COOL COMFORT
Designers who scoff at a popular coziness-obsessed lifestyle trend find myriad ways to marry warmth and modernism
FOR New Yorkers, hygge doesn’t equal happiness. The Danish lifestyle trend promoting well-being through simple pleasures, hygge was short-listed as the Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 Word of the Year — no surprise given it was the subject of half-a-dozen books and countless magazine features in the US alone last year. The focus of hygge (pronounced hoo-gah): soothing indulgences like cashmere socks and flannel blankets, and homes rife with handcrafted goods, dripping candles and teapots at the ready, all shared with friends and family via cozy gatherings.
For many design experts, however, the Danes’ hibernation-like approach — created in large part as a reaction to the country’s long, dark winters — does domiciles a disservice. Instead, they create a sense of warmth with minimally designed products and environments.
“I’ll go on record as saying I’m pro-anything Scandinavian, but [hygge doesn’t seem like] a strategy for long-term comfort,” says architect Chris Weir who, with his wife, Susan Collins Weir, just renovated a multistory Edwardian condo in San Francisco ( StudioCollinsWeir.com). It has clean lines, austere furniture and ample white space, and includes an intimate seating area (on an open platform), bold, knock-out bursts of color, and the owners’ sentimental collection of art and photographs.
“The goal is to make a space decluttered without taking the life out of it,” says Weir. “You clean the space and then those warm elements really stand out.”
Whitespace, the new Flatiron showroom that is online home goods retailer Snowe’s first brick-and-mortar outpost ( SnoweHome.com), has an anti-twee philosophy that its owners say promotes a sophisticated sense of well-being. “What about design accentuating, g, elevating and highlighting your experiences, and gettingtting beyond unidimensional