Youth and Ambition
Designing for a Bleak Future
“The essence of interior design will always be about people and how they live.” — Albert Hadley
Our hapless Prime Minister Boris Johnson talks frequently about “levelling up”, i.e. raising levels of income in every part of the UK, and yet, the divide, or rather gulf, between the “haves” and “have-nots” seems to be ever increasing; more extreme and more polarized with every new year. As the pandemic took hold and the world was gradually shuttered, the art world, en masse, panicked, with many auction houses immediately, and ruthlessly, culling staff, terrified that the world was about to come crashing down around them; the main concern being, essentially, that people wouldn’t buy art if they couldn’t leave their homes to see it. After all, viewing pictures as images on a telephone or computer screen at home doesn’t even come close to the visceral excitement of experiencing them as physical objects. Desperate for a solution, auction houses and galleries unified as one in a manifesto-like call to arms, claiming that in a time of crisis, society needed the arts “now more than ever”, and that art and creativity had an important part to play in the post-Covid recovery. Yet, there was seemingly no apocalypse, and we didn’t see directors at the likes of Perrotin and Hauser & Wirth, dishevelled and shell shocked, in their scuffed Loro Piana Desert Boots, boarding up their brick—and—mortar shop fronts as bailiffs loaded Rothko’s and Hockney’s into the back of idling trucks. Whilst there were, of course, some casualties, as the rest of society were left wondering if they would still have a job at the end of the month, the 0.01% were busy making use of their newfound free-time, plugging gaps in their collections and spending like there was no tomorrow (which admittedly, did, on occasion, feel like a distinct possibility). As a result we saw auction record after auction record, with the prices of “blue-chip” works going through the roof. At Sotheby’s first “online experiment” in June 2020, it sold $234.9m in post-war and contemporary art — with Francis Bacon’s 1981 Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus alone bringing in $84.6m (that’s not forgetting the digital auction in May when Michael Jordan’s game-worn “Chicago” AJ1s went for $560,000 — which was, oddly enough, a record in the second-hand sneaker world). In recent years, wages have been stagnating at the same time asset prices have been ballooning, resulting in those asset owning “Masters of the Universe” becoming richer and richer, whilst the economic working class are increasingly left behind.
The “Northshaw Estate”, with interiors by Stephen Sills, a designer catering to the pinnacle of “blue chip” art collectors, Photograph: ©Stephen Sills
Torchere “Metropolis”, patinated and lacquered aluminium with silk shades (2014) by Mattia Bonetti, Photograph ©David Gill
The luxury sector, across the board, is of course somewhat opaque and as spending moves into new areas (such as used footwear, apparently), and becomes more discreet, it’s hard to track with any great degree of precision. Even back in 2012 the Bank of England released figures showing the wealthiest 5% of the UK population benefited most from early rounds of quantitative easing — and that was precisely because they owned 40% of assets. Obviously during a series of protracted lockdowns, those on the right side of the digital transformation, the likes of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos saw their fortunes sky rocket; but even outside the tech world, the prices of old-fashioned non-digital assets, such as gold, real estate and art, jumped by more than 20% as the latest round of quantitative easing prompted investors to desperately seek out new places to park their newly accumulated wads of cash — the sort of conundrum many of us would happily welcome. This will quite likely lead to further “bar-belling” in the consumer goods sector, i.e. as discount stores and luxury goods prosper (at the recent Monaco Yacht Show, boats have, reportedly, been practically been flying off the shelf, or rather, moorings), mid-tier stores will suffer; indeed recent figures showed that more than 8,700 chain stores closed in British High Streets, shopping centres and retail parks in the first six months of the year, which equates to an average of nearly 50 outlets a day. Outside the “super prime” market, standards of living are falling for many, with the new Minimum Income Standard (MIS) report showing that 39% of Londoners can’t even afford a minimum, socially acceptable standard of living. This is only compounded by recent data suggesting that a typical professional couple looking to buy in London would need to raise, on average, a deposit of £132,685, compared to a — paltry by comparison — £20,000 at the turn of the millennium. With the average salary for interior designers and architect’s working in the capital being approximately £34,000 and £40,000 respectively (both under the mean average of £41,000), those in the creative sector are, increasingly, not only struggling get onto the property ladder, but struggling to make ends meet — which comes as “out of touch” MP Sir Peter Bottomley this week lamented politicians’ £82k salary as “grim” and “desperately difficult” to live on (which is perhaps the case if like BoJo, you’re still paying for a £58,000 Lulu Lytle makeover).
