Authentic Interiors
Hello everyone and a very happy Friday to you! I'm back from Munich and had the best time. I won a reader's choice award from Myself magazine (Conde Nast), which was a real honor for me - I had my red carpet moment and everything. A big thank you to Myself magazine and their readers for presenting me with that award. I especially loved meeting German television personality and singer, Barbara Schöneberger, who interviewed me and gave me the award and I want to thank the very special and talented team who shot the video for the awards show of me and my work studio here in Hannover, especially the video art director and German actor Lutz Winde. So! I'm back home working now and have so many blog posts to write.
First though, have you recently visited the decor8 Interior Styling group on Flickr? With nearly 3,500 members and over 6,500 photographs, it is quite an inspiring and very international place filled with authentic interiors that are spontaneous and casual. I encourage you to visit and join (it's free!) if you'd like to share the corners of your home.Real decorating, real homes -- that's what I love the most because that's what I'm all about.
I recently met up with a friend in Frankfurt at the book fair and you know what was funny about our conversation? He was convinced that all homes in America were huge and gorgeous because each time he sees them in films, books and magazines, they always look that way. I laughed, not trying to be rude of course, but my natural reaction was, "You must be joking!", which was exactly what I said. In a very serious voice he replied, "Um no, I'm serious. Americans have the best homes ever." I grinned because I was unsure of how to break it to him. You know, tell him the truth because for the most part we sorta don't live as large as the rest of the world thinks. Or as posh. We are real people with real homes just like every other country and we make the best out of whatever it is that we have in our own way. In fact, the trend for interiors is leaning more and more towards authenticity and less bent on looking constrained and artificial.
It's easy to assume that the homes in our favorite books and magazines are perfect and that's usually because they are. What do I mean? Most homes featured are styled for the photograph and there are even times when furniture is brought in to make the space look more like the magazine's aesthetic. Yes, really. But of course, to be fair, lots of homes are just plain gorgeous and some people REALLY DO LIVE LIKE THAT. Like JLo and Will Smith and big name designers - yes, they do live that way for sure. Even creative types who are in the business of fashion or interiors, you can expect that they'd live quite lush. Then you have people who are just really into design and hire professionals to make their homes look perfect. So yes, these gorgeous jaw-dropping homes do exist but reality! check! that's only a fraction of the population.
To be fair, some countries do tend to be more "in tune" with style than others, like those amazing Danes, and even we Americans do have our radars more in tune than some countries that don't place a priority on a good table runner. I don't know if that's a great priority, but yeah, some of us do put a lot of time into how our homes look. As an American though I can say we are a pretty big country with a ton of people who have never heard of an Eames chair or who know (or care) about "design blogs". That's not being critical, that's being perfectly honest. As for those gorgeous New York apartments in every chick flick out there? That's not our reality. Most of my German friends are convinced that all New Yorkers have giant lofts with shiny concrete floors or massive pre-war apartments. Yeah, those secretaries in Manhattan, the ones who star in our films at least, can afford those penthouses but not the rest of us.
Most of the homes that belong to my friends are not magazine - ready or film - worthy. Does that mean Americans have no style? Or that all Americans possess amazing style? No and No. It's just that we're real people like the rest of the world and some of us care about decorating and some could care less. Some of us care but can barely afford what we want and some of us have way too much money and way too little taste. Those who care about design are always trying to influence the could-care-less crowd and the could-care-less crowd, though some do cross over to the bright side of decorating, usually are found wagging their heads wondering why the h-to-the-ell we bother spending weeks to research the best wallpaper options when we could simply drive out to the hardware store and pick from the 25 options on display - like that pretty vinyl floral pattern in peach, for instance. But to be fair, didn't most of us go to stores like that 10+ years ago to select our wallpaper?
Only recently have we been introduced to so many options. The ability to order wallpaper from websites or even better, from cool places like London, transformed us. Options do that I guess. But we're still just real people decorating our very real homes. A majority of us dislike more about our home than we love but we do our best. I'm inspired by all of it. The most amazing home on the beach to the carefully renovated on a budget one bedroom in Detroit - they are all special. I like to see how those interested in decorating show their personality at home and in how they select and then arrange, their things. It has always fascinated me and groups like Interior Styling continue to fuel my excitement when it comes to such spaces. I love watching how others have trained their eye and then work magic on their space. All of the photos above are from many contributors to my interior styling group and are from all over the world - and are excellent decorators with amazing style and talent. I'll take that over those carefully arranged, extremely expensive and almost snobby looking interiors any day.
I don't want decorating that is contrived, I want authenticity in interiors.
Do we all live in the perfect home? For most of us, no way. But style isn't a state of the wallet, it's a state of mind, right? Doing the most with the least is a challenge but one that can be met and in the end, it's exciting to see what creativity can do to even the simplest of homes.
(images: linked to their sources above.)