Interiors: Notable Seed stories from 2009

Singapore, Amsterdam, Lisbon – Reflecting the consumer austerity that resulted from the Great Recession, we saw rougher interior designs this year.

High-end Australian beauty brand Aesop went rough and ready with its new Singapore store, using 30 kilometres of coconut-husk string suspended from its ceiling. ‘The idea is to work with a sombre material palette in an unexpected way,’ says Aesop director Dennis Paphitis, who worked with Melbourne architects March Studio to design the space.

Roughing things up even more, the new Museu do Design e da Moda in Lisbon featured an edgy and tactile interior. Created by Ricardo Carvalho + Joana Vilhena Arquitectos, the design and fashion museum opened in a former bank dating from the 1950s. Further sandblasting – in a process the designers described as ‘selective destruction’ – created a brutally textured surface for the interior.

Elsewhere, we saw the Bleisure trend – the growing nomadic and freelance-based workforce – take hold of workspaces, transforming them into dynamic, flexible locations. New student workspaces at the University of Amsterdam were inspired by these redefined principles of work and play. Here, ten fixed work units and 40 flexible work areas were designed as part of the ‘Next Door’ project by studioquint and Jos Roodbol for the Amsterdam Centre for Entrepreneurship, giving young entrepreneurs a space in which to develop their own corporate identity.