Interior Ins and Outs

If I learned anything from talking to local interior designers, it’s that their work is not for amateurs. If you think all you need to be a successful interior designer is a certificate, a couple throw pillows, and a dream, you’re living in a fool’s pastel paradise. These seasoned professionals need the skills of the draftsman, the investigator, the artist, the therapist, and the mind-reader; insights into and understanding of construction and building; and the ability to explain a complex art and science to a public simply yearning for an answer to the question “Does this go with this?”

I also learned that interior designers are masters of diplomacy. Asking a designer what’s in and what’s out is almost insultingly reductive, I find. It’s also a bit like trying to get the Dalai Lama to admit that come on, there’s got to be someone who really rubs his rhubarb the wrong way. All the provocative questions I dangle about oak paneling, neon sculpture, and macramé wall-hangings are met with thoughtful interpretation, rather than wholesale condemnation. In home design, everything is up for consideration.

After a number of exchanges, I realize I have gone about this the wrong way—instead of bearding the designers in their tastefully appointed showrooms, I ought to have invited them to my own house, which is both an “out” and a “don’t.” I would have been able to witness and record their involuntary shudders at the Living Room of Many Woods; their irrepressible consternation at the Sanford and Son–style porch; the fine play of emotion on their features as I revealed that the Kandinsky poster had been selected to go with the Target rug. Maybe even then it wouldn’t have gone the way I planned; when I confess to William Beson, CEO of Beson Kading Interior Design Group in Minneapolis, that nearly everything in my living room is red, he kindly refers to it as a “unifying color.”

Still, without resorting to these scare tactics, I learn that unlike fashion, high-end interior design is not really about what’s in and what’s out. For one thing, while clothing and hair fashions tend to change rapidly, and it’s common for people to change and update their wardrobes seasonally, it’s not practical or desirable to change your home’s appearance or design with every fluctuation of modern culture, whether pop or couture.

For another, designers tend to never say never. A skillful designer is able to translate even the scariest-sounding ideas into something fresh and attractive, and past influences are always being reintroduced in innovative ways. For example, as Beson points out, shag carpeting is back. “There’s bad shag and then there’s good shag,” he says, although truthfully it’s hard to believe. Laura Ramsey Engler, design principal for Minneapolis interior design firm Ramsey Engler, Ltd., mentions that clean forms harking back to the ’60s, like Parsons tables, storage cubes, and acrylic furniture, are being used today in fresh ways. Still, I was able to winkle out a few things that are transitioning in or falling by the wayside—for our purposes, In and Outs.

In: Contrast colors. Color blocking, or contrasting one wall color with another, continues to be a strong trend, but the combinations are becoming richer and stronger. For example, chocolate brown is still a popular color, but turquoise and fuschia are replacing watery aqua and pink as contrasting element. Neutral backgrounds are also coming back in style, with colors like linen, putty, and grey predominating.