If you’ve been out there furniture shopping, looking through magazines or just on a quick dash to your local Target, you can’t help but notice: home decor has become lean and clean. Gone are the frills and flounces, the checks and the plaids, the fussy details. Say hello to the new modernism.
It’s crisp, it’s clean, and it’s easy to live with. It’s also hard to envision inside a traditional two-story suburban colonial — or French chateau, or Italian villa for that matter. Yet Suburbia is exploding with grand-scaled homes built to evoke a more formal, elaborate time. Is it possible for modern design and traditional architecture to coexist?
Absolutely. The Europeans have been doing it for years. Making it happen successfully, however, involves being sensitive to shapes and colors and above all, leaving preconceived ideas behind. Look at the photos above from designer Michael Weiss, who has a collection made by Vanguard: these pictures were shot in rooms with detailed, traditional molding, not city high-rise veiws. Yet the warmth of the backdrop makes the clean-lined furnishings that much more dramatic, and keeps them from feeling sterile or severe.
This, it seems, is the new direction of design, and it’s terribly exciting. It’s exciting because at last we are free to mix the best of every period, free to stop pretending that we live in a different century than we actually do, free to move forward in a new direction that has something to say about the time and places we’re living in. Be brave, Suburbia. You can do this.
