Photograph by Bill Jacobson
The Rough Luxe movement’s embrace of imperfection is exemplified in the kitchen Bill Sofield designed for a Hudson Valley house, with its Aga oven and reclaimed chestnut floors.
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.
Courtesy of Rabih Hage
The lobby of the Rough Luxe hotel in London with its photo of artists Gilbert and George by Jonathan Root.
Already, in its place, something else has taken hold. You see it in the fascination with found objects and conditions, the race to use unexpected materials in unpredictable ways, and the hunger for vintage and the poetically juxtaposed clothes sent down the runways for fall. Last spring, at Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile, the design industry’s leading fair, the rough luxe notion was celebrated in pieces such as Piet Hein Eek’s chairs and cabinets made from a patchwork of salvaged—and then highly polished—wood. At Design Miami/Basel this year, all four recipients of the Designer of the Future awards, Nacho Carbonell, Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny, Peter Marigold and the duo Raw-Edges, used irregularities to draw attention to the maker’s hand. In fashion too, the extraordinary was played off the utilitarian: Miuccia Prada’s plush velvet dresses paired with workaday thigh-high waders; Giambattista Valli’s high-drama, floor-length skirt entirely covered in peacock feathers with a staid nubby black turtleneck.
Bill Sofield, best known in the ’90s for his sleek overhaul of the Gucci boutiques—a seamless universe of plush carpeting, chrome and lacquer, with nothing out of place—has lately found himself playing spokesman for rough luxe due to a sudden surge of interest in two interior-design projects that could act as case studies for the style, mixing immaculate finishes and raw surfaces, judicious intervention and existing conditions. In one room, in a wealthy artist’s house, a quilt-covered daybed is nestled in a corner, where a wall, covered in pristine ivy-patterned wallpaper, meets another, its paint job splotched and faded. The wallpaper was Sofield’s contribution; the adjacent wall “looked like a painting, so we just left it,” he says.
François Halard, a photographer specializing in interiors, whose own homes in America and France qualify as prime examples of rough luxe, says that he finds homes that are immaculate, in which the selection of the furniture and paintings is perfect and the placement is just so, “a little bit dry.” Murray Moss, co-founder of Manhattan’s store Moss—itself a showcase of high-priced, cutting-edge design items in an interior stripped to its original materials and structure—believes that Americans no longer feel so obliged to decorate by the book. “I think we’re confident enough now to mix different styles and periods,” he says. Both Moss and Halard use the word “autobiographical” to describe the kind of home they admire—“a reflection of the soul,” Halard says, “not what the owner can afford.”
Courtesy of François Halard
Photographer François Halard’s guest bedroom
Elements of rough luxe aesthetics have been brewing for years in one form or another. A catalog of examples could run to several volumes: the apartment where Cy Twombly and his wife live in Rome, first photographed for Vogue in 1966; Maxwell’s Plum, the New York restaurant outfitted with the trappings of defunct saloons; ’70s exposed brick; the colonization of Soho and Tribeca, with manufacturing spaces mildly renovated for residential use; white wallpaper introduced by Gijs Bakker in the early ’90s, with holes in the panels to allow what’s underneath to show through. Since they began designing in the ’70s, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto have both played with overwrought artifice and stark simplicity. Today, Consuelo Castiglioni, for Marni, and Dries Van Noten—two fashion designers who work in a style that comes across as both deliberately haphazard and coolly measured—are front and center after years in which their work tended to be eclipsed by carefully orchestrated outfits and the handbag of the season. Referencing the past has always been “a necessary component to understanding the present,” Castiglioni says.
In America, rough luxe would seem to be the latest installment in a long tradition, with each generation breaking with the style of its parents and asserting its own identity. A new wave of young people in their twenties is championing rough luxe as a rejection of the minimalism that dominated the world they grew up in—a style that began as industrial and makeshift and gradually progressed to extravagant and precious, with multiple coats of polish on a cement floor and living rooms indistinguishable from hotel lobbies. Rough luxe sounds the death knell for that perfectionism. “I think there are two camps in fashion,” says fashion designer Thakoon Panichgul, who created distressed “everyday” silver fox furs dyed saffron yellow and cayenne red for his line Thakoon. “One is people who love the idea of looking theatrical and perfect—I think that’s dated. More and more, designers from my generation or younger look for the imperfection.”
The American preference for the brand-new, the impulse to raze history and start all over is understandable when you consider the circumstances, with large swaths of the population living in suburban houses built in the style of their owners’ fantasies. In which case, Murray Moss says, preserving someone else’s French provincial makes no more sense than imposing your own preference for early Colonial.
If rough luxe has a mantra, it’s “authenticity.” Gil Shapiro, founder of Urban Archaeology, built a business on random acts of historic preservation, rescuing mantels, chandeliers and architectural ornaments from Park Avenue dumpsters. He can be a zealot about it: He once made casino mogul Steve Wynn sign a statement promising that he wouldn’t polish the pair of municipal lampposts Shapiro sold him for a hotel in Atlantic City. Crystal ball–gazers who forecast changes in our patterns of consumption have been predicting for some time that authenticity would be the next big thing. Caroline Till, the design trends editor at London’s The Future Laboratory, says the brand strategy firm was tracking a trend among designers that by spring was spreading into the broader marketplace. Their April 2009 trend report, called “Inspire: Rough Luxe,” stated, it “celebrates a heavy rawness erring on the artisanal.” Till doesn’t believe the timing is coincidental: “Because of the downturn, consumers are taking a bit longer to think about a purchase,” she says. “And they want to buy into a story.”
Old things are used in their capacity to disrupt the smugness of the new, while new things pierce the weighty messages of the old. It’s cheeky to expect travelers accustomed to heated towel racks and pillow menus to spend the night in a room that looks as if its renovation was halted before it was done, but that is what Rabih Hage, the architect who designed London’s Rough Luxe Hotel, did when he left much of the building, an undistinguished Georgian townhouse, as he found it. Gilbert and George photographs hang against walls with peeling paint and obtuse Kelly Ryan chairs sit in halls with cracked plaster. “The different layers and types of wallpaper were the witness of every family and every era that has come through, from 1827 until today,” he says. When Halard outfitted his loft, he collected 18th-century tiles and shipped an old tub from Europe, to ensure that not everything would match or look as if it had been minted that week. “So I actually spent a lot of money to make it look imperfect,” he says, laughing. “Which for me was the ultimate luxury.”
Rough luxe may not have been occasioned by the current economic recession—the movement was on a roll before November 2008CHK—but it does seem to resonate with it. “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,” Sofield says. “There’s a friendliness to it, maybe an egolessness—just letting certain things be.”
