Style Icons: Top South African Designers and their Interiors, by Paul Duncan

Style Icons: Top South African Designers and their Interiors, by Paul Duncan. ISBN 9781770079380 / ISBN 978-1-77007-938-0

Style Icons: Top South African Designers and their Interiors, by Paul Duncan. ISBN 9781770079380 / ISBN 978-1-77007-938-0

Paul Duncan’s highly visual ‘Style Icons: Top South African Designers and their Interiors’ features 12 South African interior designers, each with their own unique style and approach to design.

Paul Duncan  

Style Icons: Top South African Designers and their Interiors features some of the best interiors in South Africa. Style Icons is a remarkable, varied collection of places designed and decorated by some tremendously talented people, some of them very well known, others less so, and not all of them decorators either. One has been an editor, one is a creative director in all but name, and others are product designers or architects. I thought it would be a good idea to look at all of them together, as a collection. Interestingly, although their work is so different and varied in style, their roots are essentially in sync and they have a single voice. This is the first time such a collection has been put together and it provides a unique opportunity to compare such talent all in one go. There are the well-known decorators - Stephen Falcke, John Jacob Zwiegelaar, Graham Viney, Maira Koutsoudakis, Boyd Ferguson, Toni Tollman and Michèle Throssell - and others less known for their decorating skills, but certainly renowned in other areas of stylish living. There are one or two who have decorated for themselves: former editor of Elle Decoration, Karen Roos, with her contemporary interiors at ancient Babylonstoren is one; La Grange founder Charlotte Daneel, with her Herbert Baker-style farmhouse, Gordonville, is another. A dedication to living stylishly comes naturally to both women who, coincidentally, have a shared Afrikaans heritage and have both lived in Holland. Catherine Raphaely directed, more as creative set designer than decorator, the kitting-out of her camps in Botswana as well as her eye-wateringly beautiful Cape Dutch beach house at Vermaaklikheid. In Botswana, tents filled with historic booty would be pure cabinets de curiosités if it wasn't for the fact that guests still have to eat and sleep comfortably in them day and night. Fantasy allied to functionability could be her mantra. There are well-known designers working for discerning people who have clearly had a hand in the result: architect Stefan Antoni and his team's beach house, Silver Bay Villa, for House & Garden editor Liz Morris and her husband Greg Truen is one. It captures the absolute essence of comfort allied to local style. There are designers who are able to turn their hand to all aspects of the physical creation of spaces and their content; Julian and Trevyn McGowan of Source, when not procuring South African-made products for prestigious European and American stores, are designing interiors that zing with light and airiness. Whoever the designer or decorator, whatever their project and wherever the location, whether by design or by instinct, each one is doing something that makes sense in the South African context. And the range and diversity are enormous; if you happened to pick up this book on arrival from a distant planet, you'd certainly return fully versed in the style of South African interiors. Their creators understand provenance and context. Their mixes are brave, as is their use of colour. Their work is iconic. It's fresh and exuberant. Nothing matches their wilful spirit of invention or their now-freed-from-ties-to-the-old-world-and-its-social-hierarchies feel. In a land filled with space and bathed in gorgeous sunlight, they are able to do what they like, breaking the rules and inventing new ones, blurring boundaries and conjuring surprise after surprise. They take the best of the old and refashion it with what's current and relevant. This is a country still fashioning its own image at a time when those abroad are taking stock of their own. In some instances, a style is invented here and then later given an exciting new twist, so that we see a genre of design developing and maturing. There's an obsession with nature, its textures and patterns. If you want a bird's-eye view of what's happening in South African décor, look no further than this book.

This is an excerpt from the book: Style Icons: Top South African Designers and their Interiors, by Paul Duncan.

Book title: Style Icons: Top South African Designers & their Interiors
Author: Paul Duncan
Type: Illustrated Book
Imprint: Lifestyle
Publisher: Random House Struik
Cape Town, South Africa 2011
ISBN 9781770079380 / ISBN 978-1-77007-938-0
Hardcover, dustjacket, 23x30 cm, 192 pages, throughout photos

Duncan, Paul im Namibiana-Buchangebot

Style Icons: Top South African Designers and their Interiors

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