Pattern Language

Cindy Allen -- Interior Design, 7/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

The July issue has driven our art department (and me) to graphic despair. Most of the time, we do an impeccable job of wrangling and corralling our featured interiors into an equitable, across-the-board visual format. But this month has proved a real bear for even my ultra-talented design jockeys. To some attentive and loyal readers, it may even look like our team has thrown in the towel—or picked one up on the way to the beach. Absolutely not. Theatrical patterning and freestyle texturing dominated our chosen projects to such an extent that what could we do but go with the flow and have fun with it? And indeed we did! Noticing the way that white-painted steel tubes angle their way through a fashion headquarters in Belgium, we dressed up our spreads in head-to-toe diagonals. The bold green vertical stripes that wrap a Beverly Hills guest house by Aleks Istanbullu inspired us to add a few chartreuse swaths of our own. In our global restaurant roundup, framed mirrors, empty bottles, and neon tubes become our vocabulary.

Sending our last pages off to the printer, I couldn't help reminiscing about the turn of the millennium, when a select group of masters started experimenting with this kind of work—Hall of Famers George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg spring to mind, among others. I'm clearly seeing something forming. I hesitate to use the word trend, though, incidentally, this year's NeoCon fair in Chicago was a positive lovefest for innovative surface treatments, as you'll see next month in our wrap-up. When the commercial market speaks, loudly at that, everyone should damn well listen.