DESIGN INSIGHT: Inspiring Individualism

Photo by Quinn Buffing on Unsplash

They say you cannot judge a book by its cover or a person on the street by the way they dress and carry themselves.

A refined, intellectual mind may not care for finesse in personal attire and fine clothes certainly do not make a gentleman or a lady as we found out in Julia Robert’s Pretty Woman. But you can always tell something about a person by the way they choose to live and arrange their personal space.

You can tell a pretentious person by their lavish, chosen-for-show, must-haves in their homes -they try too hard to please others rather than pleasing their own senses and tastes.

A pragmatic, no nonsense person will have the essentials to live and nothing else.

A fanciful person will have things that need a fanciful mind to comprehend.

A book lover will have books spilling out everywhere, used as doorstops and make-shift tables.

An art lover will have art on their walls and then the subject of their choice of art is another giveaway.

There is always something that gives you a glimpseof a person’s personality as soon as you step inside their personal space.

But all these wonderfully narrative signs are sadly stripped away as soon as someone (not trusting their own judgment) hires an interior designer to arrange their space. As such, I don’t necessarily approve of interior designers arranging personal spaces (I know it sounds strange coming from someone who trained as one). Perhaps for this reason alone, my design quest has always been more inclined towards finding, sourcing and promoting good design rather than ramming my design ideas downs people’s throat (or through their doors!)

I always feel individuality is on a backburner these days — the world of now is mostly about conformity — conformity of thoughts, uniformity of actions, and following the status quo.

Remember the corner shops of yester years that sold everything from groceries to magazines to fabric? Each one was laid out different, stocked different merchandise, there were always surprises to be found if you visited a store further afield. These days each brand of retail shop is the same the world over. Gone are the little ways that owners and employees could…