Neccos continued

If you haven't read the last post, please do. The following relates to it:

If a store presents the customer with twenty designs of a towel ring, it becomes a challenge for the retailer to stay current and interesting? It might lead to higher competition, if more stores took this on. No one or two manufacturers could reign, or one country of origin; for products. No display system would resemble the next, from room to room. Variety would become the new face of success.

Who would take it on though, especially in a culture of 'style stores'? With no face of style, a store would have to revert to the old 'General Store' style, where the emphasis is on the products and individuality, and not in the selling of a style.

Only talented display artists could provide the ideas of how these products are shown and this is good! The market might require the kind of people (like back in the late seventies) who create window displays that knock your socks off! With more variety, retailers would be forced to use artists to handle the wares. No 'display criteria manual', would suffice for employees without real art training. More jobs would be available for artists and a culture that thrives because of it!

Imagine a wall full of towel rods in anodized colored metals, tied rattan, barbed wire, tire tubes, stainless steel, colored acrylic, flexible clear tubing with glass beads inside. Recycled materials could flourish. Inventiveness would be the new criteria for success. With adequate research, resources are available, so what's stopping companies from making more available? What will it take to find products and services with the lowest impact on the environment? When will this happen?

An answer to my mother's comments, about the convenience of having all the products and color ways coordinate, as you see in Restoration Hardware; I add the following question:

Because the public is exposed to less, people revert to the seven color system. Is this truly success?

I hope it will all change someday, and retailers will sense the urgency consumers feel for tension between colors, a play between surfaces and light, some humor and nuance in the mixture of products, but most of all; a bit of risky playful fun in the way articles are shown together.

Carolyn

Neccos or nada

Recently I visited Restoration Hardware. It is one of the new rising stars of retail chain stores. I hadn't really browsed the place in a while. In fact, the last time I truly spent time wondering in the store, was back in the old days when they were selling the old days. There were lots of affordable items big and small, with roots from the past, back then. Items like record players, desk fans, whirly gigs and liquid bluing.

Now they are selling color. Seven to be exact.

All the vintage items are gone. Replacing them, is a variety of soap dishes, towels, shower curtains, bedspreads and pillows, all lined up in neat rows. And best of all....cans of paint matching the accessories! There are seven colors represented, each color with its own half of a room; in case you like to shop shelf by shelf. I couldn't help noticing how they all looked like Necco candies. No flavor though.

Heaven for bid you decide to mix the colors or get a little flavor by adding a bright color. There wasn't one display in any part of the store that dared go there.

Lots of items were available in bright chrome, brass or a gun metal brown finish. Every hardware item stocked for the taking in either choice! That's in case you want to tell a friend and you don't want her buying the same as you. But don't tell more than two friends....or you might have to hang your towels differently to be unique.

I couldn't help remembering how the store branded its name 'Restoration Hardware' from the rather humanistic, romantic approach, in the merchandise they sold. Where are the original customers of the old store? They can't be the same people buying coordinated bath sets now,... are they?

I'm a bit like the original crowd and so are my towel rods.

Makes you wonder what is being restored. Our nostalgia or their staying power? There must have been a great turnover of chrome reading lights back in the old days and it just made sense to follow the money.

I don't know about you, but I can count more than seven colors in the crayola box , can't you? And last I checked, my hardwiring doesn't need restoring. Does yours?

Ok, I'll get to the point. I believe genetically we are terribly different individuals when it comes to what we need, and what fits us. In my years as a designer, I find no two solutions work in the same way for any individual. This makes my job more difficult in research but much more satisfying to see the form fit; of any particular plan when complete. When discussing Restoration Hardware with my mom, she said "Well it makes it so much easier, for the client...to see all the colors right there." I agree. But some things good, take a little more effort.

I say "Just say no to only seven colors!" What do you say?

Any ideas out there?

Carolyn

Seeing

Once in a great while I will enter a home I've visited before and see things arranged differently than before. I rarely mention how excited I am to see items used in different ways, for most people are more comfortable with things in their 'proper place' for a long span of time. For me, I see objects differently when I move them around. If an item in my house doesn't shift to a new home now and then, I forget what it looks like in various light, or with different surrounding color.

I wonder what this says about where we came from and why we typically don't change our surroundings.

Once I visited the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. It was right before Christmas and they had set up the dining room for dinner with twenty full place settings at the table, as they would have in the Victorian era. I couldn't help noticing how many utensils, how many plates, the size of the floral arrangements and the multitude of serving pieces that were on the table. The adjacent rooms were each dressed with ornamental garland hanging from the fireplaces, full candy dishes on table tops and what looked to me like furniture that never moved, unless to make room for the Christmas tree. One tree, fully decorated was placed in every room and not an ornate ornament out of place! I tried to imagine bare trees with winter branches but the glittered orbs and glass beaded angels left frothy mist in my brain.

Today we have less to maintain and yet in some ways, we don't take the greatest opportunity to see and feel the simple forms around us. But I have great hope we are moving into this new state of grace.

Sure, we see the large over-filled estates in 'Architectural Digest' and maybe we even try to emulate them....if that be our style...but it's not the only way to live. New magazines like a Dwell show us how to be more conscious; building with fewer materials and less furnishings. It could be the new cultural norm is conserving what we have before purchasing, and then being careful when we do. Sometimes moving things we own from one spot to another is a prosperous gift of sight.

You may want to ask yourslef if you really need that new fandangled TV cabinet, especially when flat screens will make them obsolete someday soon. Instead use a room in a way you've never tried.

Take for instance our living rooms. Today they are used more....thank goodness! When I was young, many houses had living rooms you weren't permitted to sit in. I remember a lady proud of her velvet rope across the entrance, to keep kids out.....(or anyone else for that matter). In the ten years I lived in an out of her house as a child, I never saw anyone in that room! Times do change and now we live a more relaxed style.

With less interior objects in our homes, the exterior scenes can fill our rooms. When windows open, the tree branches fill the space. When the colors change outside it gives us reason to rearrange the forms and colors and light, we live with. Take everything out of a room for a month and see how differently you use it empty. Notice how the light and shadows fill the room.

Nature leads us toward the greatest lesson of design. Leaves fall and the grounds are full of orange, red and burnt sienna colored leaves. Winds blow gray into the sky, and soon a bright green covers the hills. Grasses then dry, to gold hues and the carpet changes again. Sometimes these exterior views can fill one with the mood for change on the interior as well.

Paint a wall of color.
Like a seasonal shift,
like a ray of light through a window,
like a visitor unannounced....
we begin to see differently.

Enjoy these last days of 2006, and unfold the new year with a brave new spirit!
Carolyna