THE BEAUTIFUL INTERIOR
The use of color and subdued lighting, non-decoration and the imperfection of the new Mediterranean style are some of the keys to current interior design.
Patricia Bustos' interiors always have a dreamlike and sensorial vision and also play with and reverse the codes of other styles, such as the Mediterranean. Photo: Manolo Yllera
By Enric Pastor, Director of MANERA Magazine
In recent years we have all changed, and so has interior design: there is now a new way of enjoying homes. Our Spanish culture and lifestyle, Mediterranean as well as dietary, have begun to value luxury in a different way, not with the sumptuousness and golden glitter of yesteryear, but in a more conscious and sensory way. Although design and excellent materials are still essential to achieve a higher level of comfort, now we can add wellbeing translated into spaces and objects that are more handcrafted, durable and respectful of the planet, that big house that we also inhabit.
Color and humor in decoration are not at odds with elegance and sophistication. These are two criteria that, when well combined in an interior, in a piece of furniture or in a fabric, can give as much joy as personality to a house. A perfect home should be like a good conversation with a friend: at times deep and sincere, at others fortunately ending with a laugh. Life, houses, are like that.
That's why we are attracted to interiors with striking colors, like the cover of MANERA Magazine, the magazine that I have the pleasure of editing together with an excellent group of professionals, in which we chose a living room that bet everything on red. It is a house designed by Alex March. Its owner, a Latin American creative, asked him for a "crazy project" and the interior designer responded by covering the walls and ceiling of the living room with a gleaming crimson that he extended to the curtains. Is it elegant? Of course. Contained? No one would say so. Yes it is accurate, bold and capable of uplifting. You be the judge.
The no decoration
"To pass without being noticed", is the great phrase with which the historic decorator Duarte Pinto Coelho defined his work, one of the pioneers of design in Spain in the 70s, part of that generation of first-time interior designers (along with Jaime Parladé, Paco Muñoz and Fernando Benjumea), who shunned interviews in magazines because they preferred their houses and their mix of fabrics, antiques and good taste to speak. They answered with photographs of their projects, rarely with words.
To go unnoticed is the ambition of many decoration projects today, to achieve spaces that speak of their inhabitants and not of the interior designers, just as those emerging decorators of the twentieth century did with their clients, environments with human scale, personality and some informalism, since a somewhat disheveled decoration always helps to find that lived and familiar point that we all look for.
The decorator Beatriz Silveira put into practice her eclectic vision to compose a balanced living room in white tones where the rhythm is provided by curved shapes and textures. Photo: Manolo Yllera
"Color and humor in decoration are not incompatible with elegance and sophistication"
Always Mediterranean
My favorite aesthetic has always been the Mediterranean. It must be because I was able to live it since I was a child in my native Valencia, and when I see it applied with new airs to design, interior design and architecture, I still recognize it. I see it in the lime or stucco walls, so fashionable today, in the terracotta floors, the semicircular arches in doors and windows and in the imperfect touches of furniture, lamps or crockery. It has not gone out of fashion, and in the new designs I recognize the details that were always there in the good things that, although renewed and improved, still serve the same purpose today: to make us feel at ease in our social or private spaces.
This house encloses the concept "Desert" in its decoration. The interior designer María Teresa García was inspired by the desert landscapes of Almería and its colors to compose her own apartment. Photo: Pablo Zamora
Ceiling and wall moldings, woodwork and soft furnishings. Tristán Domecq embraced classical ornament in this project in Madrid, which plays with a studied lighting. Photo: Manolo Yllera
Dim light
The writer Junichiro Tanizaki said in his 1933 essay The Praise of the Shadow that traditional Japanese aesthetics considers it essential to capture the enigma of the twilight. If in the West we do not understand beauty without light (there are the European painters of all centuries to corroborate this), Tanizaki describes with astonishing elegance and simplicity how the Japanese are moved in the darkness by the veiled reflection of gold leaf or the fading shine of a lacquered screen.
Lately there are many interiors that perfectly capture their reflection, highlighting the magic of diffused light and the valuable wabi-sabi patina that is achieved by illuminating spaces with an accurate dose of darkness. They are projects that extol the tenuous, the backlighting, the subtlety in front of the innocuous shine of polished metals and marbles. They place the dancing fire of the candles before the cold irradiation of the glass, they extinguish the glowing halogens in favor of the veiled flame of the low lamps. The thinker Tanizaki, fearful and nostalgic to see that the arrival of electric light to the interiors would eventually dissipate that magical universe of shadows, had already warned about it in his time.
We have almost forgotten the power of good darkness. We tend to over-light or disguise spaces without natural light. By applying shadow, the sensations perceived come through other senses. The fascination with the opaque is rekindled.
On the modern
When I see an innovative interior, an avant-garde piece of furniture or a fabric fresh from the workshop, I think of an accurate statement by the most intelligent Irishman (Oscar Wilde), pronounced in one of his wise lectures to art students: "Every good work seems perfectly modern: a piece of Greek sculpture, a portrait by Velázquez are always modern, they are always of our time".
How many works created today will survive us and be rescued 50 years later in vintage version by the next generations? It is a mystery. As is knowing which ones will speak best of us and our time and will give clues to the archaeologists of the future. Those that will have enough substance and will be revered in museums and books of the future as revolutionary, the before and after in comfort or technological innovation. Those that are measured in deep concepts and not in likes of a social network.
There is nothing that ages more and worse than assigning the label of modern to an object, piece of furniture or style. Just as Wilde said, only the good things remain relevant.
Fine upholstery, extra-large rugs and softly curved furniture, the new sensorial luxury in a project in Madrid by interior designer Alejandra Pombo. Photo: Manolo Yllera