The mind of Oscar Wilde is multi-faceted, where realism and fantasy intermingle and create onto a blank canvas work unforeseeable by the ordinary minds. Restoration Hardware is like an Oscar Wilde creation. In every space, there is a vision. The galleries branch into different philosophies. Some have features that follow the function of the space, others tell a story or fold into a different era of style.
California based merchandiser, Stephen Gordon, who had difficulty finding high quality, luxury and vintage hardware and fixtures for a Victorian home, founded the idea of RH. While, RH provides furniture and pieces for every style of interior décor: Victorian, Edwardian, Roman, minimalist, modern, western, rococo, contemporary, classical, etc.; it also provides an experience. Walk between the spaces with a Prosecco or Americano in one hand and a notepad filled with designs or a camera filled with snapshots in another. It is an experience, where one dreams, fantasizes, and engages in storytelling. They tell themselves, this piano will be the main attraction for dinner parties or this white wooden crib is the birthplace of new lullabies. It invokes the modern curate to engage with this next-generation styled design gallery.
“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
The walls aligned with mirrors or new age white artisan room with vintage Vogue cutouts is for the dreamers of the world. RH was truly created for those unhinged by reality, not caged in by normalities of the mundane, and can see past emptiness. For the dreamer, each space is like a painting—offering a unique color palette, brush stroke, depth, angle, and hue for the mind to dive deeper into and allowing it to explore the space through mental mediums.
Fantasy is escapist.
RH has quickly become a weekend, happy hour escape. As though an inhabitant of a Lana Dey Rey song, the observer is transfixed visually and escapes to different eras and times. The ambiance supports luxury fantasy and hopes of greater reality than presently sustaining. Serenity and pristine through whites and happy greys.
“A love story is not about those who lost their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.”
The one thing I left with from my tour of RH was the constant reassurance of self-appreciation and self-love. Imagery that reinforces motivation, confidence, and table places for social graces. Counting blessings through aesthetes, old and new lightings and subtle and soft fabric touches.
The Flaneuse Journal 