence in Brussels by interior architect Pierre Yovanovitch a deceptively simple oval staircase, immaculately detailed and conceived, snakes sinuously from floor to floor
This duplex apartment in New York’s Soho demonstrates interior designer Alyssa Kapito’s unique sense of style and ability to create seamlessly elegant interiors
It’s clear that styling sells and in the world of “social media influencers” fashion and interiors have started to overlap; once limited to flogging makeup and fast fashion, furniture manufacturers, galleries and even art and antique dealers are now sending socially savvy individuals furniture and objet to plug in their artfully styled Instagram-friendly interiors. This is usually against a backdrop of brilliant white walls, upholstery, curtains and carpets, with a tick box list of trending interior status symbols including, but not limited to: luxury scented candles (usually a PR freebie), fiddle-leaf figs, small wooden stools (a topic that recently caused some controversy following an unnecessary take down by SSENSE), a multitude of art books and (knock off) Jeanneret chairs. Indeed to fully function as a “lifestyle blogger” it would seem a Kinfolk-esque interior is a requisite to success; especially so during the Pandemic when enforced isolation has resulted in a preoccupation with our homes — sometimes verging on the neurotic — and the ways in which they help, or hinder, our daily lives. Of course small independent businesses have suffered terribly, and it’s understandable that now, more so than ever, they would want to increase market exposure, but will freebies in the form of “on trend” home accessories tagged in overly styled Instagram posts really result in increased sales? For mega brands and producers of cheaply made high-street tat, such disingenuous marketing rarely seems to backfire, but one has to question whether dealers and gallerists actually risk devaluing their brand, with their real and core customers put off by such insincere tactics especially when engaging with bloggers who clearly don’t know the first thing about art and design.
Sadly this mentality has started to seep pervasively into the world of interiors, with everyone from retailers to designers and FF&E giving “lifestyle” undue precedence over quality and integrity; juniors in particular often seem to have a very superficial view of what exactly the day-to-day-life of an interior designer entails, and are often reticent to engage in those more laborious, thankless elements of the profession. Whilst there is a distinction, at least to my mind, between an interior “architect”, “designer” and “decorator”, those key elements of a successful interior — namely, a satisfactorily resolved shell taking account of first, the bigger picture, i.e layout and functionality, and then secondly, the junctions and detailing, carefully concealing mechanical elements and other such unattractive necessities — are being insufficient attention compared to cushions, curtains and prettifying. Sometimes for e.g. with commercial interiors, hotels, restaurants etc it’s harder to tell if ugly detailing is the fault of a design team as such developments are often at the victim of value engineering, and final decision are made on site by project managers and builders who tend to prioritize time-frame and cost over an artfully composed and carefully conceived whole. Sometimes however it’s entirely inexcusable, especially in high-budget residential interiors where a good designer should be able to conceal or design around messier elements of a pre-existing shell, or, if designing from scratch, avoid them altogether. Staircases are a case in point, often challenging, they’re left to the end, or lazily detailed, resulting in a hodgepodge of lines and angles that simply don’t work; this can be especially so in more traditional interiors when runners, skirtings, dados, panelling and windows are thrown into the mix. The job of a designer is the resolution of these elements so as to achieve overall coherence and balance, not merely to create an artfully styled editorial interior that will capture a magazine editor’s attention.
Whilst of course the basis of architecture and interior design is to provide clients with the lifestyle to which they aspire — or to which they are already accustomed (as François Catroux (1937-2020) did on numerous occasions for the Santo Domingo family) — it becomes a problem when “lifestyle” overtakes “design” as the driving force behind a project. Clearly furnishings are an incredibly important part of a successful interior, but it should be on an equal playing field with those less glamorous practical elements (for e.g. vents, which are often unnecessarily enormous), that if done well, blend seamlessly into the overall whole, unnoticed by a buildings occupants, but if botched, stand out like a sore thumb. The reality is that to most clients, the majority of such nitty-gritty is incredibly dull, and when presented with pages and pages of elevations and plans, gloss over them (understandably), leaving it up to the designer to implement a successfully resolved scheme. The problem is, that without a solid education, a good many interior designers (not so much architects, as they’re far more carefully regulated), especially those who set up firms at an early age, riding on a wave of Instagram followers and PR smoke and mirrors, have no real idea how to integrate more complex technical elements. Whilst this is often irrelevant to their client base, who are probably perfectly happy with their carefully curated cushions and “vintage treasures”, it’s having the effect of watering down interior design and the industry at large. Beneath the surface, a good many of those projects featured in the pages of glossy magazines lack any real understanding of design — and by that I mean scale, proportion and functionality. Vincent Van Duysen (b. 1962) is an architect and designer who is enormously fashionable, but ignoring that, his interiors are original, perfectly finished and beautifully detailed; indeed that’s what makes them so special. Furniture and fixtures are part of a coherent whole, they’re not used to mask poor design — as is, sadly, with a large part of the profession, increasingly the case — indeed if anything, they often play second fiddle to beautifully conceived kitchens, bathrooms, staircases and joinery.
Styling is clearly an important factor, and for those designers who reach the pantheon of the greats — Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950), Le Corbusier (1887-1965), Jean Royère (1902-1981), David Hicks (1929-1998) and Axel Vervoordt (b. 1947) et al — it’s often their unique and individual sense of style, an ability to combine disparate periods and genres, or a way of using colour and pattern that sets them apart from the pack. The overall success of their interiors however, is as a result of their own unique aesthetic. It would be far better for the design world at large if there were less reliance on finding images of each individual element on Pinterest, so as to shoehorn them together in the hope of creating a coherent “on trend” interior (something more senior friends and acquaintances in the industry are increasingly finding problematic). Instead, start from scratch, no one is expecting a designer to reinvent the wheel, but if a client wants panelling for e.g. research it, look at original period examples and reinvent them; the perfect illustration of which being that Jean Michel Frank designed for the Rockefeller apartment at 810 Fifth Avenue, a wonderfully original reinterpretation of the classical style of Louis XV. Essentially, designers should stop focusing so much on image, because as a result, everything is starting to look the same; with the same fittings, fabrics and furniture — even vintage and antique — used ad infinitum. Perhaps if the magazine world were more open to publishing and promoting a greater breadth of interior styles, then fewer designers would be inclined to jump on the same band wagon.