Here is What this Blog is About

I'd like this blog to be all about my passion for design. More than just interior design and decoration, but about how the design of everything enhances or detracts from life. It's about how the color and texture of our surroundings and the everyday things that we live with effect each moment of our lives, which eventually adds up to our whole life.

A lot of the design business is about aspiration, about selling dreams of a certain lifestyle. Ralph Lauren captured America's fantasies about living in the upper class in pre-World War II America. A nostalgia for what we wish we had, or where we wish we had come from. The craze, which thank god is passing, for anything "Tuscan" styled reflects an aspiration or nostalgia for a simpler time in a simpler place where people lived more slowly and more closely to the earth. Calvin Klein's sleek minimalism is about an edited version of reality, maybe a future where only a Zen-like calm is permitted to enter.

This escapism can be comforting, especially given the world around us right now (that world which I can write about on a different blog...), but to me design also needs to be about the present, and the real.

What does the chair you are sitting in feel like? Is the lighting where you are sitting comfortable? How does the color on the walls make you feel? Is there something close by which brings back a good memory, or which reminds you of someone you love, or that is comforting for you to pick up and hold? Do you have a place to set your drink? Can you reach that book you were looking for?

Your life is mostly made up of the small repetitive tasks that we do every day. For example a large part of our lives are spent in bed sleeping, so what is the bedding like? Do you have a truly comfortable mattress? Do you have good pillows? What is the surface of the sheets like? It's touching your skin for 8 hours. Does it feel good? Does it absorb moisture and keep you comfortable? Where do your feet touch down when you get out of bed? Is it cold and slick, or soft? When you dry off after bathing, does your towel really absorb, or does it have so much synthetic fiber content that it just pushes the water around your skin? Think of the doorknobs and handles in your life. Do they feel comfortable, solid and trustworthy or are they sharp edged, or flimsy?

What about sound? Can you hear yourself think, or are there so many hard surfaces and open spaces that your home is like an echo chamber where everyone hears everything all at once? Is the noise of the street invading? In my case the answer is yes, and I'm working on heavy fabric window treatments that will screen out the noise and give me more visual privacy, but also more of a feeling of remove from the outside which I need in the middle of the city.

Your body meets the material world through designed objects and spaces, the things that you touch and use every day, as well as the things you see and hear around you. Design is about the senses, your senses, not other people's senses, unless you are hosting them in your world.

Color, light, texture, sound, temperature, and smell are the ways your environment interacts with you. Design is about making all those things intentional in a way that will enhance all the moments that add up to the greater whole of your days and your life.

This is why design is really about reality more than fantasy. When reality is taken care of and things are really working, then fantasy and romance thrown in adds life and emotion.

This is why your home should not be like a hotel, or a magazine page. A hotel does not have your books and pictures, or your memories. A hotel does not have your personal and family history. A picture from a magazine or a set in a furniture showroom doesn't have those things either. (Your friend's house does not have those things either.)

Design is personal, it's real, it's about the here and now, and it's also about what moves you and what you dream of, less about what other people see or what they think of you. If we're only out to impress, which I will admit we all are to some extent, then design is cold and impersonal. The space which is based on impressing others reflects that we don't know who we are, or that we are trying to convince the world that we are someone else. From that impulse stems a lot of not-so-good design.

So for me the design process is a process of honesty, practicality and self discovery with some fantasy and romance thrown in to keep things fun. A designer's or decorator's job is to look and listen very carefully, then bring his or her skills and resources to bear in creating something personal to the client, but which also embodies the high aesthetic values that only come from having a trained and experienced eye.