In the midst of a rococo cupcake of a room at the London Design Festival stands designer Mathieu Lehanneur’s black monolithic table. At first glance, the contrast between the dark slab and the jaunty filigree – a gilded, 18th-century vision of musical instruments and swirling vines from the Norfolk House music room – is jarring. It raises the question: Why is contemporary design so ceaselessly stark?
However, looking closer at Lehanneur’s Liquid Marble piece, its surface, made from machine-sculpted marble, ripples fluidly, like still water disturbed by a stiff breeze. The surprising dynamism of the stone is transfixing. Moreover, its movement feels apiece with the dancing lines of the room around it. The plinth, then, instead of standing in opposition actually creates a conversation between the contemporary, a style often marked by its sober absence of ornament, and the baroque, a style defined by theatrics, rich materiality and indulgence.
Liquid Marble isn’t the only example of current design that reaches back to a movement that emanated from 17th-century, post-Reformation Europe. In fashion, frills befitting Madame de Pompadour inflected several 2016 collections, including Dolce & Gabbana and Alexander McQueen, according to The New York Times’s T Magazine. And Rihanna’s latest Fenty x Puma show was inspired by “Marie Antoinette at the gym.” Likewise, in architecture, furniture and interiors, motion, whimsy and sheer sumptuousness are bringing life to design again, offering a refreshing alternative to the ruthlessly stark, straight-lined and modern.
The movement has been steadily building. Nearly 15 years ago, Philippe Starck released his iconic Ghost Chair, an abstraction of a Louis XV seat that has sold over a million copies. Artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel looked to the Spanish baroque for his 2006 redesign of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York. The recently departed Zaha Hadid was dubbed a baroque futurist for her swooping lines. Her most recent project, completed posthumously, is the Port House in Antwerp, Belgium, which looks like a liquefied diamond jetting across the sky.
In residential interiors, Toronto-based interior designer Colette van den Thillart frequently references the baroque as the creative director of NH Design by Nicky Haslam, a London-based studio that works internationally and is a perennial fixture on Architecture Digest’s Top 100 list of best firms.
“Whether it’s for myself or my clients,” van den Thillart notes, “I do end up bringing those baroque or rococo references. It’s a very dynamic and emotive period. It came at a time when society was moving away from the influence of the church and really pursuing pleasure.”
As a style, she notes, it appeals to a lot of people because “even for those of us who want to live quietly and minimally, we are still human,” she says. “Symmetry and straight lines can be pleasing and calming, but too much of a good thing is banal.”
The trick is convincing people that it’s possible to transpose a feel of the epoch into their own home. “I find that a lot of people go to Europe, go to Italy, and come back amazed by what they’ve seen. But they don’t think it has any relevance to them. It’s hard to relate a palace to an apartment,” she says. “But people can translate playfulness and curves and comfort into an urban condo.”
She points to her own dining room in her midtown Toronto house as an example. It was inspired by European grottoes. But rather than rock walls and water features, she used a velvet wallpaper printed with the image of stones and shells. “Yes, it’s over the top,” she says, “but dining rooms are great places to experiment – they are meant for special occasions.”
Alexa Griffith Winton, a design historian who teaches at Ryerson University’s School of Interior Design in Toronto, suggests one reason that the baroque is reappearing is because “those impulses [toward the baroque] are always there. Those impulses for drama and for glamour.” And maybe after years of lingering frugality from the Great Recession, there’s a want for something more sumptuous. Simply put, Griffith Winton says, “it’s not an austerity style.”
It helps that “we are in a period that is kind of incoherent. Maybe it’s globalism … but there is no one guiding principal right now,” she says. This frees us from the strictures of “the modernism project, when it was so impossible to consider anything else, because there was so much devotion to modernism in design education and elsewhere. It became the dominant language.”
But the baroque is not without heavy baggage. Much as it is associated with whimsy and the pursuit of pleasure, it is also the style of destructive decadence. Versailles, for example, which ended at the guillotines, is the peak of French baroque. And more recently, “Donald Trump’s apartment,” Griffith Winton says, noting that its relentless use of gold is “in really bad taste.”
“These things all start with socioeconomic movements,” van den Thillart says, “which is still the case today.” Maybe the resurgence of baroque influences suggests that we are all simply becoming more interested in using our homes to express our flights of fancy – to have our cake and eat it, too. Or maybe the resurgence is a sign that a bigger revolution is on the way. Only time, and style, will tell.
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Bringing home baroque
The Sabre Old-Fashioned Teaspoon blends the dangerous and the dainty. Its floral lilac colour contrasts a handle that was inspired by Musketeer-esque rapiers. $9.50 each. Through hopsongrace.com.
Alessandro Mendini’s iconic, 1978 Proust chair is the forerunner of the baroque’s influence on contemporary design. The dramatic, flared frame, replete with ornamentation, references history. The vibrant colours strictly speak to today. Price upon request. Through quasimodomodern.com.
German textile designer Jan Kath often looks to history for contemporary rug collections. For his Ferrara Cloud series, he subverted the baroque tradition of painting trompe l’oeil skies on the ceiling, instead using ethereal cloud scenes for carpets. Price upon request. Through jan-kath.de.
French designer Mathieu Lehanneur was inspired by the waves of the ocean for his Liquid Marble table, machine sculptured from black marble. Baroque artisans, too, looked to nature for inspiration. For more information, visit mathieulehanneur.fr.
Curiousa & Curiousa’s Caravaggio Lights blend contemporary, paired down shapes with richly romantic hues. Each one is edged with opulence: hand-made trim dripping in crystals. From $765. Through curiousa.co.uk.
The ghostly, wire-frame appearance of Abigail Ahern’s Neo-Baroque chandelier are a reminder that while the baroque era ended long ago, the effects can still be seen and felt today. $3,245. Through abigailahern.com.