Bill Bensley on interior design in Thailand
By Jon Fernquest |
Monday's Bangkok Post featured an interview with landscape architect and interior designer Bill Bensley, owner of the Bangkok-based Bensley Design Studios.
Mr. Bensley recommends interior design to Thai students as a career:
"A lot of interior design work from abroad is flowing to Thailand, but this does not seem to have heightened the competition among local designers."I can't remember the last time when my proposal was put against another Thai firm, can't remember when that last happened," he said.
The low level of competition could signal that interior design is a good career path. Mr Bensley himself began by studying landscape architecture at Harvard and only later moved to interior design without any formal training in the field."
(Note: A good place to begin is to browse through the large collection of books on interior design at the Thai Creative and Design Center (TDRC) upstairs at the Emporium on Sukhumvit)
As one can see by browsing through Thai magazines and design books, many dream of living in an elegantly designed urban apartment full of fine art:
With major Asian economies roaring ahead in recent years, property owners' mindsets are changing, the craze for condominiums being the most obvious example. But also there is a greater focus on interior design and contemporary art.
Mr Bentley believes that Thai art is undervalued compared to the overvalued art markets of China and other Asian countries.
Chiang Rai with its large art community comes immediately to mind.
A friend of mine decorated his little farm house on the outskirts of town with beautiful paintings he purchased from art students at the local Rajabhat University:
Bill Bensley...says Thai artists are hugely undervalued. It would be a good idea to invest in one beautiful, original painting by a Thai artist because right now prices of contemporary paintings are going through the roof in India, China and Indonesia.Last April Xu Beihong's 1939 painting Put Down Your Whip fetched $9.2 million at a Sotheby's sale in Hong Kong, breaking the Chinese artist's own auction record for an Asian masterpiece. Prices of paintings by Chinese contemporary artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun have more than tripled in the last five years as Europeans and Americans compete with Asian investors for pieces that best interpret modern China."
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...while Chinese, Indian and Indonesian artists are thriving, Mr Bensley believes Thailand leads the world in resort interior design. His own company currently has commissions in several countries, including South Africa, Morocco, Hungary, Mauritius, the Seychelles, India, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Tanzania, Maldives, China and Vietnam.
Mr. Bensely favours an idiosyncratic and slightly risky approach to interior design:
Bensley Design Studios is very original in its approach, with the Indigo Pearl Resort in Phuket a strong illustration. In Mr Bensley's own words, "you either love it or you hate it" because the colour scheme is an arresting blend of charcoal, steel grey, hot pink and burnt orange.Mr Bensley says his company tries to make every project different from the next one and never repeats anything.
"Right now I'm working on a hotel in New Zealand and because the oceans are blue as in Koh Samui and the grass is green, very green, the entire scheme is 400 shades of green. Every shade of green you can think of ... not only green carpets and green fabric but green stones, concrete, green pigments and stains, green glass and green mirrors - shade on shade of green."
Not that he shuns the all-time favourite neutrals - at the Four Seasons Hotel on Koh Samui his firm used neutral colours accented with turquoise."
He also offers some advice to amateur interior designers who just want to spruce up their house a bit:
Mr Bensley's advice to those undertaking interior design on their own - either out of financial necessity or for pure fun - is to go step by step and perhaps move into a partly furnished home and slowly complete the decor. This way one can really feel the space and decide what to do about it. (photo caption: "Live with your space for a while before finishing all the decorating.")It's also good to experiment before starting to paint. "I always start a house that I move into with just white, everything white, and then I go room by room - one wall in this colour, some wallpaper or something, and go about it gradually, but don't be afraid to experiment.
"Another key is to have many light sources, make all of them small and inclusive of candles. There's nothing that can turn a house around like low light and candles."
Mr Bensley also favours wooden floors and a couch that matches the floor. "If you can ground the couch and make it match the floor, then work everything else around it, then you can experiment.
"And if you can't do this then get a big rug underneath the couch that matches it - that's a solid base to start. Then behind the couch paint it hot pink if that's what you want, fill it up with recycled wood, something quite strange."
Mr. Bentley advocates outdoor gardens and abhors the typical cement shophouses one sees on almost every soi in Thailand:
Perhaps the most important ingredient of interior design is space, both interior and exterior, but it should be private space, for example an outdoor garden. This is vital in a busy metropolis.What pleases Mr Bensley is that the rise of residential condominiums and the demise of deteriorating shophouses. "It's going to improve the streetscape of Bangkok tenfold. I have for years been an enemy of the shophouses because I feel shophouses ruin Southeast Asia."
For further reading, check out a Forbes article on Bill Bensley at Thailand Property blog.
(Source: Bangkok Post, 14-02-08, temp-link)
Vocabulary:
interior design, interior decoration - the art of decorating the insides of homes and apartments, "not to be confused with interior decoration, interior design draws on aspects of environmental psychology, architecture, and product design in addition to traditional decoration" (See Wikipedia on interior design and interior decoration and a list of Wikipedia articles on interior design)
landscape architect - a person who practices the profession of landscape architecture:
(See Wikipedia on landscape architecture)
"...the art, planning, design, management , preservation and rehabilitation of the land and the design of human-made constructs. The scope of the profession includes architectural design, site planning, housing estate development, environmental restoration, town or urban planning, urban design, parks and recreation planning, regional planning, landscape urbanism, and historic preservation."
elegantly - pleasing, graceful and formal in appearance and style
urban - in the city
roaring ahead - going quite quickly
going through the roof - price is rising very quickly by large amounts
Sotheby's - a famous auction house (firm) based in London (See Wikipedia)
auction - a public sale of goods to people who offer the highest price (See Wikipedia)
a masterpiece - the best work that an artist has done, an extremely good work of art
a person's forte - something you are good at and do well, a strong point
commissions - work that clients have given a firm to do
idiosyncratic - unusual, strange, eccentric
indigo - a dark purplish blue colour
arresting - surprising and interesting, gets and keeps your attention
blend - a combination or mixture of two things, such as colours in paint
an arresting blend of colours - a combination of colours that surprises you and gets your attention (for better or worse)
spruce up - improve the appearance of something
go step by step - in a project do one task at a time, systematically and methodically
decor - the style of furnishing and decoration in a house
inclusive of X - including X
ground the couch - (interior design language) attach it to the ground, make it look like it is sitting firmly on the ground
a solid base - (interior design language) whatever is underneath supporting it, appears to be solid
recycled wood - wood that is used for a second time
abhors - hate very very much
demise of - the end or death of something (sometimes slow)
a streetscape - the appearance or view of a street (like a landscape)
