Shoes & Art

(Illustration by Milly Rose Stephen)

by Vicky Pylorides

Shoes & Art

The other day I was talking to a friend who recently moved into a new house. She was telling that she and her husband were quite happy with the interior styling choices they had made. The new kitchen, the new wallpaper and the new furniture, all felt like great picks once put together with everything else they already had. “But somehow”, she said, “we’re still missing that ‘personal touch’ that makes a house feel like home.”

To achieve that personal touch they were now on the hunt for new artworks to add to their walls. As she was telling me this it all kind of made sense; in styling your own interior most people view art as something essential in adding a personal touch. I, too, could not agree more about the personalizing power that art has when it comes to decorating an interior. After our conversation I was wondering though why artworks are so often chosen only in the last phase of decorating, when everything else is already decided on and placed. Thinking this over it felt more and more like a questionable sequence, comparable perhaps to choosing an outfit. When selecting what to wear most people tend to start with clothing and consider footwear an accessorizing part, and therefore only decide on what shoes to put on after they’ve picked the cloths. For me personally shoes often form a center of gravity though when it comes to picking my outfit. They have this great power of expressing personal taste and artistic sense, and because of that it more often than not occurs that I start with the shoes when choosing an outfit.
Being in the midst of making interior choices for a new house I am soon moving into, I realize that I am daydreaming a lot about where to place some of my favorite artworks and what colors to use on the floors, walls and ceiling in order to make them stand out. Like making my shoes the center of gravity when it comes to my outfits; I see art as the starting point in styling my new home.

There are of course no fixed rules, nor real do's or don’ts when it comes to styling. The way you build up any creation, whether that’s your new interior or an outfit for the girls’ night out, is and should be subjective, and entirely up to you. Sometimes that means that following what is considered a common way of doing something is not necessarily what works best for you.