Where Designers Grab Inspiration on the Go

By Jay Johnson

Successful interior designers don’t live in bubbles; they absorb the world with each breath, noting the good design around them and dismissing the rest. Inspiration is an elusive thing, but it’s the job-related challenge for a decorating professional to learn to look, and from the active part of looking, seek out elements that are thrilling.

To illustrate this inspirational voyeurism, my interior design partner Irwin Weiner ASID and I put together a list of our favorite inspiration points:

• Foreign shelter magazines give a great design counterpoint to American publications. They serve up a more global point of view. Irwin’s favorites are English House and Garden and the World of Interiors. I gravitate towards the Magazine Café at 15 West 37 Street [http://stores.magazinecafeny.com] for their global collection of design magazines. Recently I found some amazing French and Italian titles that perfectly captured elements of the Mediterranean feel we were looking for with a new beach home for clients in the Hamptons. These visual references are great for both designers and clients – it’s easier to make your point if you’ve got that eye-candy photo for everyone to relate to.

• Travel broadens both the designer and client. Trendy restaurants, hotels, and retail stores in large cities like NYC, London, Paris, and Las Vegas are great inspiration mills. They usually have bigger budgets than your typical residential project, and it’s important to see how, with money being no object, talented designers like Philippe Starck and Jacques Garcia have expressed their creativity. Shopping abroad with a client will also expand everyone’s design education. You can’t help but feed off one another’s excitement when you’re abroad and make a new discovery, like stepping into Hotel Costes in Paris for the first time, or splurging on $600-a-yard fabric at Luigi Bevilacqua in Venice because you stumbled upon a family resource that’s been refining their craft for hundreds of years.

• Movies Irwin and I loved the aunt’s English country mansion in the recent Jane Eyre movie. The furnishings, drapery, embroidery, and color palettes in movie sets are useful references that a designer can point out to a client. Memorable movie rooms, like the sophisticated, grand-scale Milanese rooms in I Am Love – some of my favorites – invite the designer to see how people, albeit actors, relate to beautiful interiors.

• Finally, auction and antique houses always fuel our inspirational fires. These can be online, like at 1stDibs.com, or offline. You’ll see finely curated furnishings, accessories, and artwork when you go to Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips de Pury, or local auction houses with solid reputations like Freeman’s and Rago. Houses and top-notch dealers only select items they feel they can sell, things that are current and sought after with a market demand. So it’s great to scope these items out for clients, both to inspire them but to show them the fair market value of what’s desirable and available. 

Remember that inspiration may be around the next corner, unplanned and ready to hit you between the eyes. Carry a camera, camera phone, and/or a sketchpad or notebook with you at all times so you’re able to capture that beautiful inlaid floor pattern in the building you just walked into, remember the moldings in a period room at a local museum, or marvel at the stunning door details of a 17th Century home in a tiny Italian village. Learn to look for inspiration wherever your daily routine takes you, and the world will always manage to offer up fresh surprises.

---

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.

Photo credit:

Photos © Irwin Weiner Interiors