Wabi-Sabi and Other Imperfectly Perfect Interior Styles in Practice
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Photo: Blake Shorter
Hanging a frame in my apartment the other day, a crooked placement gave me pause. I had vetoed elaborate measurements and diagrammed planning for a more shorthand process (out of laziness, more than anything else). Standing back to evaluate, I realized I was okay with the happenstance nature of its position. The askew frame added a human element, which fits the space. My Brooklyn rental is quite old. The space reflects its years in warped wood floors, exposed silver radiators, and layer upon layer of paint. Striving for gross perfection is a futile game in here.
Anyone with a penchant for antiquity in all its manifestations is bound to face similar dilemmas. This is not a unique inclination—according to Anthony Barzilay Freund, editorial director and director of fine art at 1stDibs, orders for vintage and antique items over the past several months are up. Helen Rice, cofounder of Fuzzco, Ponytail, and Serious Buildings, adheres to similar principles. “Wabi-sabi comes to mind, finding beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and simplicity,” she explains of her approach to curation. “It relates to a particular aesthetic in design, but it’s really a philosophy that, to me, feels like an intuitive relationship or collaboration with forces that are greater than you.”
When Rice lovingly restored her Charleston residence, originally built in 1839, she insisted on keeping oddities like worn-out corners of door, and then filled it with antique furniture. “I like things with scars and patina because they have texture and depth of color—and they soften the new white lacquered coffee table in their midst,” she says. “The same philosophy applies to what makes a lot of things in life great: music (voices like Bob Dylan or Conor Oberst), writing (even bad grammar), people, style, etc.”
Hollie Bowden, a London-based interior designer, remarks that it’s pretty arbitrary who decides what perfection is: “A really important part of being a designer for me is questioning inherited ideas about value and beauty.” In the landscape of today’s social-media-driven age, fast-fashion style microtrends supersede spaces curated over time. Barzilay Freund notes that “in an era of AI-generated imagery and the rapid advances (some could say dehumanizing nature) of technology in general, people are gravitating toward objects that bear the mark of the human hand and show the passage of time through patina and wear.”
In the end, it’s all about finding a balance. “The imperfect makes you appreciate the perfect,” Rice concludes. “There’s something about imperfection that allows you to let your guard down. I find I can actually relax on a sofa that someone else has worn-in a little rather than being overly cautious not to fuck it up myself.” Bewitched by imperfection and the storied nature it conveys, I asked seven experts to share their favorite applications of perfectly imperfect interiors in personal and professional projects.
Gillian Lawlee on raw plaster
“In our current rental, (with permission) we stripped off many years of wallpaper, exposing the original lime plaster walls, as well as lifting old carpet and old vinyl flooring to expose the very worn and imperfect original floors beneath,” says the Ireland-based interior stylist and consultant. “In all of their distress, there was an inherent beauty in the bones of the house. Our very first night in the house, with stools as nightstands, I tacked a vintage kantha quilt onto the wall behind the bed to protect us from crumbly plaster, and this is the situation that has remained. While we sealed and painted over the plaster almost everywhere else, I’ve grown attached to the romance of the raw plaster and carousel of vintage textiles taking turns as my headboard. I’m enjoying it rather than enduring it. Equally, the floors are painted in some areas while scuffed and partially covered by rugs in others. I like both. They tell a story, and they remind me daily of the history of this house. I imagine an Edwardian woman, sitting by the fire as I am now, maybe imagining how she would like to decorate some part of the house.”
Hollie Bowden on spots and splatters
“The modern world is saturated with machine-made objects, which can be quite alienating, so handmade objects reintroduce the human touch into our spaces and lives,” explains the interior designer. “I’m very inspired by Zanine Caldas, for example, whose work is dedicated to finding the form of an object by following the material, enfolding all its wonky imperfections into the expression of his pieces. A recent project where I thought about imperfection a lot was the Completedworks flagship in London. The space was a converted industrial space and had incredible exposed beams and columns. I chose to really embrace these elements by taking back their surface to make them even more distressed, achieving this incredible spotted and splattered effect that resembled scagliola, which we enhanced with a specialist finish. I balanced these elements with an extremely soft off-white wraparound limewash over the exposed brick walls and floor, and added sharpness with the vitrines made of stainless steel. What this paint effect contributed to the space was complexity and richness—introducing something completely other to the idea of perfection that jewelry centers on.”
Xavier Donnelly on leaving marks of age as they are
“I grew up in old 19th-century Vermont houses where no floor was level, no wall was straight, and no door really closed properly. So the idea that a building would be totally ‘perfect’ has always felt sort of foreign to me—and in life, I generally seek out ancient, layered, strange, and storied places,” says Xavier Donnelly, creative director of AD100 firm Ash. “As architecture ages, it takes on all the typical signs of a life lived—quirks, wrinkles, scars, modifications, and memory. History imbues a space with life and personality. It’s impossible to replicate it or create it from scratch, and it’s hard to erase it in a way that feels natural. I always try to just lean into the ‘imperfections’ and work them into my concepts rather than fight them. My favorite places are those in which I can see and feel the traces of history.
“I work a lot with older and historic buildings and with things that have lived many, many lives, and it’s evidently something I’ve sought out in my career. Unless a ‘flaw’ is impeding the basic functionality of a space or object, I’m more likely to love it than try to pretend it doesn’t exist. I worked on a restaurant called Stissing House up in the Hudson Valley a few years back, which was a circa-1781 tavern building that had been renovated and altered countless times over the centuries. A good example of what we decided to leave ‘in the rough’ was the conversion of an early 1800s addition into a cocktail lounge. The roughly 200-year-old space had a big crumbling fireplace and wood paneled walls that were quite beat up from years of use as a woodshed. We decided to restore the fireplace so that it could be used again and made some repairs to the ceiling, but we kept everything else as it was. It’s probably my favorite room in the restaurant because it perfectly captures the warm, cozy, rustic elegance of a country house.”
