Every 15 years or so I become fashionable. My worn jeans and faded blue shirt ensemble becomes the look for that season, and for a brief moment, I’m on trend. The downside is that I live in Somerset, so when everyone’s realised what the trend is here, everyone in London’s wearing something else.
As a company, Artichoke also avoids trends. Our kitchen and architectural joinery designs are naturally classical. As designers of bespoke kitchens, libraries and principle rooms, we like the elegance which classical order, balance, proportion and harmony produces, and as fine cabinet-makers it suits us too. Classical design is steeped in tradition, and we enjoy making furniture in the traditional way, using hardwood which is joined together with mortice and tenons, mason’s mitres and halving joints. It’s a tried and tested formula.
In the early 2000’s we began to notice a significant shift in furniture and room style, particularly among the super-prime homeowner in London. These buyers typically came from overseas, and arrival on the streets of London gave these wealthy incomers a new found freedom to become more gregarious, and fashionable interior design became a popular route for those wanting to make an aesthetic mark on their newly acquired English home.
The consequences were sometimes questionable. Suddenly homeowners began to request furniture made from metal effect spray coated panelling and, albeit in extreme cases, Swarovski crystal covered shoe shaped baths. Interior design became a heady mixture of luxury hotel interiors crossed with theatre. Design became depressingly temporary.
More recently however we’ve noticed a welcome reversal, with more discerning clients beginning to appreciate that elegant design is actually best achieved through gentility and restraint. An introduction to the English countryside, its pursuits and architecture has also managed to educate some buyers to the more muted ways of successful English classical furniture and interior design.
Wealthy overseas buyers are now beginning to understand that quality English interior design and architecture is about style, grace, understated beauty, and above all, permanence. They are beginning to realise that it does not pay to be on-trend with interiors. Libraries, kitchens and dressing rooms cannot be replaced every time a new fashion emerges.
At the heart of this is craft, and we explore whether we are in the middle of a new Arts and Crafts period in another blog.
Our clients homes are too important to be treated simply as temporary or artificial stage sets with shelf lives, and the furniture design work we undertake here at Artichoke needs to have this air of permanence before it can be presented to the client. For joinery and fitted furniture to truly deliver an air of permanence, it needs to look comfortable and natural in its surroundings.
There are many ways of introducing permanence into design, but one sure fire method is to deploy classically inspired design treatments, mouldings, shapes, balance and proportion. When executed well it delivers breathtaking glamour that, we think, outstrips anything that a bronze and crystal adorned flat door panel will ever deliver in its short lifetime.
What wealthy buyers have begun to understand it appears, is that less is more. Or to quote the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.”
To discuss your project with us, please email newprojects@artichoke.co.uk or call +44 (0)1934 745270