Fashionable By Design
The dividing line between fashion and interior design is getting pretty blurred, as our overview of contemporary interiors shows
To create a truly timeless interior, it pays to keep up with the times. Our new book, By Design, features some of the greatest interior designers working today. Many draw on a variety of disciplines, from architecture to botany. However, you may be surprised to learn that there’s a strong thread of fashion and clothes design represented in the book.
Consider Linda Boronkay, the erstwhile design director at Soho House. “Born in Budapest to an architect father and an antiques dealer mother, Boronkay’s childhood was spent being dragged around vintage markets,” explains the text in our new book. “A degree in fashion design in Paris was followed by a modelling career, an experience that Boronkay credits with her chameleon-like ability to understand the nuances of different cultures.” That detailed understanding is quite apparent to anyone who has had the pleasure of visiting Soho House Mumbai, which Boronkay worked on in 2018.
Other featured practitioners have helped haute couture find a comfortable home, by creating breathtaking flagship stores. US designer Fawn Galli “gained industry experience working for architect Robert A. M. Stern and later Peter Marino, an architect of luxury fashion stores, before launching her own interior design and construction management firm in 2005,” our book explains. Galli’s work on a Washington Square Park private residence certainly displays her familiarity with the colour-popping fashions of the day.
Some of the book’s designers still work directly with clothes designers to create retail spaces that best-suit the clothes. Consider Fran Hickman whose carefully considered designs meet the most on-trend client’s needs. “Stone columns, cotton-candy pinks, and sweeping cuts of terrazzo, for example, welcome visitors to fashion designer Emilia Wickstead’s dreamlike showroom in trendy Knightsbridge,” explains our book. “With a minimal use of color and sinuous curves, there are echoes of Villa Savoye, the Modernist icon designed by Swiss–French architect Le Corbusier, while upholstered wall panels and floral furnishings add warmth and sophistication.”
And then there are designers who, having excelled in small-scale design, switch to interiors. Take California’s Brigette Romanek. ”The erstwhile handbag designer opened her Los Angeles-based Romanek Design Studio in 2018, and within six months it was included in Architectural Digest’s AD100 designers list,” says the entry in our book. “Her studio has grown exponentially over two years, and her focus remains on learning from each residential and commercial project. Romanek’s generosity and gift for observation make her highly attuned to her clients’ needs. For a family home in Malibu, she realized a design grounded in sturdiness and elegance. A blackened wood staircase inspired by the Japanese shou sugi ban technique (in which wood is charred to waterproof it) links the house’s open-plan first story with a second story in which black-framed glass partitions separate the rooms.”
To see more of all these designers work as well as much, much more order a copy of By Design here.