In a story about the Met Gala this week, The New York Times asked in a headline: “Was It Art? Was It Fashion? Was It Good?”
Since I love all facets of the design world, I’ve been thinking about which consumer categories allow more freedom to push design to (and sometimes beyond) its logical boundaries. Fashion tolerates experimentation because purchases are temporary, seasonal, and identity-driven. The home is different. Consumers may wear a daring fashion piece two or three times, but they may live with a kitchen for 15 years.
With high-end home brands, I think the answer to the question,
“how far can you push design?” is “it depends…”
A sofa, faucet, kitchen appliance, textile, or cabinetry line is not simply an expression of taste. Instead, it is one component in a larger system that represents the emotional architecture of the home. Affluent consumers, who buy the lion’s share of high-end home brands, might admire avant-garde designs on an intellectual level, but they may also reject the same designs commercially because they might cause friction with many of the emotional drivers that are important to today’s homeowner: comfort, warmth, familiarity, and of course, resale appeal.
Our most successful high-end home brand clients understand an important principle: affluent consumers often prefer edited innovation over disruption. They want distinction without discomfort.
And several of our clients have found that it is actually possible to go beyond an either/or proposition towards a both/and position. I believe that the tradeoff is worth exploring carefully and respectfully, and that some of the most enduring luxury home brands do a fantastic job of balancing design originality with emotional usability.
Allow me to give you a few examples:
Recently, I attended the launch of Dornbracht’s Atelier line of faucets and fixtures in New York. Our clients, Amy, Kara, and team, demonstrated conclusively that consumers could create their own uniquely crafted products with limitless freedom of design. The brilliance of this new line was that the consumer got to decide how far he or she wanted to push the design of a product. It wasn’t the manufacturer making the design decision: it was the consumer. I’ll never forget a leather-wrapped faucet that felt right up my alley, design-wise, and would be perfect in my home bar. It wasn’t over-the-top by any stretch, but it was definitely boldly expressive. Was that piece scalable? Maybe not as a single product, but as an entire line, Atelier is an idea whose time has come.
Similarly, in a recent visit to our client, Duravit, I came across a freestanding bathtub with a matte, velvety surface that is soft to the touch, designed by Studio F. A. Porsche. The lines were as beautiful as the feel of the ceramic material itself. It was advanced design, for sure, but it was operating in a space that was psychologically and spatially livable to me. Duravit found the way to create a product that successfully balances the both/and.
Finally, we’ve worked with some fantastic appliance brands over the years, including Viking Range, Hestan, Fontana Forni, and Thor. My friend and former client, Brent Bailey, who ran Viking’s product design group for many years, used to talk about how to balance radical design differentiation with emotional approachability. He used to say that consumers might tolerate experimentation in a lounge chair, but less so if they were uncertain about the design of a 48” range.
Affluent consumers typically want their kitchen to feel professionally elevated, but also emotionally familiar.
Push too traditional and the product feels dated. Push too commercial and the kitchen loses warmth. Push too conceptual and the consumer becomes uncertain. And uncertainty kills conversion in high-ticket home categories.
Luxury brands operating at the leading edge of design face a unique challenge: translating aesthetic innovation into broad emotional adoption. Consumers reward innovation that they can emotionally inhabit. Think of it as sort of “positioning physics” of design.
For those of you working to capture the both/and – the prized space where you can push design, while remaining emotionally approachable – I offer a few questions to debate with your team:
- Are we admired more than chosen?
- Is our design language emotionally accessible?
- Are we creating distinction at the expense of specification?
- How much design radicalism can a scalable brand sustain?
Let me know if you’d like to kick around these ideas with some objective outside counsel.
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