Nuriev-designed interview rooms inside NGRS, a recruiting firm. Credit Courtesy of Crosby Studios
IF YOU’RE A DESIGN OBSESSIVE who follows a certain set of Instagram accounts — @studioyellowtrace, @_sightunseen_ and @somewhereiwouldliketolive, among others — then you’re likely conversant in the vocabulary of contemporary design as practiced by a group of youngish talents. There’s the prevalence of brass, the ubiquitous arches and the ambient influence of the ’70s and ’80s: that era of sunken living rooms, scalloped seating and “Golden Girls” peaches and pinks. Ettore Sottsass and his Memphis Group are routinely referenced, though the collective’s Day-Glo hues and cartoonish shapes tend to get reinterpreted as something less ebullient and more streamlined.
The aesthetic, you might say, is global minimalism — softened with pastel colors and curves. It pulls from postwar Scandinavian furniture, ’80s postmodernism, the spareness of Japanese design and various art-world references, like Bauhaus and neoplasticism. You can find the style (as distinctive as it is unnamed) in homes, studios, hotels and cafes in Paris and Los Angeles, Brooklyn and Barcelona; much as the ’90s consolidation of stations by corporate-owned radio filed away local flavor on the airwaves, the prevalence of this look on social media and #IRL — in real life — has had a homogenizing effect on design.
The 33-year-old Russian architect and furniture designer Harry Nuriev has emerged as one of the style’s masters. Like his contemporaries — Brooklyn-based Bower, Milan-based Studiopepe, Los Angeles-based Etc.etera — he pairs the high polish of brass with rough-hewn materials (broken ceramics, raw ceilings), returns often to the natural curve of the arch (“it’s the shape of the human body,” he says) and has used millennial pink (before it was called that, mind you) on everything from fur chairs to bathroom walls.