Being original is hard these days

Has it all been done before? (And does it even matter?)

Through my job as a stylist and set designer I get to see a lot of quote unquote incredible homes. Homes that make the crew ooh and ahh the second they walk through the door. Some have been featured on design tv shows, others in magazines, many have had a lot of money poured into them.

But after a while they can start to look the same. Same tastefully painted interiors, same oversized Crittal doors on their oversized rear extensions, same marble kitchen worktops and brass taps. And they are all STUNNING, don’t get me wrong. This is not a criticism of these homes. I sit here in a little run down bungalow by the sea that is still in need of so much work that the neighbours complain (read on…) so I am not one to criticise such beautiful, desirable homes!

But you know me, I’m always looking for a spark of personality in a home (and in fashion as well). And sometimes these homes lack that spark. For me. There is a predictability about them that leaves me wanting. Wanting to know a bit more about the people who live there because as they stand, they are more like cookie cutter versions of ‘a tasteful home’.

It’s all so personal isn’t it? One person’s dream home is another person’s idea of a space that is too:

Cluttered/boring/stimulating/traditional/modern/muted/overwhelming. Delete as appropriate or fill in your own.

This morning as I had my coffee I pulled a book off the shelf, looking for a spark. Still deep in the throes of what can only be described as mid-life confusion of the hormonal kind, I am on a search for a return to my old creative excitement. Although a friend reminded me the other day not to be looking backwards for the way I used to be, but to accept that I am different and a new creativity will emerge in this new stage of life.

But still, I’m searching.

The book I chose to browse this morning is the chunky architectural wonder that is The Tale of Tomorrow: Utopian Architecture in the Modernist Realm, published by Gestalten.

The front cover grabs you with its quintessentially futuristic Monsanto House of the Future that once sat in Disney’s Tomorrowland, but it’s the image on the back that gets me every time. An interior shot of Ford House in Illinois built in 1948, a home that I could live in today, no questions asked, hand me the keys please.

“We don’t like your house either”

The sign the owners Ruth and Albert Ford installed outside because of the reaction of the town to their Bruce Goff designed home. Now this is what you want! Not to say that we should design our homes to elicit a reaction - negative or positive - but we shouldn’t be afraid to veer off from the mainstream in terms of what is considered a ‘nice’ home.

Ford House designed by architect Bruce Goff and built in 1948. The interiors are a perfect blend of raw and refined, muted and bold, elegant and eclectic.

An anonymous neighbour recently posted us a hand-written letter, saying that we were letting the neighbourhood down with the outside of our house and we should trim our blackberry brambles at the very least. Now, they aren’t wrong. So far we’ve spent time and money on the inside not the outside of the house, but even when I get to the exterior, it still won’t make that neighbour happy. I will never have the manicured lawns and spotless concrete driveways of the other houses on the street. It will always be more Miss Honey’s cottage than Kim and Kanye’s concrete dream.

Part of the reason I’m feeling creatively jaded these days is because the cycle of interiors trends is getting faster and faster. The once gentle stroll from original design to mainstream is now a superhighway. Things I’ve liked for decades and considered ‘my’ style- checkerboard floors, vintage florals, the colour RED - quickly become micro trends with names (cottage core anyone?)

When you are bombarded with images of homes that are all so similar you start to feel like nothing is new, nothing is original. And aren’t we all trying to put our own stamp on things? Or is it just me? ;) Or maybe it’s the realisation that I’m not as original as I thought I was that stings so much.

I’m acutely aware this sounds a bit like when someone claims to have known a now famous band back when they were playing in dive bars. I know I did not in fact discover the colour red (see image above circa 1948).

Interiors magazines work months in advance, but social media is instant. Maybe an interiors influencer posts about their new bathroom tile or sofa or pendant light they found on eBay. An interiors writer sees this and writes a piece about it for an online magazine, then interiors brands design the next season’s collections inspired by it or even in collaboration with said influencer. Then they get copied by the cheaper high street brands and then we can all buy a piece of it but then before long we’re all over and done with it because we’re seeing it everywhere and the process just keeps on going, faster and faster and not necessarily in that order until everything looks the same and no-one has personal style anymore. Arghhhhhhh!

And that is why I picked up this book this morning. Looking at homes designed in the past that were searching for an optimistic future was apparently what I needed to get out of my head and away from the sameness I see in interiors. I needed to look at homes that were and still are so outlandish that they make your head spin.

Even though I will never design something as unusual (insane!) as Kurokawa’s Capsule Tower, Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center (now a hotel) or Antti Lovag’s Palais Bulles (a fantasy come true for someone whose all time favourite childhood book is Barbapapa’s New House), the fact that someone did inspires me.

I often come back to the phrase attributed to author Wayne Dyer (although likely inspired by William Blake):

All that now exists was once imagined.

I was so inspired by this phrase that back in 2012 I made a piece of wall art, fashioning the words from wire and hung it over the bed (hey, if your past interiors choices don’t make you cringe then you’re doing it wrong).

Imagination is everything, but with so much external stimulation it can be easy to lose sight of your own vision. In order to tap into my own imagination I sometimes have to disengage from my usual routine. I come off social media, I pick up books I wouldn’t normally, I wear things I haven’t worn in a while. I go inside myself and I stop trying so hard to figure it all out. At the same time as…trying to figure it all out.

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