DESIGN ODER NICHTSEIN

I have never photographed my breakfast for social media.
I am not a big fan of this.
Apparently, this is unusual for a designer. I should probably arrange an avocado beside a handmade coffee cup, wait for the morning light and show the world how beautifully life can be.

But I normally just eat it.

Perhaps that already makes me unsuitable for the modern design industry.

The word designer has become remarkably generous. Today, someone can buy a collection of very expensive furniture, add some high-end art, add insanely expensive decorative items, place everything inside a twenty-million-pound penthouse and call the result interior design.
Of course it looks good, absolutely amazing!

The apartment was spectacular before they arrived. The view is spectacular. The furniture is spectacular. The art is spectacular. With that room and that budget, it would require genuine talent to make it look terrible.
But buying beautiful things is not the same as designing them.
It is expensive shopping. It reminds me of the old saying: we buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.
There is nothing wrong with styling a room and spending money. Styling requires taste, proportion and an understanding of colour and composition. There are people who are exceptionally good at it.

But call it what it is.
Design begins when something does not yet exist. It requires decisions, problems, compromises, mistakes and responsibility. It means understanding how something will be used, how it will be made and what it should feel like when nobody is looking at it through a camera.

Frank Lloyd Wright did not simply design a building and leave somebody else to decorate it. Eileen Gray did not arrive afterwards with a catalogue and a shopping list. They considered the architecture, the interior, the furniture, the light and the smallest practical details as parts of the same thing.
The chair belonged to the room. The room belonged to the building. The building belonged to its setting.

That was design.

Today, the process is often divided into departments. One person designs the building. Another chooses the interior. Someone else buys the furniture. Another person styles it for photography. Finally, somebody adds a bowl, two books, a half-eaten apple “for art” and a carefully folded blanket so the space looks as though a human being might occasionally enter it.
The result may look beautiful in a picture, but it can also feel strangely empty.

Nothing belongs together.

This is one reason I created NOCTURNE as a complete object rather than simply designing another cabin.
I designed the exterior form, but I also designed what happens inside it: the kitchen, the marble bathroom, the mezzanine bedroom, the folding table, the lighting, the storage and the handles. The shape of the building affected the furniture. The furniture affected how people move through the building.
It would have been easier to build a rectangular box and fill it with expensive objects.

It would also have been less interesting.

Designing the whole thing means there is nowhere to hide. If a detail is wrong, it is my detail. If something is uncomfortable, impractical or difficult to build, I cannot blame another department.
During the build, I had to redesign many things. Sometimes I had to cut something apart and start again. Sometimes I cut or burned myself in the process. When the shape did not have enough “drama” for me, I slanted the front wall to 15 degrees. As a result, we then had to cut the workshop entrance bigger just to get it out.

No compromises.

This is less glamorous than arranging cushions for Instagram, but it feels more honest.
I am not against luxury. I like beautiful things, beautifully made furniture and objects that exist for no reason other than giving somebody pleasure.

What I dislike is the idea that cost automatically creates design.
A marble bathroom is not good because the marble was expensive. A chair is not important because somebody recognises its name. A room is not successful because every object inside it appeared in a magazine.
Good design should change something.
It might solve a practical problem. It might make a small space feel generous. It might control the way light enters a room or make an ordinary action unexpectedly satisfying. It might simply create an atmosphere that did not exist before.

But it should do something.

It should have an idea.

The world does not need another perfectly styled room containing the same fashionable furniture, the same neutral colours and the same enormous Tom Ford book placed on the same low table.
It needs people willing to make things that do not already exist.
Things that may divide opinion.
Things that cannot be selected from a catalogue.
Things with enough character to be disliked.
That, to me, is design.

And tomorrow morning, I still will not photograph my breakfast.
But I might design the table, the chair, the light above it and the room around it.