A New York penthouse designed by architect Vincent Van Duysen, perfectly illustrative of the pared back, elegant Antwerp aesthetic so sought after around the world
As a result, the idea of “success” in the Capital is somewhat warped, as, especially with the advent of social media, the lives of the glitterati are more visible now than ever before, leading to a somewhat skewed sense of what constitutes “normal” living; especially if one is lusting of the luxuriously primped lifestyles of Chahan Minassian (b. 1961), Michele Bönan and Kelly Wearstler (b. 1967) et al. In turn, for a multitude of reasons, this is having a negative impact in terms of creativity, as for e.g. many of those avant-garde designers, who might not be an immediate commercial success, are unable to live and work in a city with such spiralling living costs, and even those designers of a less radical disposition often feel shoehorned into producing inoffensive, acceptably bland “luxury” interiors so as to secure those higher-paid jobs with firms catering to the prime-residential sector (whose clients are often reticent to rock the boat, for fear their international neighbours will balk at the sight of a Mattia Bonetti dining table). The truth of the matter is that many of the “bright young things” or rather, editorially successful named designers, are often only willing to pay experienced mid-weights well below average for some apparently perceived advantage of being able to bask in their reflected glory (presumably the idea being that, one day, with a little black book bursting with contacts, they’ll be able to break away and start their own firms). If one looks at Antwerp, a creative hub that has turned out a myriad designers, such as, perhaps most famously, Axel Vervoordt (b. 1947) and Vincent Van Duysen (b. 1962) (that is of course purely in terms of interiors and architecture, and excluding the edgy, deconstructionist “Antwerp Six”, i.e. Dries Van Noten (b. 958), Ann Demeulemeester (b. 1959), Dirk Bikkembergs (b. 1959) and so on), the average property price is £240,000, less than half that in London, yet in Belgium, on average, an interior designer earns £61,000. Even if one looks beyond the obvious benefits of lower property prices and higher salaries, with a less competitive property market, en masse, people are able to invest more in their homes, and, without such a struggle to find suitable square footage, to do so without having to worry about moving. With a receptive client base, and without the constant, crushing worry of obscene London overheads, there are greater opportunities for those young, talented designers who want to go it alone and start their own firms.
A bathroom at a private residence, Brussels, designed by Pierre Yovanovitch, demonstrating the sort of spa like facilities the super prim market now expects
Clearly the London design world benefits enormously from an international roster of creatives, and there were understandably fears that in post-Brexit Britain, it would seem a less appealing option; whether or not this is the case, it’s clear that with the rapidly increased cost of living, as a capital city, it’s becoming an ever more daunting prospect for generations of young graduates taking their first tentative steps into the creative sector. Undoubtedly, for those interior designers at the top of the pile, who deal only with the truly filthy rich, it will presumably be a particularly prosperous time, as many such clients will inevitably have decided changes are necessary to one, or even multiple homes, following months cooped up inside — already interior design firms are receiving an increasing number of requests for leisure facilities, such as swimming pools, spas and gyms as well as bars and cinemas. Similarly the price of exclusive rural retreats in places such as Cornwall and the Cotswolds is surging, suggesting the wealthy want to “cocoon” in style, and will inevitably require the services of an international roster of interior designers in bringing them up to the standards of their luxurious city pads. It might come as little surprise that very little of that will trickle down to those desperately trying to eke out a living on often miniscule starting salaries. The creative industries contribute some £112 billion a year to the UK economy in gross added value, greater than automotive, aerospace, life sciences and oil and gas sectors combined, yet government arts funding has fallen 35% over the last decade alone. There has been an entrenched stigma associated with creativity in the UK for so long that for a great many of the population it isn’t even considered a “real” profession. Between Covid-19 and Brexit, there are sure to be further calls for funding and educational cuts to the arts, meaning, more so than ever, creative enterprises will have to rely on individuals turning their passions into businesses with very little support — whatever the merits of a pair of $560,000 shoes.