TRUE COLORS

Adam Nathaniel Furman's Mediterraneaninspired rug for Floor Story. Courtesy: Floor Story and the artist.

An irrepressible playfulness is erupting in the design world, giving free rein to color and its joyous cohorts, ornamentation and pattern. Polychrome design – from large-scale urban landmarks to homeware – is becoming the norm, not a fad.

This represents a turning point, given that color in design has traditionally been undervalued, if not frowned upon. After pondering this for a while, it occurred to me that this problematic relationship is partly down to a long-established focus in the West on functionalism. While color has credence in fine art because it is expressive and is embraced by fashion – well, part of the point of it is body decoration – many deem functionality the main attraction of design and color not relevant to that.

That said, color has rarely been absent from design, although there was scant evidence of it in the mid-1980s. The 1950s black and white homeware of Piero Fornasetti, stocked by cult London shops Oggetti and Themes and Variations, and the fabrics of design duo Timney Fowler, were the apogee of chic then, although I hasten to add that they were both decorative and functional.

In the you-can-have-any-color-you-like-so-long-as-it’s-taupe 1990s – a decade overshadowed interiors-wise by Kelly Hoppen’s home-decorating bible East Meets West – mimimalist, monochrome homes boasted wooden floorboards and white muslin curtains.

Color crept back into interiors in the noughties, due partly to the resurgence of wallpaper, notably the opulent designs of Cole & Son. In the 2010s, Memphis, the early 1980s collective spearheaded by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, enjoyed a revival. As the curator of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s 2011/2012 exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, Jane Pavitt, pointed out, Memphis’s candy-bright laminate surfaces had long been maligned as vacuous, a case of style over substance. “Since the 1980s, Memphis and Postmodern styles have been regarded as tasteless and superficial. The fact that we’re now seeing these patterns revisited is partly due to designers and companies opening up their archives and finding that clashing colors and geometric forms look sharp today.”

I remember quizzing Rhonda Drakeford, co-founder of London design store Darkroom, soon after about why Memphis was greeted with such enthusiasm. One reason she gave was a backlash against a surfeit of watered-down Scandinavian modernism that had dominated interiors for some time.

French designer Camille Walala was at the vanguard of the Memphis comeback, and acknowledged its huge influence on her. In 2015, she created a homeware line called In Da House and covered the facades of buildings with her Memphis-esque murals. She is still channeling Memphis’s graphic oomph – typified by shrill pastels, shades such as cobalt blue, black stripes, dashes and amoeboid squiggles – with such recent projects as Les Jumeaux, comprising typically vibrant pedestrian crossings and murals in White City, West London.

Memphis continues to grip the public imagination internationally – it was celebrated this year by the exhibition Memphis: Plastic Field at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes in the UK – “a reinterpretation,” states the venue, of shows previously held at The Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Bordeaux and Fondazione Berengo in Venice.

Time has shown that it is facile to dismiss Memphis’s appeal as skin-deep or kitsch – in fact, it knowingly explored the boundaries of “good” and “bad” taste. And its eclecticism partly rested on its authentically multicultural make-up: before it disbanded in 1985, its members included Nathalie du Pasquier, Shiro Kuramata, George Sowden, Michael Graves and Javier Mariscal – from France, Japan, the UK, US and Spain respectively. Sottsass himself was highly cultured, his own maverick, sensual aesthetic heavily informed by a trip to India in 1961 that predated the hippie trail.

A major difference between then and now is that, along with multiculturalism, we are witnessing the greater prominence of women and the LGTQ+ community in the design world, who deploy color with even greater panache, argues half-Argentinian, half-Japanese artist and designer Adam Nathaniel Furman.

Furman, who trained as an architect and is co co-director of Saturated Space, a research group on color in urbanism and architecture, is outspoken on the subject. He believes that color has long been marginalized or suppressed by Modernism, still regarded as sacrosanct by the design education establishment.

“Homophobia, misogyny and sexism are mixed up in aesthetic judgments that have their origins in Modernism,” he tells me over a glass of red wine during a Zoom call one weekend. “This tradition has a strong idea that simplicity, clarity and structure are masculine, intellectual, serious and have depth and that anything colorful, ornamental or decorative, which is gendered or queered, is superficial or effeminate. Color has been traditionally exoticized – something that exists in other cultures – as happened with 19th-century Orientalism.”

