Modern Design Dilemmas

If the art of design were a color, how about a warm, nineteenth-century gray like Farrow and Ball's French Gray? Or something more New England in grayscale, such as Winslow Homer's confluence of spume and coastal rock, a vibrant, neutral capturing of design's paradoxical nature, its stubborn refusal to yield either to all black or all white. People have their paradoxes, too. As in the 1990-'91 recession, clients want cheaper, faster and at the same time sustainable, green and built to last. Moreover, they want smaller, more manageable homes these days but with enough space for two home offices and a suite for returning adult children. They want those spaces to have clean, contemporary lines but they also want their homes to express their uniqueness with collections, travel souvenirs and mementos.

Architect and Harvard Graduate School of Design Professor Peter Rose worked out a seemingly intransigent paradox: eco-luxury in the form of the new, gracefully graying, cypress-clad Annex at Kripalu in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The yoga devotee doing “down dog” on the mat next to you may be a kindred soul but will be returning to a dorm and shared bath. You on the other hand, will be retiring to the understated elegance of the fifteen-million-dollar adjoining Annex with its private everything. Rose's compact, energy-efficient design features the hot and cold radiant floors favored in Europe. These in turn meet over-size windows equipped with king-size, individually-operated shades of graying cypress salvaged from Katrina's tidal surge. From outside you can meditate on the playful rhythms formed by the devices in their various states of openness.

“What's changed for our practice here is that now clients are pushing to do the right thing, the responsible thing and they're willing to pay for it,” says architect and Room to Dream vice-president Michael Collins of Natick, Massachusetts. “They want less quantity in terms of square footage, better quality and more sustainable materials.” Can sustainable and sublime coexist in the paradoxical gray zone? So it would seem... Collins is using recycled barn siding and posts from Maine for all the flooring, beams and columns for a project on the Cape. “The color of the wood is exceptionally rich and comes with a deep sense of character and witness. It's also a lot more stable than some new wood,” he says. Collins' sources include Long Leaf Lumber in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Carlisle Lumber in Stoddard, New Hampshire.

One of the most persistent design paradoxes for New England designers has to be the one that arises on a visit to Italy. “It's so beautiful, I'd love to bring it home with me in a box,” designers think, “but at the same time I'm so American and New World—what to do!” Kathy Venier, of Details in Lexington, Massachusetts, may have felt some of that when she toured the royal apartments of the Pitti Palace in Florence, recently, where she was besotted by  the grand drapes and bullion-graced valances, tabletops of inlaid marble and blue lapis, the collection of Sevres porcelain, painted ceilings and statuary. But her real dilemma came later: “At dinner, there were so many wonderful items on the menu but so little time to enjoy them,” she says. Afterwards, Venier strolled about the old city. “A delightful detail is how the shopkeepers stack their items so artistically inside their doors awaiting the window-shoppers.”

David Sanborn, of EcoModern Design in the Boston Design Center, was in charge of antiques at Shreve's when they closed their doors. But that's ancient history. Now Sanborn has a second venture situated in the back of his fifth-floor showroom: EcoModern Architecture with partner Alan Juliuson, an architect formerly with CBT Architects. One of the many innovative products the new partners are working with is reclaimed leather floor and wall tile. “It's made of shredded scraps from upholstery and car seats mixed with acacia bark and natural latex. Then it's cut to size,” says Sanborn. “And it comes in various colors and patterns, with color matching available and abrasion testing that's better than linoleum.”

When you look at the deep-navy-painted doors of Paris, it has to be poisonous lead that makes that blue so vibrant and so responsive to the changing light. Whatever's tempting and delicious, it seems, always turns out to be illegal. Designer Enrique Chavez of Jamaica, Vermont, and New York's Greenwich Village returned from London recently where he happened to find an intoxicating Prussian Blue on the door of a Greek Temple garden folly. The eighteenth-century color that's extremely malleable to changes in light never looks the same, and reminds Chavez of those neoclassic ideals informing his own work: the search for the perfect form, the perfect proportion; indeed, the perfect blue. So far the actual paint has eluded him. The walls of his own neoclassic, Greek Revival house in Vermont will just have to wait.

Newport architect Ross Cann performed “architectural jujitsu” on a house overlooking the famous Cliff Walk, adding shingle-style gambrel bookends to replace tacky 1950s additions, and tearing off a 1970s sunroom. Ripping out the almost comical connectors to the master suite was perhaps the key to changing this odd little duck into one of the Newport swans—and a national Dream House Award Winner for best exterior makeover. “To get to the bedroom, you first had to pass through a bathroom and through a second door which opened on a long connecting closet. I would like to think there was some kind of architectural intent about those spaces—simulating Indiana Jones finding the burial tomb—but really it was just cobbled together with duct tape and baling wire,” Cann says. “Two years ago in a different economy the house would certainly have been a tear down.”

Great design has many applications outside the home. After a friend who commuted by bicycle to work was hit by a car for the third time, industrial designers Alex Tee and Evan Gant, of Altitude in Somerville, Massachusetts, decided to do something about bike safety. Their solution: the LightLane, a laser contraption that attaches just below the seat of a bicycle and projects a bright, wide “virtual bike lane.” LightLane not only cuts a wide swath of light so a cyclist can see where he's going, it also creates a clear boundary for drivers to avoid. After creating the prototype, the two put together a You Tube video about their product. “After getting 250,000 plus views we thought, ‘Okay, maybe we should take this seriously,' ” says Tee.

The block-long Steven King showroom at the Boston Design Center just came under the aegis of Beauvais Carpets in New York, opening an important source of antiques as well as new designs. Says King: “I can count on just two hands the number of producers of original rug designs, and they're mostly in the United States. We have almost nothing to do with oriental rugs anymore, or Aubussons and the like. What we have at the showroom is what you can't find in the retail stores—the highly unusual finish, color, pattern, textures. Once the producers work out the design and texture they want, then they source it all over the world, where it can be done best.” The notion that orientals are no longer of interest and that leading designers may be moving on to other kinds of rugs poses one of the knottiest of knotty design paradoxes: designers and architects are committed to preserving the best of tradition while at the same time opening themselves to new ideas and to the fact that the world is forever changing along with their clients. The question becomes, how does one honor and preserve the ancient art of oriental rugs and at the same time welcome the new and never-before-seen? Questions such as these call for a very special kind of LightLane—an attachment perhaps to the gray matter of the cerebrum. Alex Tee are you ready?

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