Daily, on the DesignQuotient™ blog, DesignCoach™ Los Angeles interior designer James Swan answers readers’ questions or tests your knowledge about the decorating and and design worlds.
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Today on the DesignCoach: It All Started with A Little Shopping
Previously we looked at the influence of significant figures in the history of architecture that played important roles in the evolution of style and taste. The men set the fashions for palaces and, by extension, royal courts throughout Europe. As wealth grew individuals who wished to be perceived as fashionable sought after these same styles but the inclination was not one to which the average householder could aspire. Style conscious furniture stores and decorating sections of major departments stores appeared early in the 20th century and had the ‘many’ rather than the ‘few’ in mind. Add in the growing profession of individual decorators (designer) and we see the beginnings of an industry which, today, is about making the fashion of our homes. Today it is a multi-billion dollar industry. That’s a lot of shopping!
Scandinavian Design: Comingling the influences of three small northern European countries (Scandinavia, Finland and Sweden) we see a recognizable style with simple, clean lines; exposed wood surfaces and graceful curved that relieve an otherwise severe and linier vision for home furnishings.
International Style: A distinctly modern approach to design that derives its influence from the architects who created building under this nomenclature. Materials, like the buildings which inspired them, rely heavily on metal and glass. Clean straight lines appear amenable to contemporary architecture and seem to reinforce rather than challenge its underlying principles.
Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye
Italianate: When viewed through 20th century eyes this becomes the world of the free-form, free thinking and gregarious Italian life force. Beginning in the 1950’s Italian designers contributed a unique, fresh and often forceful esthetic unequaled elsewhere in the world. The use of curvy, sexy furniture, molded chairs, slick stone or tile floors and unusually shaped ornamentation are some aspects of this influential style.
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