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Designing with materials

Contemporary design places the focus on material quality. While traditional styles of decorating have tended to emphasize applied finishes, today's interiors allow the unique characteristics of wood, stone, glass, and metal to speak for themselves. From smooth matte plywood to translucent perspex, from cool, classic limestone to burnished concrete, the scope has never been greater. Materials once considered suitable only for industrial or commercial use have found a new, expressive role in the modern home.

Designing with materials created effects which are more than skin deep. Unlike superficial transformations with paper or paint, the robust use of materials as cladding, surfaces or integral elements offers a basic integrity that outlasts trends in interior fashion. Evocative combinations of glass and metal, wood and stone create sympathetic backgrounds with inbuilt liveliness and variety and the potential to improve with wear and time. From floors and walls, to screens, worsurfaces, doors and details, the sheer range of applications provides a host of opportunities to add an enduring sense of character to the interior.

The Material Aesthetic

Material quality has always been embedded in the process of design. When you choose a material, to a great extent you are also choosing how a design will look, how it will perform and how it will last.

From earliest times, the use of materials has also provided a means of signifying power and status. At the most obvious, princes and prelates could advertise their wealth and authority by employing rare, imported materials in the construction or decoration of their plaaces. Equally, the same richness could be expressed decoratively, by working "humble" materials in elaborate ways.

The industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century and the developing of new manufacturing methods and materials brought a whole new dimension to decorative simulation. A burgeoning middle class was able to decorate and furnish their homes in imitation of the rivh, even if the effect was only skin-deep. And, as the century wore on and Britain's imperial power reached its zenith, exotic materials from colonial outposts were added to the mix, materials such as bamboo and rattan.

The Arts and Crafts movement was immensly influential; it could be argued that the movement has been responsible, directly or indirectly, for many of the contemporary notions about material quality we hold today.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the honest use of humble materials had lost its capacity to shock and had become something positively to admire. This period's houses in the Arts and Crafts or verncular idiom elevated the use of local or humble materials to an art form.

The materials that have defined twentieth-century design, however, are not the "honest" Arts and Crafts elements of timber ans local stone but brash, new manufactured materials such as reinforced concrete, steel and plate glass. These machine age materials have made possible entirely new forms of building.

In recent decades, the modernist material has lead to a whole new level. In place of rich and poor materials, or honest (bare) and decorated (covered up), a new dividing line has now been drawn between natural and synthetic. It has been the use of plastics to simulate the visual qualities of real materials, together with their demonstrably adverse impact on the global environment, that has more recently caused a certain reappraisal of their true value. Natural, once again, has become a term of approbation, and the qualities that set natural materials apart from artificial ones-such as the fact that they age and weather, betraying the marks of time - are positively welcomed as marks of authenticity.

Natural materials are popularly assumed to be better than artificial ones because they cause less harm to the planet. But although stone is a natural material, it must be quarried, worked and transported, processes that consume great amounts of energy; furthermore, stone is not a renewable resource. Arguably deforestation, particularly of tropical hardwoods, has been responsible for greater ecological than that caused by plastic industries. While high-tech as an interior fashion did not last long, its enduring impact has been the further blurring of boundaries between industrial/commercial and domestic spheres. In this context, highly processed materials such as steel and aluminium almost acquire the status of natural simply because their use is so familiar.

Design always goes hand in hand with material quality. Designning without materials is almost inconceivable.