This month, our columnist Joy Moyler recounts how architecture influences her approach to design
IT IS everywhere you look. Simple, complex, inviting, or eroding. It can evoke much conversation with its dramatic flair, or make you feel empty and lost when something is missing. It offers shelter from the storm, and envelops the lives we create for ourselves.
It is architecture. The diversity of styles expands the test of time, across all civilisations. One of my favourite design library treasures is Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture. You can find me lost in the drawings, balustrade designs and expanded style definitions, and I’m always on a quest to discover more.
My primary professional focus is interior design but it is architecture that brought me here. A trip to Spain started it all, when a chip of stone from the facade of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia hit me in the face. Literally! Thoughts of studying fashion design soon faded and my foray into the architectural rabbit hole began.
To date, I love spaces with a historical reference. New York’s Metropolitan Museum is a favourite structure. It is a classical beacon, and I am a classicist at heart.
A highlight of my career is the opportunity to work on international projects. One, a golf resort outside Moscow. The building’s architecture was designed by my dear friend Gregory Tuck and the brief was ‘to create classical architectural spaces with both contemporary and traditional interior furnishings, decorative elements and references’. Happy to say we nailed it!
Another, the restoration and refresh of a 19th-century listed estate in Middlesex, England, for a young family. The challenge there was holding on to the structure’s rich history – original wide plank floors and deep mahogany millwork – while creating timely new modern spaces for young children to relate to.
Both projects excited me a great deal. I love studying the history of a space, the culture, the people, the design references, the exhibits. It becomes full immersion.
