Design Inspiration 1: Old City, Modern Times
The only boundary to design is acceptance. As designers, we are always trying to push boundaries looking for the next “IT” thing, but sometimes our customers may not be as progressive as we would like to be. That’s when we look towards old world charm in a new world setting. Asia is full of them. Singapore, Malacca, Penang, and Philippines, are just the few nearby places you can hop over the weekend for inspiration.
The juxtaposition of glassy skyscrapers amidst colonial stonewalled shop-houses is an art that is best understood through physical immersion instead of textbook. A good designer is one who has a firm grasp of the fundamentals of design but builds up the rest of his artistic senses through experience.
When I travel, I would sit at coffee shops and look at the landscape as a whole. It’s shape; it’s texture, the curves and nuances. Remember: Design is the sum of all parts.
Why is this important? That’s because most of our customers in Singapore straddle both eras and their houses must reflect that sense of familiarity to give them the comfort that is often hard to articulate in words. Like, how do we explain that
To get a sense of such design phenomenon, you first need to develop an understanding of how culture evolve over time, a keen sense of proportion and of space.
From an anthropological point of view cultural evolution is a narrative of key events that happened in the past that contributes in part to the present. This is why a space capsule chair can go well with a Victorian themed room.
The other principal behind combining multiple disparate design harmoniously in one home is to have an object in each room that connects with the other or by the use of colour.
Image Credit: Victorian Room
