Avoid the Design Trend Vortex
By Jay Johnson
As interior designers working in the United States, we prefer the way most Europeans approach design trends. They tend not to take them so seriously. They boldly strike out in their own mad ways, marching to the beat of many different drummers. The British artists known as Gilbert & George had their London house photographed, and my partner Irwin Weiner was immediately drawn to their humor-filled kitchen. In the midst of a utilitarian kitchen, which includes a humble washing machine, they plunked down a collection of gorgeous Aesthetic Movement ornaments on top of a similar period sideboard. They saw each item in their design scheme as being its own unique thing without pigeonholing it into a specific trend, labeling it as part of a certain design movement, or belonging to a specific period.
You may hate an eclectic approach to decorating, and many Americans would agree with you, but we want to burst your Yankee bubble. As Americans, we tend to want the hottest trends. You and your clients wind up spending a lot of money on the latest and greatest. The downside is that in order to catch the big trend wave, we wind up being washed ashore when it comes to the next trend movement. Hot interiors date quickly, like wearing last year's designer labels. If you're a slave to of-the-moment trends, we see a lot of design updates and adjustments in your future. Actually, the industry shouldn't complain, as it keeps us in business—but it's not in the best interests of clients.
Europeans—and possibly a growing number of Americans—are more trend independent, combining an independent mix of utilitarian, old and new, trendy, and hopelessly silly in a way that creates a much more classic and timeless design whole. These eclectic mixes might follow a retro design trend, like using 1970s style elements, but this isn’t like being a slave to brand-new trends. Retro trends have established points of reference, and they usually embrace a more classic approach the second go-around than when they were first introduced.
Change acceleration has deeply hit the design field. In the last dozen years or so, we've seen collective style tastes range from traditional to 1940s to 1950s to 1970s to contemporary to Baroque, and so on. Are you willing to take your clients on a continuous merry-go-round ride, from one trend cycle to the next, in order to grab the illusive brass ring of "Nowness"?
The lesson is to look at an item totally independently from its period, its trendiness, or its pedigree. Will it work in your design scheme? That's the hard question, and it's a challenging way to evaluate design elements for us and for most decorators, too. For instance, we're not quite ready to embrace things that are peach colored, and we're leery to use postmodern 1980s design elements. But we're working on these aversions and trying to adopt a more eclectic, neutral, and all-inclusive European sensibility.
As interior designers, we'd rather present a great design scheme with a mix of elements that won't date badly in a few years than sell you one hot, trendy package. Remember when all American appliances had to be harvest gold? We rest our case.
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In November 2006, Manhattan-based blogger Jay Johnson and his partner Irwin Weiner, ASID applied the popularity of watching videos on the Internet to the house-and-garden arena. The idea for Design2Share was born. On D2S, they share their insight, tips, and strong opinions about how people design and decorate their homes, entertaining over 300,000 visitors a year; their syndicated original videos had over 22 million video views in 2010.
