Articles: Viva Texturas!

The big (scary) plum.
Several years ago I was offered a big plum—the job of designing a new clothing store in a prosperous mid-size American city. The space was huge, the store was in a prominent downtown location. Thing was, I had never designed an architectural interior in my life. What I did know right to the bone was sculpture. And one thing I knew from sculpture that would carry over to architecture was texture. So that’s where I began. I studied the Italian clothing that would be sold (vaporous silks, melting-butter leathers) and began to build a palette of textures around that.. And guess where I started?

Steel rules!
(Gulp, goes the proprietor!) With steel. With steel that had a very velvety, almost pink patina and with thick glimmery bridge-grade steel cable that swooped twice across the entire width of the store from which dresses were hung like voluptuous Spanish moss.. Next I added glass, wood, stone (keeping the palette very elemental) and for perfect punctuation—fresh flowers—oh yes, fresh roses each day in a specially-blown glass vials that hung outside each (very spacious) dressing room. I drew up the contract myself with the florist. Next I insisted on

laptops, comfy chairs and a bottle of scotch for the husbands
-Lynne’s very wise input. The design worked, the store got some big awards and was even used for a number of years for the gala reception for the city’s symphony orchestra. Yup, a clothing store. Why? Chiefly, I think, because of the textures, textures that accentuated the clothes and textures that created a space where customers felt exotic enough to deserve them.

Designers Mozart and John Adams.
If one thinks of the instruments of a orchestra as textures, you get a sense of the scope you have with hard and soft, silky and brutal, natural and synthetic.

What’s the subtext in “texture?”
First, there’s something powerfully anticipatory about texture the way the smell of baked apples anticipates eating grandma’s pie. We can see a mink coat hanging on a stone wall and visually feel the contrast of textures but that’s not all. There’s (sometimes) acute anticipation until you actually touch that gorgeous red hair . . . er, that lovely stone wall. The brain is going wakawaka, kid, I have to touch that mink. Hey, you’ve switched on a little neurological storm . Texture is profoundly sensual. Without waking up the censor here,

what’s love-making anyway but…
a wildly extravagant topography of texures and a corresponding gradient of raptures. The essential eroticism of ‘touch’ is something to exploit to the fullest in design. If folks enter a room and don’t touch a thing or two on their way to the sofa, either they’ve just made love and are sated, or your room is lacking tactile excitement big time.

Holy Smoke.
Textures absorb. Stand in an old old church, say in Venice. The tapestries, the marble, the wood feels saturated with the noise and commotion and silences and candle smoke of hundreds of years. As Herbert Muschamp observed, it’s not the architecture that’s as important as how richly history has soaked into its surfaces. And you too, standing there. Something of you is being added, retained after you leave. A drop, a shred, a whiff. Great textures, rich history.

Rule 1, employ contrast.
The simplest rule of thumb with texture is use contrast—stone (every home should have some stone inside) and well, shaved beaver (what, you don’t have shaved beaver in your living room!); wear a paper necklace against a satin blouse; combine natural with synthetic. Something old, something new.

Be unorthodox.
Think steel in a clothing store. Paper in a living room.

Hey, and don’t shun plastic!
Crappy old plastic. Once a byword for cheap. Just look at what the Italians are doing with plastic and other synthetics in home furnishings now. Touch it. It’s voluptuous, it’s on par with the chrome on a new Lamborghini.

So go on, lug in that boulder,
plunk it in your living room.. Viva texturas!