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modern interior. <strong>The</strong>y are portrayed as having unlimited imaginations<br />
and the capacity to change the appearance of the interior with the wave<br />
of a wand. Other programmes approach the domestic interior from<br />
slightly different perspectives. One, for example, builds on the longstanding<br />
fascination of the public with celebrities’ homes, while others<br />
set out to provide information and advice to people who see their homes<br />
as a form of investment which would benefit from the addition of an<br />
enhanced interior.<br />
By the early years of the twenty-first century the idea of ‘lifestyle’<br />
has come to dominate private consumption and, along with fashionable<br />
dress, holidays, leisure activities and private transportation ownership,<br />
the home has become increasingly important in that context. Especially<br />
in its idealized and desired form, home is the place where personal<br />
identities are still formed, for the most part, and the destination for<br />
most consumed goods, from new technology products to furniture and<br />
furnishings. It is not only the goods within interiors that are consumed,<br />
however. <strong>Interior</strong>s themselves, particularly those in hotels, shopping<br />
malls, supermarkets, restaurants, banks, theme parks, airport lounges,<br />
ocean liners, and other commercially oriented spaces, have themselves<br />
become objects of consumption. As the idea of ‘lifestyle’ became the end<br />
in sight within consumer culture, the role of branding also increased in<br />
significance and interiors were integrated into marketing and branding<br />
strategies.<br />
Increasingly global companies seek to brand themselves through<br />
the language of their interiors as well as through their graphic design.<br />
<strong>The</strong> experience of a McDonald’s restaurant, of a Hard Rock Café, or of a<br />
Planet Hollywood, is, in any city in the world, a more or less standardized<br />
one. <strong>The</strong> same principle applies to shops – from Max Mara fashion<br />
stores, to the Body Shop, to Gap, the interiors of which utilize the same<br />
colour schemes and display techniques across the world, to chains of<br />
hotels, such as the Madonna Inn in the us, theme parks and shopping<br />
malls where the same franchised shops appear together in different<br />
venues. In those contexts the interior has become less an extension of<br />
architecture than of graphic design, advertising and branding. <strong>The</strong> more<br />
standardized mass-produced interiors become however, the greater is the<br />
desire to create ‘difference’ at a higher level of the market through an<br />
open alliance with designer-culture. <strong>The</strong> luxurious stylishness of the<br />
interiors of French designer Philippe Starck’s New York hotels, for example<br />
– which have a family resemblance but are highly individualized