How Instagram is influencing interior design trends – for better and for worse

A year after the October 2010 launch of the Instagram app, the first big global project of Sydney-based design studio Landini Associates opened in Toronto, Canada. Loblaws supermarket was a redevelopment of the Toronto Maple Leafs ice hockey team’s stadium, regarded as the national “cathedral of hockey”. A Hong Kong flat gets an extreme makeover Knowing that the site was close to people’s hearts, Mark Landini, creative director of Landini Associates, commissioned a sculptor to make a logo 12 metres (40ft) square out of seats from the stadium. He also marked centre ice by putting a ring on the floor in the exact place it once stood (in aisle 25, next to the tuna). He recalls asking the store owner whether he’d allow people to take photos. “No, of course not” was the reply. A discussion about social media ensued. “We were just honouring history,” Landini said. But hockey fans were soon queuing up to take selfies. Today, architects and designers find that “make it Instagrammable” is increasingly appearing on their retail clients’ briefs. “It’s free advertising [for them],” Landini says. To “create excitement at every turn” at Loblaws, Landini Associates created an 18ft high wall of cheese, which is the world’s tallest cheese wall and tasting station. Another Landini Associates project, the McDonald’s flagship restaurant at Sydney Airport’s International Terminal 1, is, according to Sally Fielke, general manager Corporate Affairs, “the most Instagrammed spot” in the entire airport. Its “kitchen in the sky” design, where food is prepared behind a yellow glass overhead box and delivered to customers via a conveyor belt, was conceived for practical reasons – to maximise space in a limited footprint. “The burger carousel has a real surprise for passengers,” says Fielke. “It’s great dining theatre and our passengers love it.” For his design of Elephant Grounds coffee shop in Hong Kong’s Star Street Precinct in Wan Chai, James “JJ” Acuna, founder and creative director of Hong Kong studio JJ Acuna / Bespoke Studio, incorporated a mechanical window system into the facade that can be raised on sunny days to allow indoor/outdoor seating on the wide timber sill. To show how the concept can work as a communal gathering place, Acuna enlisted his friends for a photo shoot, posting on his own social media feed in the hope it might be picked up by design blogs. “Little did I know that image would go viral,” he says of the girl and a dog photo, much shared on sites such as Instagram and Pinterest since then. Acuna still fields inquiries about the system from architects all around the world, and finds that the window is the most photographed aspect of the project. "Make it Instagrammable" was not part of the brief for Elephant Grounds, completed in 2016. Today, that is almost mandatory, Acuna says. At Tokyo Tokyo, a 30-year-old Japanese fast food restaurant in Manila, capital of the Philippines, for which Acuna refreshed the brand, every aspect of the project has photo-taking in mind, from a mural by Hong Kong artist Michell Lie to the lighting scheme – designed to eliminate shadows and give off different lighting effects. Even the pattern on the tabletops was selected to look good in food photos. “The brief here was that it’s got to be shared on social media by the diners,” he says. Instagram kick-started Acuna’s business. “I’ve got jobs specifically because people were sharing the images,” he says. Tokyo Tokyo (completed in August 2018) was one. Influenced by social media, the Gen Z children of the restaurant’s general manager had Elephant Grounds on their itinerary for a visit to Hong Kong, which in turn led to the Tokyo Tokyo commission. So, what constitutes “’grammable design”? Every designer needs to tell their client that there’s a difference between a restaurant that looks good in photos, and, basically, theme parks James “JJ” Acuna Scott Valentine, founder of Valé Architects, based in Brisbane, Australia, has produced an Instagram Design Guide (followed by a second e-guide, Niche Hotel Design) for commercial operators of all sorts. Its aim, he says, is to help clients understand what images people share online, and why. “It’s very general – anyone can use it,” he explains. The guide uses case studies to highlight examples of designs worthy of Instagram. This could mean leveraging the setting, the architecture, or even the signage. “If you can get people to advocate for your business on your behalf, the impact is exponentially greater than trying to convince those customers yourself,” he says. But does social currency necessarily translate to return on investment? Valentine agrees that it’s impossible to quantify the value of a “like”. “We cannot do that yet,” he says. A Hong Kong property agent finds a hidden gem inside an ordinary looking complex However, with 800 million active Instagram users, he believes it’s essential for businesses to design a space that is “so remarkable, everyone has to take a picture and share it with the world”. It follows that others will then decide “we need to go there”, Valentine reasons. “TV and traditional media have never had that power,” he said. However, Ben McCarthy, founder of design studio Charlie & Rose, based in Sheung Wan, a Hong Kong Island neightbourhood, thinks an instruction to “make it Instagrammable” has no place on an interior design brief. The risk, he says, is in creating “quite kitsch” projects that will have a short lifespan. Charlie & Rose projects, including Chaiwala, a restaurant in Hong Kong’s Central district completed late last year, are also much photographed and shared on Instagram, but McCarthy sees social media coverage as “just a by-product of good design”. He incorporates “the element of surprise”, so that on subsequent visits, patrons may find details they haven’t seen before. Acuna agrees that social media coverage is no guarantee of business success. How to make a rental flat feel like home: a Hong Kong banker gets it right “Every designer needs to tell their client that there’s a difference between a restaurant that looks good in photos, and, basically, theme parks,” he says. “As interior designers, we want to make spaces that people will come back to again and again. If you make it too ‘themey’, people will go once, feel like they’ve experienced it, and never come back again.”