Design for a Beautiful Life

These two words encapsulate a sensory mouthful of a design style that seems at first glance to be a paradox. Taking rough-hewn and well-worn elements and combining them with luxury textiles, antiques, and art to create an atmosphere that tells a story is the goal of those who love this style. Embracing the love of antiques, especially from the 18th and 19th centuries with found items seems to be the ultimate way to live with what you love and go green as well.

The New York Times mentions The New Antiquarians as those who have “an appetite for late 19th-century relics like apothecary cabinets and dressmakers’ dummies, turning their homes into pastiches of the past. For many, it seems, the smooth surfaces of modern design have lost their allure.”

Collectors like Hollister, left, and Porter Hovey, sisters with their Rough Luxe collection.

“Ryan Matthew, 29, is a silversmith with a knack for articulating, to use the expert’s parlance for rigging and displaying skeletons; for creating the tiny domed vignettes the Victorians were so fond of

(artful arrangements of taxidermied squirrels, for example, in twiggy settings); and for making delicate pencil drawings that look like old photographs.”

“Many, in fact, point to Mr. Somer’s restaurant (Freemans), open since 2004, as the catalyst for the latest round of interior decay and decorative revisionism, and for making taxidermy, as Caroline Kim, editorial director for LX.TV, a lifestyle division of NBC, said recently, “a hip-yet-comforting decorating trend.”

Mr. Somer who seemed bemused by his role as a tastemaker but gamely explained the thinking behind Freemans, which began life as a party location. “The idea was to make this clandestine Colonial tavern,” he said, “the sort of place the founding fathers would have conspired in.” The look, he added, reflects his assumptions about their tastes, as refined Europeans living in a rough new world: “Taxidermy was a symbol of that wildness.”

Asked why Freemans has a look that young Brooklynites like the Hovey sisters might want to replicate at home, he suggested that his own anti-modernist impulses may be shared by many others. “I look at all the glass buildings and think, who wants to live like that?” Mr. Somer, who grew up in a Swiss-modern household and once worked for the architect Steven Holl, said the perfectionism of modernism had begun to grate. “I got fed up and rebelled,” he said.

Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, offered a different explanation. “It’s way more than anti-modernism, this sort of deep spelunking into the past,” she said. “It’s not aspirational and it’s not nostalgic. It’s a fantasy world that is almost entirely a visual collage. It’s a stitched-together, bricolage world, an alternative world. Authenticity is such a fed-up idea,” she continued. “But collecting these old things, it’s like there is an aura attached to them. It’s not some prepackaged product being foisted on you by a big corporation.”

“Steven Grasse, chief executive of the advertising and branding agency Quaker City Mercantile in Philadelphia, says “Our job is to restore the aura that has been lost by strip malls and cheap junk from China. The approach is particularly appropriate right now because everything has collapsed. The old notions of luxury have crumbled. People are looking for what is real.”

Those who want to experience living in this environment can stay at the Rough Luxe Hotel.

As they say on their website – “This is Rough Luxe. Half rough, half luxury. A little bit of luxury in a rough part of London. A little bit of rough in a luxurious London. Our philosophy is simple: You are staying with us in our home, so just ask us for anything you need.”

In an interesting excerpt from the Wall Street Journal, they give vivid imagery to the components of this trend. “As movements go, it may be too early for this one to have a name, much less a manifesto. But if every new era is at least to some extent a reaction to what came before, then the one now taking shape shows signs of being antiminimalism and antiperfection—a repudiation of the old notions of luxury and the mindless accumulation of more stuff. Rough luxe is, at first glance, a study in Contradictions, an attempt to reconcile the antique or the just plain old with the contemporary, the accumulated with the newly acquired, the decrepit with the pristine. It’s artful dissonance. For those who have come to think of luxury as smooth, shiny, polished, refined and expensive, rough luxe will undoubtedly come off as unfinished, unplanned and somewhat chaotic. But that’s judging by the standards of a Gilded Age that’s officially over, and though the economy will rebound—seems, in fact, to be rebounding as we write—it is doubtful that the culture of bling will be back anytime soon.”

“I think especially now, when we don’t have a sense that we control our fates entirely, maybe there’s something a little bit easier about the idea that every single surface of your environment isn’t polished,” Bill Sofield says. “There’s a friendliness to it, maybe an egolessness—just letting certain things be.”

Friendly or not, this style does have a certain appeal to the senses. And now that we’re looking at our lives and our spending habits differently maybe it’s time to look to those things that have a truly timeless appeal.

Leave your comments about this style and let us know what your favorite rough and luxury items are.

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