Taste test
Why we’re still in love with the 80s
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the 80s.
As a teen with a decor obsession that just would not be denied, I had grid pattern wallpaper, a faux Rococo bedroom suite I threw a tantrum to get and a wall clock in the style of a giant, multicoloured Swatch watch. I said I had an obsession, not great taste!
For my mum it was all Laura Ashley prints, chintz cushions and highly-glazed china vases in Art Deco-esque shapes and soft pastel colours; at the movies and on TV, it was Memphis Designstyle asymmetrical furniture in bold colours and patterns, neon and bungalow palms; desperately impractical white leather sofas with sleek curves, Patrick Nagel prints in thin brass frames of sultry, stylised women, and matching glasstopped, brass-legged coffee tables.
We’d probably call a lot of the faux-luxe stuff tacky now. But were the 80s really a decor wasteland or just a flashy time of innovation when mass production made luxe homewares accessible to almost everyone? And is there anything worth saving from that period?
Wherever you come down in that debate (and I don’t think anyone would blame you for coming down on the ‘‘ew, tacky!’’ side when you think of chintz), hints of 80s style have been in and out of decor books since at least the early 2010s.
All that cane furniture and those big, blousey jungle prints we went nuts for a couple of years ago? Totes 80s.
I saw one design blog call that look Golden Girls chic, after the 80s sitcom about four older women living in a retirement community in Florida.
At one point it was so hot, Apartment Therapy even did a room-by-room breakdown of the
GGs’ decor, from their outstanding cane lounge suite to Blanche Dubois’ pale pink, shellbacked armchairs to her banana leaf print wallpaper. There is something still really charming about that look – and we all know the big jungle-type indoor plants are still a hot ticket.
For the best contemporary version of those lush, shell backed chairs, check out the ultra chic cafe Sketch London’s tea room and Sara Ellisons’ Golden cane collection – a sublime update of GG chic.
I also have a huge, 80s-shaped soft spot for woven rattan, spraycoated steel furniture and terrazzo – especially the kind that uses bright recycled glass.
That 80s kind of terrazzo gives me warm, nostalgic feelings, especially when it’s used in bathrooms and particularly when it’s obviously engineered from recycled materials like primary coloured glass – check out Shiro Kuramata’s 1983 side table for Memphis Milano and the huge chunks of semiprecious stones in Max Lamb’s Marmoreal furniture for Dzek.
At one time a cheap storage option for 80s homes, spraycoated steel furniture now has a designer edge thanks to collections like Richard Yasmine’s HAWA Beirut, which includes armchairs and screens made from steeply arched rods in pale pastels.
Ostensibly a tribute to Lebanese architecture, the collection is also clearly a nod to the art-deco-lite style that dominated 80s design.
In the United States, Amigo Modern has a range of tubular furniture that looks like it beamed in straight from 1987, while Spanish design company Houtique’s playful Arco collection looks like it travelled into 2020 in the back of Marty
McFly’s 1985 Delorean – the brass and velvet Arco chairs wouldn’t have looked out of place in Gordon Gekko’s Wall
Street conference room either. Pushing that look as far up market as it’s possible to go, however, are Lara Bohinc’s sculptural, asymmetric Planetaria and Orbit collections.
Blending steel rod construction with that other cornerstone of 80s design, Memphis Design, her arched and curved pieces, with their block colours, tubular cushions and geometric shapes, are works of art. Bohinc’s 80s game is strong – just check out those fire engine red armchairs – but it’s also so lush you’d sit in some other chair so you could gaze at them.
While Bohinc makes it look easy, I think Memphis Design is the hardest sell of all the 80s classics now.
Although it’s come back in different contexts – the geopatterns are popular in fashion and paperware – in terms of furniture it’s that much harder to integrate with even the most eclectic decors.
Usually that’s because Memphis, with its bold, primary colours, geometric patterns and asymmetrical shapes, rarely lets form follow function, making the pieces feel quite confrontational at times.
Take Ettore Sottsass Carlton room divider, the definition of a statement piece – not the least because it’s worth a cool €13,799.42 (NZ$24,850). Is it a shelving unit? Is it a work of art? How do you begin to use a thing like that?
Not even Camille Walala’s playful, bright collection of Memphis-inspired homewares could tempt me, but I feel like if anything could work in the average home, it’d be her delightful cushions, china or even her funky glass topped coffee table (£1225 or NZ$2527).
If there’s one key design element that is salvageable, even covetable, from the 80s it’s that tactile arch that’s so popular in spray-coated steel rod furniture and big arched mirrors.
Possibly the finest version of it I’ve seen is Kiwi design company Douglas and Bec’s tactile, infinitely conformable looking Arch chair ($3960) and matching Arch vanity mirror. The blend of pale wood and rattan with that arched decoesque shape is pure 80s.
Team it with a bungalow palm, a pair of brass and glass Turn Ceiling Spots ($230 each) and perhaps one of US design store HK Living’s Webbing Sideboards in Terra (US$1295/ NZ$2039) for your own time portal straight back to the best the 80s had to offer, via a fresh, contemporary take.