One constant I have noticed in a career of over 25 years in the kitchen furniture design industry is that fashion changes, there is a type of seasonality, both predictable and surprising. I have not yet managed to understand what are the mechanisms behind trends, who is the puppeteer in the dark who plays with our senses, but we do not look for the occult among the obvious.
The planet is warming, but people’s souls seem to be getting colder every day.
In terms of design, I feel the loss of individuality in customization as an effect of rapacious industrialization. We live in an era of assembly line production, mass production, mass production, automated production, non-stop production. The personal has become collective, in a sense. I’m not trying to ramble on in an anti-consumer manifesto, but somewhere along the way we have become alienated from the individual personality of design.
In the 90s, fashion was very varied in Romania, many styles were explored, and everyone tried to mix with great courage and tried to create their own style. It was the craze for “warmth”, everything had to be warm and full of life. I suffered back then because I often ended up with some moods that were too sweet and crowded. I loved minimalism at the time, it was a new “thing” that seemed to only go in high circles. And I remember that it was very hard to find gray colors, because no one produced gray furniture.
In the world of kitchens, it was the time of the combination of beige with cherry, possibly with yellow and blue tiles. The ultimate in luxury-value was to buy a Ferrari Red kitchen, glossy and “on the curve”, with curved shapes.
But still, in those days there were still adjacent colors in decorative objects: books, a lamp, a rug, a work of art, a vase of flowers, a bowl of fruit. People expressed themselves in a chromatic language. Or at least they tried, and that was the delight of life!
Then the “global cooling” in contemporary Romanian design began.”
Wenge! First Wenge + Beige, then Wenge + White. Not bad at all! Then Wenge became more and more black, and the highlight is that Wenge, as a tree species, is a very light wood (!). And finally Grigio Tortora / Dove Grey appeared and from this point on it seemed like the design world started to get cold.
Nowadays, everyone is asking us for “minimalism”, but not a balanced minimalism, but one taken to the extreme. Not only cold, but especially sterile. Only Black and White with “bold” accents of Gray. Wenge is already something with too much life, it is still wood!
No wood, no stone, no color, no shape, no spice. Like a food without a hint of sweet, salty, sour, bitter or spicy… no flavor! No emotion, no personality!
What happened to art in interior design?
A few decades ago, Peggy Guggenheim designed the interiors of her palazzo in Venice according to the style of the art collection in each room. Nowadays, austere spaces are often favored in interior design, people have even given up decorating the walls with works of art or personal photos. You don’t need a Juan Miró painting or an original Henri Matisse, but you can print and frame a high-quality poster at the Print Shop on the corner of the street. What’s the point of printing a photo from your phone when we have Instagram? The list goes on and on in terms of objects or art installations.
