Diana Vinoly is a brilliant New York designer. Her portfolio had me totally drooling all over my laptop. I am in awe of anyone who is bold enough to display huge artwork and she does over and over and over again. She had so many gorgeous photos of rooms designed in her eclectic style that I had a hard time decided which to use.
She has been working professionally as an interior designer for only a few years, but the distinctive look that she gave to all her projects, has brought her to the fore among designers working the industrial look. Her approach might best be described as tossed-off chic. The designer drew on the classic silhouettes of some modern furniture designs — a testament to beauty in brevity.
Diana Vinoly created the interiors of the houses, in close cooperation with the client. “I’ve done houses that are quite different from mine,” says Diana, “but there is a certain feeling you can find in all those houses. It’s in the flow. I like the idea that as you go from one place to another there is continuity, not a shocking difference. You just continue without feeling like you have to learn the whole language again. One element is color, a very subtle thing people don’t even realize goes from one place to another.”
The modernist interior designer, conceived in midcentury to exalt the everyday, the mass-produced and the fuss-free, has in 1998 become merely au courant. Plywood stacking chairs and tubular steel sofas, designed for utility, now peer from the pages of glossy magazines like so many blase models with nothing to do but pose.
The high-style status of modernism is putting the once proudly democratic design movement at odds with young people who just want to live with it.
“Always calls our houses the Diana’s house.”
