Canadian Interiors November-December 2024: Customizations both Grand and Subtle in the Home
People love to customize their homes because it’s an extension of their identity—a canvas where they can express personal taste, creativity, and values. Customization turns a house into a sanctuary, filled with colours, textures, and objects that evoke comfort and joy. Each choice tells a story, making the space feel both intimate and a showpiece.
In this issue of Canadian Interiors, we take a look at several examples of this exercise in customization. First, we examine three residential projects where a sculptural staircase is the pièce de resistance, a central element that is a focal point, an organizing element and even an art installation, providing punctuation between the different living spaces. The projects include a penthouse in downtown Montréal by ARCHITEM Wolff Shapiro Kuskowski architectes; a residence situated in an older, private community north of Toronto designed by FrankFranco Architects; and a renovation/restoration to an older brick home also in Toronto by StudioAC.
Next, from the grand gesture to the subtle, we investigate two custom wallpaper installations. The first is an elegant powder room in a loft in New York City by Candice Kaye Design, who was inspired by the timeless elegance of art deco design. The second project is by Alykhan Velji Designs, who mixed geometric motifs inspired by his African heritage with strong nods to Brutalist architecture.
Customization can be more than aesthetic preferences: it can be a desire to change the very nature of how we use space. In this case, we spotlight a small apartment in downtown Toronto where the owners, instead of moving to a house once they outgrow the space, tasked Picnic Design to challenge the constraints of traditional living spaces by offering unique features like built-in and moveable furniture, details that fold up, fold in, move left and right and operate in more ways than one.
The consumer desire for effortless style and customization means designers must be on their toes and effectively blend brands and collections to create spaces that suit different needs and styles. In this issue we showcase new products for the kitchen and bathroom that provide unique ways to amplify small details in these hard-working rooms; warm and moody paint shades chosen by their makers as a 2025 Colour of the Year; and highlight a new lighting collection by Montréal-based designer Will Choui that adds a modern flare to indoor spaces.
Lastly, we stop in at the 41st edition of Cersaie, the international fair dedicated to kitchen and bath ceramics, where warm earthy hues ranging from amber to aqua to coral were seen in all shapes and sizes. Thanks to advancements in digital decorative technology, allowing for incredibly tactile, three-dimensional surfaces and textures that perfectly replicate the look and feel of natural stones like onyx, marble, travertine as well as wooden planks, creating a sense of comfort and connection to nature that is a trend clearly back in the forefront of interior design.
Editor’s Notes: The Year is [tr]Ending
It used to be that as the year wound down, we would first reflect on the successes and missteps of the year “that was” before looking ahead to our expectations of the next one, and that “looking ahead” part is when consideration of “trends” would come into play. Now, it seems, trend predictions for the following year are announced when we are only halfway through the current year. I can’t blame comms teams: exposure by getting picked up early in news cycles is valuable, and it’s a well-known fact that the media loves trends reports. After all, these clairvoyant experts give us so much to report on: who doesn’t want to know what will happen in the future?
What worries me, though, is the danger of expecting “trends” to provide answers on how to move forward. Too many “trends reports” are just surveys of people’s Google search results: does that really qualify as pointing out observable changes in people’s behaviour? No. What’s worse is it becomes fodder for the content streams we are already inundated with, which leads everyone to just repeat whatever is out there. And that is driving me crazy: when everybody says the exact same thing and yet none of that chatter is helping our industry — that has gotten complacent recently — really figure out how to move forward.
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Canadian Interiors
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However, there are voices out there trying to cut through that complacency. I quite like Mark Bryan, Senior Foresight Manager at the Future Today Institute and who appears on the trade show lecture circuit. “We’ve thought that we can’t be disintermediated from our clients, and what we’re finding is that we are becoming a commodity, [and] that we have other players, other competitors, coming to the market that are not as financially constrained as we are, and they’re starting to take some of our market share,” he said during a lecture that was part of NeoCon’s virtual CEU programming this year. “And I think that we’ve gotten stuck in near termism versus challenging ourselves to really think beyond.”
The design industry is burdened right now with a sea of sameness, but just identifying trends to ostensibly spark something isn’t an answer. For example, the emergence of AI was identified long ago, yet ask ChatGPT to design a “modern conference room” more than once and, as Bryan demonstrated in his lecture, the same results appeared with only slight variations. “The whole thing about AI is it’s fed on data of what is happening already,” says Bryan. “I’m pretty sure that if you walk around the showrooms today, you might start to feel that you’re starting to see some of this today.”
It is easy to get caught up in things that are trendy versus an actual trend that addresses long-term patterns indicating a direction of change over time. When a foresight specialist tells us that technologies are converging right now — AI, the Internet of Things, sensors, metamaterials, synthetic biology — that will form a tech super-cycle in the coming years and those technologies are going to impact every single industry and every single way that we practice and we need to be prepared for that now, it is understandable that our reaction is “what do I do with all of that information?” According to Bryan, “The first thing that we need to realize is that it’s the long-term implications that really matter here. Short-term thinking has gotten us to where we are today, but we need to think a little bit more extensively. A lot of us get trapped in three-to-five-year planning cycles, and we really need to be thinking further out in terms of 10 to 15 years.”
It reminds me of the conversation I had last year with Dr. Michael J. Berens, author of a Trends Outlook report for the ASID, where through him I asked myself these bigger philosophical questions: for example, where do value-based assessments like “what should happen” fit into reporting “what is happening”? Trends reports are tools for preparation, but the right ones can also be tools for challenging one’s own perspective and catalyzing thoughts about the evolving roles of designers, and that emphasize the importance of empathy, creativity, and emotional connection in design, qualities that set human designers apart from machines and artificial intelligence. Preparing for the future is one thing, but how do “trends” help those who want to create the future? As Bryan stresses, we need to be better prepared. “We need to get out of the near termism and start asking “what if” now, so that in the future we’re not asking, “now what?”
