The end of minimalism

A big-budget, retro-kitsch, Edwardian Baroque anthology of dredged restaurant memories? There must be a bigger expression to describe Berners Tavern. Whether or not you want a Jason Atherton concept of a BBQ pulled-pork sandwich with chips and slaw, anyone with a desire to understand where we are today with design must visit. It is a truth universally acknowledged that restaurants have always been as much about style as food.

One visitor, whelmed by the opulence, asked me: ‘So is this the end of minimalism?’ He had seen a busy, grand room, a 1908 original, with elaborate plasterwork ceiling. The walls are jammed with gilt-framed pictures, like the Zoffany painting of Society at the Royal Academy of Arts. Guests sit in pink plush-upholstered demilune booths or on handsome, sturdy, dark-wood chairs with squidgy cushions. There is an insistent central glass chandelier and dramatic back-lit bottles behind the bar. The effect is neither truly old nor really new.

This time last generation a restaurant du jour would have looked very different. Instead of the embracing warmth and de luxe clutter of Berners Tavern, you would have found a stripped-back room, like the mortuary on a Swiss space station. The lighting would be unforgivingly bright, cruelly revealing the careless scuffs on the Scandinavian blond-wood floors and the hairline cracks in the polished concrete walls. You would sit — in your Issey Miyake smock — on Hans Wegner’s Wishbone chairs. You would be the soft part of a stern and hard architectural theorem.

Wagamama was the drip-down cargo-cult version of this approach to interiors, which journalists began to call ‘minimalism’, hijacking an art term first used in New York in the mid-1960s for the cerebral metal sculpture and fluorescent installations of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. It was here in 1977 that Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened Studio 54, a Warhol Factory for discofolk. Schrager has since become the planet’s arbiter elegantiarum, a hospitality impresario whose taste is half a step behind the experts and several steps in front of the public. It must now be explained that Berners Tavern is attached to Schrager’s latest project, The London Edition hotel.

Schrager seems to say: ‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and understand the unpredictable ripples of metropolitan desire.’ In the days when it was fashionable to do so, which is to say 1988, Rubell and Schrager hired star designer Philippe Starck to work on Manhattan’s creaking Royalton Hotel. He turned it from a beat-up flophouse with dusty palm trees and a diner that would make Norman Rockwell sentimental into a pitiless exercise in mid-town, mid-market, media-friendly, miserable minimalism.

Schrager soon worked with Andrée Putman, the Simone de Beauvoir of interior design at Morgans Hotel Group. He created the Delano in Miami and the Mondrian in Los Angeles. Style-wise, each is rather different. He moves on. Herzog & de Meuron have worked for Schrager and so, too, has John Pawson, a name that is the very eponym of minimalism (even if it is a term that Pawson strongly disavows). It was Pawson who designed Calvin Klein’s Madison Avenue monument; with an interior evoking the Cistercian abbey of Le Thoronet, chastity had never before so thoroughly ravished the rag trade. But that was 1995.

And now, by way of contrast, we have Yabu Pushelberg, the Toronto/New York designers responsible for Berners Tavern. The very name carries suggestions of irreverence, revolt and ambition. They have, if Berners is evidence, energetically rejected the orthodox modernist- minimalist canon of clean lines and found a replacement in the more easy-going orthodoxy of comfy pastiche with a base note of high-concept nostalgia. We could be in Balthazar. Anyway, it seems to work — but does the success of swags, drapes, bevelled glass and nets mean that minimalism really is dead ?

There is plenty of evidence for a terminal diagnosis. Sir David Chipperfield, the Richard Dawkins of architecture, eviscerated the old Café Royal. Out went the crapola, the folderols and geegaws, but out with them also went the precious charm. (Happily, even Chipperfield’s ferocious minimalist tools have been deterred by the ghost of Oscar Wilde: the opulent listed Grill Room remains intact.) Sometimes, bewildered tourists visit. Otherwise, it is a cold and lifeless late-period minimalist disaster, cringe-makingly out of touch with the spirit of the age. Meanwhile, just around the corner, Corbin and King’s tad too theatrical Brasserie Zédel is rammed. Polpo on Beak Street, furnished from salvage and skips and fuelled by impure Venetian fantasy, is perpetually busy. Has anyone opened a white cube of a restaurant this year? Even the gallery closed its Hoxton base at the end of last year.

Or take fashion. I have, in a gesture that I find freighted with import, recently bought a pair of bright cerulean trousers. Perhaps more significantly, at the spring/summer 2014 Paris shows, Céline’s Phoebe Philo had her guests precariously sitting on old metal stools brightly painted in green, blue and yellow. Wobbling, they watched a catwalk show that demonstrated triumphant colour and pattern over defeated solid beige and grey. ‘Street-fuelled energy’, it was called. You could surely sense the shame, fret and anxiety felt by correspondents whose wardrobes at home still held ghostly racks of embarrassing neutrals and unassertive cuts.

The motor industry, by tradition so humourless a trade, has recently discovered frivolity, or at least a version of frivolity as understood in south Germany. BMW, for example, was once inspired by the lucid geometric principles of the Bauhaus, but now takes inspiration from what will attract the attention of an ambitious estate agent in Shanghai. And he will not be attracted by formalist geometry. Morphologically, German car design used to be rational, but not any more. My own handsome Mercedes-Benz has, to match my bright blue trousers, chrome embellishments whose aesthetic source is based in sensational Detroit vulgarity, not the aesthetic theories of Plato that drove the minimalist idea.