Interiors go crazy in 2012
Enough with doom and gloom in this crazy world!” proclaimed the trend forecasters at the recent Maison & Objet show in Paris. Instead, they propose caustic humor and a pinch of folly to let the imagination rule. “It’s time to champion the right to a breath of mental fresh air, to have fun and to affirm the jubilant desire to detonate wan conformity.”
Entitled “Crazy,” the proposed trend itinerary features quirky interiors and décor that turn to whimsy and humor, insolence and irony, extravagance and outrageousness, “to sweep away everything that we have seen before.” Sweet delirium and highly euphoric abnormality reign. As Francois Bernard, Elizabeth Leriche and Vincent Gregoire would say, “We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and it feels crazily good!”
Hyper-personalization is the key to Art’keting interiors: A toy figure collection is made into a coffee table, old lampshades are converted to floor lamps, retro chairs get a new life with bespoke upholstery. Art’Keting by Francois Bernard
Bernard’s version of crazy is “art’keting” as opposed to marketing. “It’s a neologism that predisposes interior design to act according to the rules of art and to smooth over the differences between the two; it’s a portmanteau word formed from ‘art’ and ‘marketing’ with the aim of relaxing our way of living and all that it entails,” explains Bernard. With the present world becoming a carnival of madmen where we are all trying to proclaim our uniqueness, it becomes imperative that we bring the unexpected into the world of the ordinary and the quotidian. Hyper-personalization of décor is the key. Bernard advises that we “cultivate a look made up of bric-a-brac that’s eccentric but elegant, ironic but luxurious. This way the home becomes a work of art and you are its creator.” Telltale features of this trend are anachronisms, colliding materials and collusive colors.
A place to dream: A menagerie of animals changing hues Dream Box by Elizabeth Leriche
Leriche finds that our “disconcerted and disconcerting age” is exploring the strangeness of imaginary worlds: over-scaled mirrors and teacups in the Land of the Giants; Tim Burton’s menacing vines sprouting from armchairs; Salvador Dali’s persistence in a hanging lamp; a bedroom of shattered kryptonite straight out of Superman’s crystal cave. Like an Alice in Wonderland scenario, she says, “Both dreams and nightmares are teleporting us into disturbing parallel realities in which our desires and fears are transformed.” It’s a phantasmagoria of illusory effects, disorientations, over-sizing, a world turned upside down, distortions and other spells. There are wallpaper murals that transmute according to your moods, patterns that dance to the rhythm of LEDs, furniture that melds with the natural environment. This new way of looking at the home, a new way of thinking, pushes the limits of design to create an enchanting, bewitching world, somewhere between science fiction and reality.
Sweet Freaks by Vincent Gregoire of the Nelly Rodi Agency
A chandelier of rubber foam tubes in a dining room with mismatched neon chairs Like Gregoire’s beribboned papillon mascot with a Dali moustache and popping eyeballs, the Sweet Freaks home is not quite what it seems to be. In a world that’s caught between being too orderly and unhinged, there is a need to shake things up with “wild flights of fancy and offbeat whimsy.” A dining room chandelier may have a silhouette that’s traditional enough but alas, the arms have turned into knotted rubber foam tubes. Its neon colors have also infected the Louis XIV chair beneath it, which stands alone matched, or rather mismatched, with an empire chair and other chairs from other eras. “Supercharged design is experimenting with curious overlaps combining the unusual and the refined,” according to Gregoire. What he calls a “dizzily psychotropic style” is achieved with juxtapositions, accumulations and subversions. It’s a new-generation psychedelia, a dose of craziness that could be just the right drug for an ailing nation.
