Touch and texture

 As a child, one is often told: "don't touch" and not just for our own safety with hot stoves and live electrical points, but when in the supermarket and in other people's houses. This sense of touch then becomes far less developed than our sense of sight and hearing, and is often completely sidelined in architectural design. To replace this, the 'visual texture' of objects and materials becomes part of the design repertoire, especially to enrich our spatial experience.

Modernism, especially between 1920 and 19960, tended to suppress texture in favour of smooth finishes that evoked the 'machine aesthetic', but gradually, a wide variety of textures has been reintroduced into the language of design, through the reawakening of interest in traditional crafts as well as through new technologies that produce a variety of surface treatments, such as brushed metals. Everything in a Modernist space will both look and feel smooth, texture being the 'look' of roughness and touch being the physical sensation. Most things in nature or traditionally made that are smooth to look at are also cold to the touch - polished metals, glass, glazed ceramic - while things and materials with a more porous and softer look will usually feel warmer to the touch. This may explain one of the main criticisms of Modernism: that it looks and 'feels' cold, hence the shift to a more inclusive textural palette.

As with all design, texture offers immense choice, and follows very similar principles of composition to that of colour. Probably the easiest entry into the world of texture is through fabrics, which for most of us evoke a wide range of experiences, from the softest texture of baby clothes and winter pyjamas, to rough and scratchy hessian that we may have encountered for gardening and furniture upholstering.

A close-up of one of my chairs with a throw and hand-made cushion

Often these will co-exist in our spaces because they have become associated with different types of objects, through the history of their manufacture. While there have been styles and fashions where the innate properties of materials have been suppressed, either through an applied coating such as paint or lacquer, or through advanced machining to get the perfectly smooth finish, current design thinking is far more relaxed and inclusive.

A wine cooler of unglazed clay serving as a vase

Introducing a variety of textures is a great way for enlivening a space and for giving it more character - a cozy atmosphere is associated with soft throws, brushed upholstery fabric and deep-pile carpets, even if the lines of the furniture are crisp and rectangular and the colours chosen from the blue (cool) side of the spectrum. Mostly, though, we would look for a balance, but how do we achieve this?

My first move would be to make a mental inventory of the space I want to refurbish or spruce up: what are the more permanent finishes, and what furniture do I already have? For my own living room, the floors are parquet, dating to 1932, and the most important piece of furniture that I wanted to use was a mid-century coffee table, something of a family heirloom. The natural wood and darkish colour allow these to 'speak to each other' with a subtle texture of the natural wood visible.

The coffee table on the left and the parquet floor on the right

Do you have any other objects that would tie in with these key pieces? I have an inherited wooden chest for a cutlery set, a passed-down cd-holder (yes, I still listen to cd's) and a wooden box that I picked up in a second-hand shop which I use to store sewing patterns. All have similar natural wood textures in the mid-tone range, so I have arranged them around the room as a series of focal points. I needed to get more book-shelves, so I splashed out and had some made, with matching small cupboards for those random items such as stationery. I chose a natural wood for these, but in a very dark tone so that the wood texture is almost invisible, to provide a backdrop, but with a visual link to the other items.

This provides the compositional framework of my room, with the chairs and other soft furnishings contrasting in colour, tone and texture. I had recently re-upholstered my mid-century couch with a fabric that looks like moleskin, in two shades of pale beige. 

A close-up of my couch - the two tones of beige are more noticeable in reality

I needed to get some occasional chairs, so I chose ones with quite a coarse weave in two shades of grey, matching in with my paint scheme that draws inspiration from the colours of the exterior of my building. Unfortunately, this woven texture is a big favourite of my cats as a claw sharpener. This prompted some softening of the space, which looked a bit sterile and contrived. One of my daughters gave me a fleece throw (shown in the first photo), which has textural similarity with the couch, and covers up the clawed bits on the chairs. I was also given two hand-crafted scatter cushions, with a rich variety of textures created by the embroidery stitches.

A detail of the embroidered cushion

The weave of the two occasional chairs is also picked up in the canvas Roman blinds, which are contrasted with much smoother fabric of the blackout curtains. Woven texture also makes an appearance in another scatter cushion: this one made by cannibalising one of my mother's cross-stitch works, which I set in a canvas surround (also shown in the first photo). I regularly do a bit of shuffling around of the smaller items, for a bit of variety and to get an even better textural balance. 

Apart from a gallery wall, I have almost no figurative or patterned surfaces or objects: the interest is created largely through colour and texture. The one exception is vegetation - I have a collection of small succulents in interesting ceramic pots, which I occasionally complement with vases of cut flowers, but these are strictly for special occasions or gifts. These natural features provide the richest texture in the room, but their serene forms make for a very relaxing accent to the whole assemblage.

My succulents echo the textures of the embroidered leaves on my cushions