Art at home with AJAR furniture

Transform your spaces into creative environments with AJAR furniture

Whether it was in the form of a looming claustrophobia, a slowly settling cozyness, or an enhanced attention revealing previously unnoticed aspects of our homes, an intimate experience of domestic space was put right in the forefront of our daily lives. Our home became, even more than before, the most relevant place where to nurture, shield, and even confront our identities. In addition to this, having spent so much time indoors, we’ve come to know all the details of our homes or apartments: that wall in front of our desk that looks a bit too bare, the different ways in which sunlight shines in through that window at various times of the day, those round coffee tables that you feel that don’t quite fit with the rest of the furniture but that you had purposefully ignored up until a couple of months ago. There is much that we can learn from this! This enhanced attention can motivate us to change our homes, making them cozier, with more art and more in touch with our personalities.

In an article written for The New Yorker all the way back in June 2020, Kyle Chayka speculated about how the pandemic could potentially reshape architecture in domestic, urban, and office spaces, pointing out that “seeing any new space, in the midst of the pandemic, we quickly imagine what it would be like to be trapped there for months.” Barely three months into the global lockdown, Chayka interviewed architects and interior designers about how this experience had made them scrutinize their own homes as never before, and how it drove them into reevaluating and reimagining the confines of their domestic spaces. This was not by any means something limited to professionals in such fields: lockdown spurred a trend of DIY improvements among those people locked inside their homes.

There are several ways to improve our everyday living spaces. Beyond fixing those little details or malfunctions that seem to pop up everywhere, we might also consider acquiring the best furniture or even reimagining the whole home lighting design itself—not an easy task, to say the least! We might also consider acquiring paintings or sculptures to place them strategically in key places. Beyond being mere decoration, the presence of art pieces in the space of our homes can imply several positive effects. Placing art pieces in your home is one of the boldest ways to imprint your character on your surroundings. The artworks you chose to place at home say a lot more about who you are than many of the other objects and appliances we are surrounded with. It can also help amplify the aesthetic experience of a particular space. Hanging a couple of well-chosen paintings, for instance, can turn a bare wall into something capable of eliciting memories, feelings or emotions. Also, if we know the artist behind the piece, it can also evoke the effort, skill, and the life story behind their work. However, we must not think of these aesthetic and cognitive effects as something exclusive to art: these can also be achieved through well crafted design pieces.

Ever since the ideas of the Bauhaus School of design emerged in the first decades of the XXth century, the relationship between art and design has been a contested one. While previously it was commonly assumed that there was a clear distinction between “pure” art, “applied” art, and industrial products, these designers argued that art should not be considered as a sphere completely divorced from functionality. They argued that the industrially produced objects and commercial furniture we use everyday could (or even should) aim to have the same aesthetic qualities as a painting or a sculpture, and that art and daily life should go hand in hand. In other words, they believed that a well crafted designer lamp or a pair of unique coffee tables could hold the same artistic values as what we usually consider as art.

Of course, designing a piece of furniture with these aesthetic qualities is not an easy task: it takes an expertise, craftsmanship, and sensibility that can only be the result of years of experience in the field. In AJAR , we pride ourselves on having carefully curated a selection of Spanish furniture and lighting design brands which have successfully achieved this. These brands are Viccarbe, Santa & Cole, and BD Barcelona, each of them assembling an impressive roster of some of the most talented designers from around the world.

Perhaps even more than with other branches of design, lighting design is especially capable of radically transforming the atmosphere and the aesthetic experience of a space. Take a look, for instance, at the Lamina Mayor pendant designed by Antoni Arola for Santa & Cole. Straddling the functional and the sculptorical in equal measures, the Lamina Mayor exploits the virtues of indirect reflected light while at the same time occupying space in a way reminiscent of someone like Bruno Munari’s work with mobiles.

The Giro side table designed by Pedro Paulo-Venzon for Viccarbe is another piece where functionality and artistic value are seamlessly integrated into a coherent whole. Composed of an expressive curved metal frame and single-piece oak bowl, the Giro table could be set inside a modern art museum or gallery with the same ease as it might sit beside your ottoman. Likewise, Jorge Pensi’s Shape low table (also from Viccarbe) is another piece with a character and spatial presence that most mass-produced items of the same class could only wish to attain.

Heir to the ideas of the Bauhaus school, in his classic book Design as Art Bruno Munari writes: “Anyone who uses a properly designed object feels the presence of an artist who has worked for them, bettering their living conditions and encouraging them to develop their taste and sense of beauty.” We believe that the carefully selected design pieces that we have at AJAR can achieve precisely this.