featured on Irish Examiner by Kya deLongchamps

Minimalist or austere? The uptight, sleek, relatively empty neutral space spiked with worthy mid-century inspired furnishings is being challenged in 2019 with the return to a cosier more full inhabited feel of maximalism. Celebrated American architect Robert Charles Venturi Jr, who sadly died this year, tangled with the Mies Van Der Rohe’s sacred but paralysing adage trotted out in the last 10 years of decorating – ‘Less is more’, Venturi stated flatly, ‘- and less - is a bore.’

One of the most popular and luxurious interpretations of the ‘more is more’ school of aesthetics is the Memphis look – a 1970s fantasy of brass bound tables, marble, velvet and abstract art layered joyfully over every wall, glass and lacquered surface. It’s still chic, but there’s a lot more ‘you’ in these playful rooms.

In lush imagery of the Memphis lifestyle in European and American trade shows, living and faux greenery softens glass counters, orphaned corners and empty vertical voids using the exquisite geometry of rosette succulents, string-of-pearl (trailing Senecio Rowleyanus) and statuesque palms-house super-stars.

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