Home with a heart mixes the old and the new

Former editor of Elle Decoration UK and global stylist Ilse Crawford suggests how to integrate human needs into home decor in her new book. Eoin Lyons reports

Ilse Crawford is a creative director who has set new directions in design for more than a decade.

Born in London in 1962, she launched British Elle Decoration in 1989, the magazine that taught the British to love modern design, and her company, Studioilse, created the members club Soho House in New York and the Babington House hotel in Bath.

Studioilse has launched two ranges of furniture and she is a creative consultant to Waterford Crystal. For a time Crawford was vice president of Donna Karan Home, where she helped to launch DKNY. Her book, Home Is Where The Heart Is?, examines our basic requirements for survival, as defined by psychologist Abraham Maslow, namely safety, love, respect and self-fulfilment.

It suggests ways in which we can integrate these emotional needs into the decoration of our homes. The aim of the book is revitalisation and asks one principal question: how can we go beyond the visual and use interior design to give greater emotional value to our surroundings?

Crawford describes a home where "we can get out, groove back" and in short this means creating a 'human' place, that is, somewhere personal and not an Identikit designer look.

She explains: "We need the functionality of the technological age but we want a sense of humanity, of home, a space that speaks to us both rationally and emotionally. We want to be modern but we want to be human too."

This doesn't seem like a particularly extraordinary concept, and the book is more practical than it suggests. Large text and moody photography combine with entertaining essays about "The Boudoir" or "Making a Meal". There's also real information on how architecture, design, and furnishings can create a given effect. For example, Ilse tells us we need the hand-made to balance the mind-numbingly similar machine-made things around us. "Craft makes our homes more human," she writes, before launching into dreamy designer-speak: "Like life in its slow accumulation of experience, a crafted piece is an expression of the daily moods of the maker during its creation."

Most appealing is her emphasis on working with old and new, the idea that a home evolves gradually. "We all have a strong subconscious connection to objects with a past. What is interesting is to take these ingredients, with the familiar feelings that they bring with them, and weave them into a more modern context".

A Chesterfield sofa that loses its stuffiness when set against graphic stencils, which in turn lose their sweetness next to a giant anglepoise, illustrates this point.

"In combination these three objects are new. Such mixes are vital: they allow us a warm connection to the past while freeing up the way we think".

The book reminds us what a home should be and focuses the mind on ways to bring more 'heart' to interior decoration.