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COCOONING: CONTEMPORARY LUXURY |
The hardship of contemporary society and, last but not least, the tragic facts that troubled the world on 11th September 2001, have highlighted a strong wish to stay at home, to rediscover the family nest, to retrieve warm-hearted values, such as safety, reliability and harmony. As a result, there is a revival of such terms as ‘nesting’ and ‘cocooning’ (meaning cosiness), denoting a wish to stay with your family, privacy, a need to look for protection from unforeseen external events.
Consequently we look at the emergence of a renewed love for a protected household environment and for all those details that can improve the quality of our lives. If our home remains at the heart of our lives, and it is ever more usual for us to share with other people the peace and tranquillity of a comfortable environment, we start to look at nature as everybody’s home.
The new rule seems to be the following: to invest on interiors inside the home, and save on the outside. purchase less things but of greater value/quality. Therefore, we pay greater attention to home interiors that should make visitors and guests feel at ease. This is a trend that makes the grown-up, adult world closer to children. It is in this way then, that the classis organisation of space changes. We can observe micro-cosmos in which we see different functions: for example sleeping (Lit clos of Ronan and Erwan Bourollec for Cappellini) and working (home office). In this situation the preferred materials are those able to communicate a feeling of well-being and warmth.
The search for safety, trust and wellbeing does not involve, of course, only the home environment but is extended to all those places – for example schools, offices, hotels – where we spend a great part of our time and where we need to live in a comfortable environment, conceived to respond in the best possible way to our needs, to our wish to be in our own home: an environment where we can be on our own in front of a computer, or we can join our friends according to the situation.
All the major office furniture manufacturers are studying the concept of ‘at work as at home’ or ‘at home working’. It is worthwhile here to indicate the office-home on wheels designed by Matali Crasset for the Paris advertising agency Red Cell and Cloud a mobile meeting/study/relax room designed by the Snowcrash group for their offices.
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