Industrial look for homes thrives as antidote to an excess of luxury
Industrial style combines austerity and recycling with natural materials to create a living space where room boundaries are blurred
Rusty iron, raw concrete, bare light bulbs, exposed pipes. It sounds more like a third-world workplace than a cosy home interior, but the industrial look has been with us for a decade, perhaps more, and designers say it's not losing ground.
Factories and warehouses are an obvious candidate for the raw, rough and ready aesthetic, but it's crept into urban chic, too. Indeed, Shanghai-based design firm Neri & Hu, recognised masters of industrial-style architecture and interiors, can barely keep up with demand.
So, what's the attraction? Granted, austerity rules these days - industrial is a style that can (potentially) be achieved on a budget - and reusing and recycling are greatly in favour. But Lyndon Neri, founding partner of Neri & Hu, has another take: could we simply be fed up with all the bling?
In China at least, luxury has permeated society to the extent that we don't know what's real or fake any more, suggests Neri. "[It] caught on maybe because people are tired of all the gloss and ostentation surrounding them."
While the industrial look is epitomised in Neri & Hu projects -such as the Waterhouse Hotel, a converted 1930s warehouse in Shanghai's old docklands; Mercato restaurant on The Bund, an all-steel building stripped back to its bare elements; and the de-construction of a lane house back to its austere origins - it's a label that doesn't sit well with Neri.
