>PORTLAND HAS HAD its own “hip” interior design look for some time now.
You can see it down there at nearly every Pearl District record store, book store, bar, clothing boutique, and coffeehouse. You can see it up here at Hamburger Mary’s and the McMenamin’s brewpubs. It’s a look that even makes efficient new buildings look quaint and lived-in, at least on the inside. It involves “weatherbeaten” paint hues, retro wallpaper, “antiqued” wood paneling, and reproduction posters and metal signs. It doesn’t really look old; it looks like a stage set for some nice little play about how sociable life used to be, back before the sterility of modern design and the hectic pace of advanced-industrial society.
Seattle now has its own “hip” interior design look, and it celebrates everything the Portland look implicitly renounces.
We’ve previously mentioned it in regards to the ARO.Space dance club and its associated venture, the Ace Hotel. Now, the look’s spreading further.
Example #1: The Lux coffeehouse on 1st used to be a homey, comfy little joint, intimate and coccoon-ish. Now it’s been redone in “clean” off-whites. The overstuffed chairs and heavy tables have been replaced by lightweight, curvy, Scandinavian Modern-inspired furnishings.
The old Lux was a womblike shelter, a respite from the day’s stresses. The new Lux is a more engaging environment, a place to recharge one’s batteries.
Example #2: Pages is the new independent, capitalistic bookstore in the Capitol Hill space formerly occupied by the leftist Red and Black Books Collective. Red and Black was tastefully crammed with products of feminist, gay/lesbian, ethnic-minority, labor, Beat, and other un-corporate thought systems. Pages is much cleaner-looking and much, much airier; almost a boutique. It carries far fewer titles than Red and Black did, and it displays them far more “elegantly.”
Red and Black was like a reassuringly-cluttered general store for vital information. Pages is more of a boutique.
(Being on Capitol Hill, Pages still carries gay books, but they tend to be celebrations of out-ness rather than struggle-for-respect broadsides.)
Out-of-towners can see the principles behind this look in the UK-based magazine Wallpaper*. It’s like a Charles and Ray Eames revival blended with a Herman Miller fetish, stirred through with less-cheap versions of Ikea designs, and strained through a seive of World’s Fair-style futurism.
And it is not, despite everything Wallpaper* and others claim, foreign to Seattle. As I wrote in Seattle magazine, the ARO.Space name implies a reference to our leading pre-Gates industry. We make planes here. We know a thing or four about sleek lines, functional streamlining, and making small interiors look roomier than they are.
And, 37 years ago, we built the Space Needle and the arches of the Pacific Science Center as parts of the Century 21 Exposition.
As the real 21st century approaches, the homey-clutter look is getting turned into upscale preciousness by the likes of Restoration Hardware and The Pottery Barn; while the new hipsters, inspired by Euro-chic and Tomorrowland nostalgia, are heading back to the futurism.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.
TOMORROW: The potential next great civic task, humanizing the suburbs.
ELSEWHERE: Speaking of Oregon-based trends, the L.A. Times has discovered Eugene’s punk anarchists, about 20 years after their first appearance–and starts out the article with yet another dumb ’60s nostalgia lead.
