An article published two weeks ago in World of Interiors calls into question why there isn’t more criticism in the interior design industry. Something is in the ether. The Los Angeles design community has also been having this conversation, so I thought I’d expand it to the nationwide DNN readers by exploring a few questions that have come up.
- Zooming out: What is the purpose of critique in the first place? Who is it helping?
- What makes interiors different from other creative industries, like art, theater or film and television, which receive plenty of criticism?
- Where does one find design criticism?
- Why does everything seem boring right now to so many?
- Is everything actually that bland? And, if so, is it productive to critique it?
Where do we find critiques of interior design?
Interior design criticism of public spaces
Interior design as a profession is first and foremost a service. Often, working interior designers will say ‘we don’t have a signature style, we are guided by the client’s wants.’ A designer may be hired for their aesthetic, but ultimately decisions come down to the client’s budget, taste and timeline. The more those things align, the better a project’s potential, but rarely is a designer given complete creative control.
I call the rare designer with creative control the artist-designer. Among the most notable contemporary examples is Kelly Wearstler. We can easily compare the Austin Proper hotel to the LA Proper to the SF Proper because she designed all of those, there are less variables and they are designed for public consumption.
Similarly, if you are an avid reader of restaurant reviews, you know the design and ambiance is often reviewed, but it is not the main event. A restaurant is considered bad if it has bad food, drink and service, not if its a dive. The design factors in, just lower on the priority list.
Another common target of design criticism: city skylines. Buildings overlooking the Hudson are viewed by millions of people daily, your residential bedroom is not (hopefully).
Interior design criticism of private spaces
Right now the most thoughtful discussions of aesthetics are happening on Substack and Patreon blogs that rely on donations and paid subscriptions over traditional ad-supported models. One of my favorite sources for design criticism is McMansion Hell.
Architect Kate Wagner who is fluent in internet-speak, writes hilarious reviews of real estate listings of suburban homes across the country through the lens of classically ‘good’ architecture. The overarching critique is of suburban sprawl and the aesthetic symptoms of greed.
As a result, she received a cease and desist from Zillow claiming she’s bad press for their real estate listings. That was enough to scare her off and prevent her from publishing for a while, but I am happy to report she found her courage and is back and better than ever. She also has a great TedTalk from 2016 that is still as relevant as ever.
Even when her reviews touch on the interior design choices, they are not personal. These are real estate listings, after all. Someone is letting go of this house, not celebrating their recently-renovated home that they plan to live in for a while. Their staged hollowness, void of personal touches, often contributes to her point.
She is also practicing the common humorist rule of ‘punching up.’ Her critiques are not of boutique mom-and-pop architects and one-woman design shops, they’re of zoning policies and HOAs, of environmental villains and mortgage-backed securities.
There is also the very funny, albeit pithy, designer-influencer Robert Giggs who’s gone viral for this ‘Designing a room for my worst enemy‘ series. Like Wagner, he is critiquing bad taste, but is more cutting and personal in tone. And unlike ‘McMansion Hell, the ‘Worst Enemy’ series is a response to algorithmically-driven design trends. It is a critique of online behavior as opposed to one of public policy.
Is ‘good taste’ making everything bland?
‘Everything looks the same,’ has become a commonplace complaint amongst the chronically online. It is easy, in our algorithmically-driven digital world to be fed an endless scroll of bland, beige interiors. It can seem as though everyone and everything looks exactly the same now. But this is not the full story. It is not indicative of what is happening in the professional residential design space.
I have the privilege of being one of the judges for this year’s IDS Interior Designer of the Year Awards. Submissions are judged based on their adherence to design principles like form and scale, their use of color and how well they meet client demands and utilize their budget.
There are common themes in this year’s submissions: Colorful kitchen cabinetry and appliances was a big one, abstract wallpaper and giant statement walls with a variety of colorful, seamless slabs in sorbet shades.
If I took these submissions to be indicative of what is going on in interiors, generally, I’d think everyone’s doing loud maximalism. That isn’t the reality either. If you look for the commonalities in the AD Top 100, you’d have an entirely different take from either of those above. You might think everyone’s doing moody contemporary these days.
Because of design’s newfound digital accessibility, there is more of everything being fed to everyone. That didn’t used to be the case.
Digital media design influences
Interior design, until recently, was mostly private. It was for the elite few who could afford it. There was no DIY or Dupe culture in the same way there is now. There were no “in-house interior designers” at Restoration Hardware for a few hundred bucks a year. Before Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous premiered in 1984, there was no broadcasted media that regularly enabled the general public to peer inside private luxury residences. HGTV didn’t launch until 1994 with its ‘you can do it too’ educational mission.