Lauren Piscione of LP Creative on practical asymmetry
“The thing with interior design is that ultimately it’s designing spaces for human beings to live and/or experience, and we know the human experience is inherently imperfect,” says the AD PRO Directory designer. “Accidents happen, whether they occur in the design phase and something gets built to the size not originally intended, or a material is no longer available that we hoped to use. I always think it’s important to embrace the reality of the situation instead of trying to force change. Accidents also occur in life—maybe someone doesn’t use a coaster on a brand-new dining table, or wine spills on a kitchen island. I have always thought a wabi-sabi aesthetic is important to embrace because it allows for humans to live hard in their spaces. I have always deeply appreciated the Japanese practice of kintsugi. When an object breaks, instead of throwing it out, the pieces are put back together and filled with gold, thus giving new life to the piece and highlighting the imperfection with so much beauty.
I often include furniture in my projects with flaws, as most of the furniture I source is vintage. Most recently we found a reclaimed Belgian bluestone coffee table that had a huge hole in the middle of it. The hole was incredibly unique, but many would not understand having a hole in the middle of the coffee table. Instead of filling the hole, we are designing a custom flower vase to inset in this hole, so that now the table has an integrated floral element. My clients are incredibly excited about it, as they know that this is something likely no one else has in their home.
In my gallery, we already had this light fixture mounted, but wanted to display a new verdure tapestry in the space. We only had one wall large enough to do so. Instead of taking the light down, we decided to hang the tapestry underneath the cords of the fixture, and I think it created this really cool asymmetrical design.”
Adam Charlap Hyman of Charlap Hyman & Herrero on mistakes in tiles
“To me, the greatest luxury is having something that is made by hand—which often allows for imperfections,” says the AD100 designer. “When you can see that an object or a technique has been rendered skillfully and not mechanically, it is very impressive. I’ve never minded seeing a seam in a wallpaper or in a patterned carpet; I think that sort of betrays the process in a way that’s actually very interesting and beautiful. The team had tiles made for their LA studio restrooms in collaboration with Adam’s mother, Pilar Almon, who hand-painted the carnation motif that they then printed onto the tiles. A few of the tiles were installed in the wrong direction—it’s sort of a blurred line as to whether or not it was purposeful, which is part of the reason we love them. You don’t really notice the Easter eggs, since the bathroom has this trompe l’oeil effect happening. We’ve also even bought wide, industrially produced wallpaper and cut the rolls into thinner panels (thus making more seams), so that the wallpaper could look as if it has been made on a smaller, more old-fashioned loom.
Alex Tieghi-Walker of Tiwa Select on a dinged table
“I’ve never once measured the height of a picture when I hang it. Not once,” says Alex Tieghi-Walker. “Our eyes are the best measure—if it feels right. For my current show, I have a piece like a foot off the floor because I thought it looked better in the context of that wall. I’m always experimenting with where to place works to give the viewer a bit of an adventure. I’ve got a show up with Vince Skelly, who, like me, is a real believer in the imperfections of things and the aging and wear and tear. He came to the gallery to help set up the current show, and I suggested refinishing my table. It’s been dinged up quite a bit. And he said he absolutely loved how much it’s been dinged up. I don’t want to sound cliché when I say this, but the scratches literally tell a story. They show that something is useful and functional and being used the way it was intended to be used rather than simply just being on display. I want to feel like everything is part of the space and not that they are museum pieces. It is a very dinged up imperfect piece.
“Even with the current show, for example, during the opening no one was touching the works, and I was like, ‘Sit on it. Use that.’ I picked up my godson and was encouraging him to climb on the pieces. I was like, ‘Ray can you get the ball rolling and get everyone playing with these works.’ I’m constantly moving my gallery around because I’m not precious about the space in the same way that other galleries might be. I’ll see the light shining in a certain way, and I’ll think it would be really beautiful if that piece could catch the light at this time. Part of not being precious about the works is also because I believe that they can be seen better each time.”
Helen Rice on converting oddities into special features
“I’ve been buying a lot of used furniture,” Helen Rice says. “I like stone countertops that look better as they age, like soapstone, or what I have at home, which is this green-gray kind of limestone that looks great now that it’s covered by etching and watermarks. I like the worn-out corner of my front door where the previous family’s dogs scratched to come inside year after year or the awkward place in the ceiling where you can tell there used to be a stairwell. These things have meaning and emotion. Brand new doors with perfect paint jobs and ceilings with perfectly spaced, straight beams are visually pleasing, but I find they don’t impact memory or emotion the same way.
“We installed the bracing in the kitchen ceiling where there used to be a stair. We could have taken out these beams altogether and put back longer ones to span the full width of the room, but we would have lost the evidence of the stair (which is also important due to the historic nature of the house, built in 1839) and lost the character of the old beams.
“The rail on the stair landing between my first and second floor has become something of a mini gallery for small objects. The carvings displayed were made by my then husband’s grandfather. I have since stripped the paint from this rail. You can also see how the stair rail changes. For some reason, at some point long ago, the stair from the first to second floors had to be rebuilt, and they replaced the elegant curving rail with some stocky newel posts and straight rails. Anyway, it adds character to the house and speaks again to its history.”
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
