Interior Design Change Agent

By Cheryl Katz

The days are getting longer and the icy banks of soot colored snow are beginning to diminish. As welcome as these harbingers of transformation are, there’s another kind of change in the air. One that is not as predictable as these early signs of spring  (no matter how wary it’s arrival seemed after a recent barrage of weather left us reeling.)

This change owes its debt to a series of opposing forces: technology versus ancient techniques, refined versus rustic, expensive versus cheap, unique versus ordinary (think last year’s norm core fashion trend).

What makes it feel new and beyond eclectic, a style we’ve seen before – is that there’s no need to choose one idiom over another.

We sit a 19^th century sofa – purchased online from the elegant and pricy site 1^st Dibs—on an Ikea carpet. Place our laptops on antique writing tables and our hand thrown pottery plates on stainless steel countertops. Our books sit on the floor not on shelves, and our sofas have no legs. We eat our dinner on coffee tables and sleep in beds with mattresses as flat as a pancake or 18” thick.

In short the rules haven’t just changed, there aren’t any. Save for one —an eye to making an interior that is as singular as our DNA. That’s as welcome a change as a bud on a Magnolia tree.

Architects Calvin Tsao and Zack McGown borrow from the world at large to create moments in rooms of their house in upstate New York that are uniquely personal.

Photography Richard Powers via Homelife

There’s change afoot, free of rules. Books don’t necessarily need to be housed in bookcases and art doesn’t necessarily have to be framed. 

Phography by Jeffrey Katz

Forget wood framed or rolled arms. Piero Missoni’s Season Chair is pared down to two simple volumes.

Spanish Architect Adrian Elizalde gives the term Carpet Tiles new meaning.