Summary
The original architectural language of the New York loft circa 1978 has now bled into the mainstream of interior design: the stainless or galvanised finishes, exposed brickwork, ducting, heavy-duty lighting, six-burner stoves and metal painted in bright colours that appear in every newspaper supplement are the legacy of Jake and Clayton. Look at the property ads and ask if anyone has ever come home to a cavernous, echoing interior, flopped into a Corbusier Grand Confort, punched the zapper, slipped off the Tod's loafers, drunk a margarita, chilled to a prog-rock CD or a DVD on the plasma-screen television and taken a brisk walk to the island kitchen for stir-fry before scrambling up the Kee Klamp mezzanine to a futon with a view of Canary Wharf and the prospect of safe sex. Modern design might have been a mid-1920s invention of central European Bolsheviks and doctrinaire Swiss architects, of massage freaks, vegetarians, concrete entrepreneurs and gymnasts, but for British consumers it became a shopping possibility when Terence Conran opened his first branch of Habitat in Chelsea in 1964.
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Extract
Home Truths
We are all in the theatre. Our homes are our stage, and their design is as revealing of our psychology as any dramatic soliloquy. But "why do we decorate?" is a question rarely asked, perhaps because the answer reveals so many anxieties buried beneath the shiny surface of consumer culture. As soon as any economy rises beyond subsistence and purchases become discretionary rather than matters of survival, every...
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