Becky Shankle :: Modern Design: Like a Box of Chocolates

When the Light Went On :: The Eye Opener

When I was fresh out of college, I was working with a fellow at a sign company who had a degree in graphic design. One evening he invited me to dinner at his home with his wife. The house was a generic brick ranch – nothing special, just a typical 60′s 3 bedroom with shutters & a paneled front door.

But inside it was modern in every detail! The baseboards, lighting, paint colors – everything. Their hallway was a miniature art gallery, with small intense spot lighting on each piece. There was no chair rail, crown molding or swirly wallpaper. It was neither masculine nor feminine. It was clean, simple, and soothing — like the most important thing in the house was the people, not the house itself.

What a great surprise this was to me – that the inside didn’t have to be dictated from the outside. It reminded me of Whitman‘s chocolates: if you didn’t look at the label, you had no idea what was on the other side of that milk chocolate.

That experience really opened up my world to the flexibility of design & the power of personalization.

No Turning Back

From that point on, my love of modern design only deepened. I began to regard interior design especially as a backdrop for humanity. The end wasn’t the design itself, but whatever it enabled. That included socializing, recharging, or the un-noteworthy daily routine.

And everyone else’s rules went out the window. That didn’t make me very popular.  During a conversation at an architect’s office where I was working, the subject of crown molding came up. My boss declared, “They are decorative crack covers!” My response to that was, “I thought those were called bathing suits?” (editor’s note: << now that’s funny!)

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My guidelines became:

• keep it simple & easy to use
• no pretenses

And the third principle I’ve adopted, many years later: Use Only What You Need.

Modern design is much more aligned with that rule of thumb than traditional:

• it takes less energy & raw material to make a slab style cabinet door;
• do away with moldings altogether – save that material for something else;
• forget the face frame on those cabinets. It just gets in the way, & no one can see it anyhow!

So that’s the story of how I got turned on to modern design, and how I realized that it is perfectly OK to have a kitchen that looks like this:

In a building that looks like this:

*Special thanks to Building Moxie for the invite to do a guest post. What a pleasure!*

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Note from the hosts: Well special thanks to you Becky; glad to have ya!

A great contribution that hits right on the nerve of what this “thing” here is all about. Becky can be found blogging at –www.eco-modernism.com. She can also be found on Twitter @ecomod. Thanks for reading and BMoxie BMore!