Diane's Design "Revolution"

Filed under: Your Home, Design, etc, News & Trends

With Diane Von Furstenberg's new line poised to "shake up" home design, one writer asks: What needs shaking?

As we reported earlier this year, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg is branching out into the home category with a partnership with Springs Global. Springs revealed the new line of tabletop, bedding and bath accessories to the press last week, and the response has been glowing. While we'd love to share images of the products with you here, the company is being super-secretive about the line, saying they don't want to "frustrate consumers" by showing it before it is available (frankly, we're more frustrated not seeing the goods than seeing them early).

This is no small launch. Home Textiles Today reports that DVF Home stores are in the works, with the first hopefully slated to open in New York. In a recent conversation with Home Furnishing News, Joe Granger, president of Springs Global's Branded Business unit, even said "[Energy] has been lacking in home furnishings, with so much product that's been watered down. The industry needs initiatives like this to bring excitement back into it."

While we're huge fans of Diane Von Furstenberg and her signature prints, we thought to ourselves, "Really?"

It's not exactly like the home market is wanting for energy and excitement, and as head of a major home company, Granger surely can't be that out of touch with the rest of the market. Plus, as much as we love a DVF wrap dress (what woman doesn't?), we're not totally jazzed for the new line. We suspect the excitement is due to Diane's stamp on the product, not the plates, sheets and towels themselves.

When Diane Von Furstenberg launched her women's clothing line in 1970, bright, bold prints were all the rage in both fashion and in the home. While beige may have ruled interiors in the 80s, and the loud hues and prints of the 60s and 70s never fully re-emerged with the popularity they had back then, the energy of vibrant design has certainly never gone away, nor has excitement for the home category.

In fact, your editors here at ShelterPop would argue that the last ten years have been one of the most exciting times for home furnishings in modern times. While Mr. Granger may have missed it, a design renaissance has been not-so-quietly taking place.

One example of the energy that Granger seems to have missed is a line of modern bedding and home accessories that started in an office with no heat and today boasts itself to be a $25 million company. When Christiane Lemieux launched her bedding line, DwellStudio in 1999, she wanted to create the vibrant, graphic, contemporary bedding she craved herself.

A year later, architecture and modern design buffs got their own hip, young publication: Dwell magazine, which was a sort of antidote to the staid pages of Architectural Digest. It was their mutual appreciation for the tenants of modern design (not just their very similar names) that found DwellStudio sheets on the pages of almost every issue of the fledgling magazine. Both were immediately beloved by the design community.

Lemieux is one of the many designers who has partnered with Target in the last decade, and these partnerships alone would be evidence enough that the products on the market today are far from watered-down. When designer Michael Graves partnered with the company in 1999, it truly shook up the industry. However, the excitement for Graves's home design wasn't a one-off event: The big box retailer has brought out home lines by everyone from Todd Oldham to Sir Terence Conran, at a pace that is nothing, if not energetic. Customers have even been known to wait outside of Target stores before the launch of a new line as they did with Target's recent collaboration with Liberty of London.

Meanwhile, we weren't all just buying fancy toasters, Americans were getting an education in the how-to side of design. In 1994, a little cable network called HGTV made its way onto the scene. By the year 2000, we were all well-accustomed to tuning in to home decorating, renovating and landscaping shows as part of our nightly viewing. In 2007, Top Design hit the airwaves and suddenly designers like Kelly Wearstler, Jonathan Adler and Margaret Russell were household names.

Wearstler and Adler are also both examples of brands that represent the energy in the last decade of design. Jonathan Adler sold his first pots to Barney's in 1993 and had opened his own store by 1998, quickly followed by a Los Angeles branch in 2001 and a furniture line in 2002. Adler's "happy chic" aesthetic was bright, bold and lots of fun, with just enough sophistication to make the design world drool. Today, Adler has branched out into bedding, stationary, books, children's wares and even a fashion collaboration.

Kelly Wearstler, on the other hand, has made her name designing hotel interiors like the Viceroy hotels in Santa Monica and Anguilla, which are bright, bold and as energetic as a teenager who has downed a case of Red Bull. Like Adler, Wearstler's name has become a brand that sells bedding, china and other home accessories.

We could go on and on with examples of fresh, exciting home furnishings in the last decade -- we haven't even mentioned Etsy and the handmade and craft movement yet! Nor have we touched upon innovative retailers like Brooklyn's The Future Perfect and Matter, design-centric publications like Blueprint and Domino (may they rest in peace) and the entire revolution of the blogosphere. We get exhausted just thinking about all of the energy that has been funneling through the home furnishings and design world in the last ten years!

So, Diane, we love you to bits, but we're not holding our breath for the promised "excitement" your partner Springs Global and HFN seem to think the DVF home line will deliver.

What do you think? Is Home Furnishing News right: Has the home furnishings category been lacking in excitement?

 

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