This week in the Wylde blog we’re looking at the beauty in transformative and transitional design. The topic was brought up as we were discussing Wylde Director Tra’s most recent knitwear project – fixing the holes in a beloved wool cardigan using a ‘visible creative mending’ technique. This technique sets out to make no secret of where these holes have been, in fact the process highlights and accentuates the flaws with use of different and brightly coloured yarn in their place.
This practice beautifully blends practicality with creativity – a process we interior designers know very well. One thing we’ve learnt over time, is that it’s incredibly important to tell the story of a building or space that has history. Whilst all of our design schemes are transformative and transitional in terms of fulfilling a brief and suiting brand guidelines and colour palettes, we take great pride in highlighting the quirks and story that space has and in doing so, showing evolution.
Every un-new object has a story – every item of clothing, every chair, table or plate has a had a journey of sorts. In the same way an old building has a kind of sacred nostalgia in the cracks, stains or weathering in the walls. The entire reason behind listed buildings – a celebration of that building’s special architectural and historic characteristics, bringing it under the consideration of a planning system that protects it for future generations. The older a building is, and the fewer the surviving examples of its kind, the more likely it is to be listed.
We absolutely love the concept of drawing attention to an object’s journey and it lead us onto a conversation about the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi. This is the reparation of items with powdered gold, silver, or platinum to value an object’s beauty, as well as its imperfections, focusing on them equally as something to celebrate, not disguise.
Not only does celebrating the beauty of imperfections make for a less mundane visual environment but it also promotes upcycling and more sustainable practices. We are absolutely obsessed with some of the Creative Visual Mending creations by Collingwood-Norris mending – just in time for winter too, check them out here;
https://www.collingwoodnorrisdesign.com/visible-mending
