As its name suggests, Kaleidoscope, the new interior design book by Gestalten, is bursting with color and patterns. Showcasing a wide range of domestic interiors, it eschews minimalism and uniformity for spaces that make a loud and bold statement about their occupants and re-imagine a way of living. With no specific categorization or predominant style in mind, the editors, Sven Ehmann, Robert Klanten and Victoria Pease, have collected an eclectic selection of interiors, interestingly a lot of them occupied by the designers themselves, which display a strong, confident, sometimes even eccentric personality and a uniqueness that feels refreshing in an age of global trends.
Some of the featured residences, like Klavs Rosenfalck’s Parisian apartment and Antonio Giuseppe Martiniello’s living and working quarters in Naples, impeccably combine the antique, the vintage and the contemporary, the former merging ornate, Haussmannian interiors with sleek modernist and post-modernist furniture, the latter complementing a refurbished 18th-century palazzo with new frescoes, red acrylic sliding doors and neon art.
Other designers have chosen to express themselves in more cinematic terms such as Rodolphe Parente’s Twin Peaks-inspired Parisian interiors dominated by bare concrete and polished red mahogany, Marie-Anne Oudejans’ blue-hued Mughal style hotel-bar in Jaipur, and Katie Graham’s 70s florid sensibilities in her Melbourne home. Then there are those that have gone for the surreal—one of these being Danielle Moudaber who has suspended a planter with a mirrored bottom in lieu of a chandelier, or Frederique Morrel who has used colorful vintage tapestries to upholster everything from furniture to lamps and stuffed animals—rounding up a stunning collection that is as distinct as it is sophisticated.