His unapologetically bold work spans public structures, such as Proud Little Pyramid in King’s Cross, London, an “anti-monument monument,” whose pomposity-pricking aim is to spread joy to onlookers, an apartment in Tokyo awash with pastel surfaces, and Mediterranean rugs for the company Floor Story, with geometric motifs in shades like canary yellow and turquoise, inspired by ancient Greek and Roman architecture.

Incidentally, Floor Story commissions other designers on this wavelength, among them Indian-born, London-based textile designer Kangan Arora and 2 Lovely Gays, co-founded by Jordan Cluroe and Russell Whitehead.

Furman dubs this uninhibited aesthetic widely adopted by London creatives as “New London Fabulous.” Other key players celebrating color include the trailblazing Morag Myerscough, who has favored fluoro-bright color and gargantuan text on her installations for decades. Last April, she created her See Through pavilion in Grosvenor Square, London, intended to offer people a safe, uplifting outdoor space during the pandemic. Another major figure is Yinka Ilori, of British-Nigerian heritage, feted for his extravagantly colorful pavilions and upcycled furniture in singing hues – jade green, fuchsia, tomato red or cooler greys and lilac. Ilori’s palette is unique, partly because it’s personal. Memories of his parents and friends dressed in gloriously polychrome outfits instilled in him a love of unabashed color. “If my parents ever saw anyone in my family wearing black, they didn’t like it,” he once told me. In May, Ilori designed a basketball court in Canary Wharf in East London with vibrant patterns in sherbet yellow and bubblegum pink.

Coinciding with a greater diversity in the design community, adds Furman, was “a new design economy” in London that triumphed circa 2014, propelled partly by the rise of Instagram: “I’d never have had a career without social media and London’s many design fairs that led to public commissions that really boosted our confidence. People in marketing, often women and gay men, rather than design curators from upper-middle-class backgrounds, were suddenly commissioning pop-up events that proved hugely popular. Effectively, the industry expanded and the traditional gatekeepers of design lost their hold.”

Color is also in demand at Pinch, whose Joyce cabinet in wood can be lacquered in a variety of colors, including punchy emerald green. “People have been ordering more colored pieces in the past 18 months or asking for old pieces to be resprayed,” says co-founder Russell Pinch. “We’ve just received an order for our Harper wooden dining table, stained bright green, from interior designer Waldo Works. Part of me wonders if people hanker after a change of energy in their homes due to Covid-19. We’re normally inspired by interiors of hotels and restaurants, so during lockdowns people have been looking at their immediate environments in a different way.”

Even designer Sebastian Cox, purveyor of furniture made of wood harvested using renewable coppicing, who favors a natural aesthetic, produces the colorful Barker collection, designed by his partner, Brogan Cox. Its tables, sideboards and cabinets in ash are stained yellow, blue, green or red using water-based dyes.

Color-drenched murals are a major manifestation of this snowballing trend – not surprisingly since their scale gives color greater impact. Notable muralists partial to strong color include Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Agostino Iacurci and British-born, Denmark-based artist Daniel van der Noon. Iacurci’s piece, Eight Rooms, lined one side of Principal Square in London last year, while van der Noon enlivened a mini precinct in Paris’s Marais neighbourhood with graphic images of 50 iconic urban LGBTQ+ landmarks and legendary venues around the world, including Paris’s Queen nightclub and New York’s Stonewall Inn.

Meanwhile, Amsterdam-based designers Job Wouters and Gijs Frieling, the former a graphic designer and calligrapher, the latter a muralist, joined forces some years ago to co-create furniture. Their latest venture – their FreelingWaters collection of cabinets made of 19th-century pine pieces – was commissioned by The Wrong Shop, designer Sebastian Wrong’s online platform selling limited-edition furniture and prints by artists and designers from around the world. The outlandishly patterned FreelingWaters pieces are adorned with landscapes, flowers, animals, faux-marble and wood patterns and words, and reflect the duo’s fascination with folk art, Renaissance wall art and pop art. Their materials include hand-mixed pigments and caseine glue, the latter used by Giotto when painting the brilliant blue heavens in his frescoes at the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, Italy. The collection was unveiled at the London Design Festival and will be shown at the Shanghai Podium at the fair Design Miami in November.

Let it not be said that these pieces aren’t functional as well as decorative. According to Wrong, “I've got behind this because it's an interesting up-cycling/recycling concept realized by two creatives who really know what they’re doing, repurposing antiques with little cultural or design interest and reworking them into unique objects of desire by adding layers of color and text. The pieces are highly crafted and quirky yet contemporary, making way for something new and functional.”