Since the mid ‘aughts, social media has amplified our views inside of people’s private residences, opening it up for feedback from people who will never live there nor invest in interior design services for themselves.
The People of the Internet see a final image, were not present for the back and forth between designer and client, and were not working on their timeline or with their budget. But they’ll have an opinion as if none of those things are relevant to evaluating the final results.
Plans also change: “We were going to buy cool art and bold wallpaper but then the water damage in the walls ate our budget” doesn’t make for an inspired Instagram caption. After so much time and investment, no one wants to be reminded of the set-backs and the could-haves unless they resulted in something spectacular.
The more creative a design project can be is dependent not only on the talent of the designer, but on how much budget they’re allotted and how much freedom they’re granted to run with it.
That is not to say only projects with sky-high budgets have the potential to be great. Creativity thrives under restrictions, after all. But these specifics are relevant to fairly compare and evaluate a designer’s work and these details are not often made available.
Design criticism on Instagram
One popular young designer who shall remain nameless, regularly posts her work to a large social media following. She ran into an issue when one of her kitchens went viral for the wrong reason. She was accused of knocking off another designer. ‘It was the lighting,’ she told me, ‘and I knew it was going to be the lighting.’ Like any good designer, she’d taken her client’s inspo image – an already very popular kitchen on Pinterest and Instagram – and designed a number of options riffing on it for them.
It became clear after many iterations and the farther they got away from the original image, the client just wanted the exact kitchen from the picture. She managed to get the client to budge on a couple of elements, but they wanted the same Arteriors lighting from the inspiration kitchen and the same color palette. So she gave the client what they wanted and moved along. She had the rest of their house to design.
That kitchen was fed to more people online because it was most similar to something that was already popular – that is how algorithms work. Unfortunately, that is what the critics of Instagram were hung up on. The engagement on imagery of the rest of the house, where the client let their designer do her thing, was virtually zero. Online, more innovative often equals less virality, unless it deviates so far from the expected as to be controversial. Extremes get the engagement.
But here’s the kicker: Despite all the online noise, her business was unaffected. She used this kitchen image as proof that she can handle projects of this scale until she had another project completed and photographed to replace it with.
Why are there so many bland beige interiors?
Why are there so many bland beige interiors? Because people are scared of feedback like that and of buyers remorse. Taking design risks involves time and money that people are often hesitant to part with so they play it safe.
New York-based architect and designer, Justin Shaulis has a theory that interior styles tend to be more traditional in times of economic downturn and more risk-taking and modern when the market is strong. If true, that seems like analysis that could actually be useful to designers, manufacturers and even homeowners, compared to a surface-level taste critique of a someone’s residential interior (Though I can certainly see the utility for a DIY’er).
Everything, everywhere all at once
Not everyone is going to Noz (Nozawa) their house with rainbow rugs and gemstone lighting, but she is an insanely popular interior designer right now for a reason. ‘Dopamine decor’ continues to be trending and in the past two years, the art and design from furniture shows around the world has featured bold, funky, colorful introductions. (See here and here and here.) How is this true at the same time that ‘Quiet Luxury’ is also trending?
There is more access to everything. Bland stuff, vibrant stuff, traditional stuff, modern stuff. You’ll see and be fed more of whatever you seek out digitally. If your Instagram feed is looking dull and too monochromatic, try giving Noz Nozawa, Sasha Bikoff, Peti Lau, Merve Kahraman, and Ken Fulk a follow and see how that alters your algorithm. Suddenly, your discovery page is tie-dye. Suddenly it looks like everyone is doing colorful, maximalist interiors.
Algorithm internet
Internet 1.0 involved searching for things, venturing out into the world wide web, finding and cultivating your niche interests and engaging with communities of people who shared them. DesignMilk founder Jamie Derringer has moved over to Substack where she often writes about this early-internet nostalgia and its relationship to art, design and discovery.
But now? The internet is run by ad-supported algorithmic models. If you don’t already have your niche interests figured out and have a decent grasp on how internet search and privacy works, you’ll be fed content based upon your internet search patterns, your IP address’ location and the interests of those around you. You will be fed content you don’t necessarily want or need and draw conclusions that aren’t necessarily true.
Put simply: When we view the world through our screens, we are all looking at completely different worlds. Some of those worlds are bland. Some of those worlds are vibrant. They are almost always lopsided, stylistically, showing you lots of things similar to what you already love (or hate) because what it values, above all else, is your attention.
This makes it increasingly difficult to establish a baseline for trends, especially lasting ones, for standards with which we can critique interior aesthetics with any sort of broad, general language. It’s not that there isn’t bland work out there, but if we’re going to talk about it, we all need to be looking at the same thing to establish productive framework for critique.
If you were hoping for a critique of something bland, stay tuned — One is coming next week.
