1980s REVISITED:Stripped pine, sponge painting and wall paper borders . . . the salmon-coloured interiors of the 1980s are best forgotten - although a few gems have endured
THERE WERE THE shoulder-padded jackets, the turned-up sleeves and the blonde highlights. And that was just the men. The 1980s were about flash, and those who wore the labels decorated their pads with status symbols, too.
The 1980s style may be making a comeback in apparel, but forget about it ever returning for your house. Black-and-white posters of hunks cradling babies, neon striplights, black, squishy leather sofas and salmon-coloured walls - the 1980s is an interior-design era best forgotten. There were too many flouncy touches, country kitchens and splashy "modern" looks ripped straight out of a nightclub.
The big paint-colour offenders from this era were hunter green and a mix of dusty blues, greys and mauves. If you're getting a Miami Vice flashback, the thoughts of stippled popcorn ceilings, bad sponge painting and paint-splash wallpaper should bring you back home. Almost every house in the country had at least one of these features. Remember those ubiquitous wallpaper borders?
Those with more ambitious tastes had rows of "Hollywood dressing-room lights" ringing a bathroom mirror. And please, the neon! While it must have seemed cool and high-tech back then, it should have been left on pool-hall signs. The bathroom atrocities from the 1980s don't end at bad lighting. Vinyl flooring in tiny floral or marble prints might have seemed sophisticated, but they were tacky. Wood or slate-look laminate floors in the kitchen weren't much better.
A lot of design in the 1980s was more about making a statement than practicality. Most interiors were overdone, formulaic and, in some cases, too theatrical. Window treatments were full of flowers and frills, and drapes sported ornate valances. Plastic venetian blinds looked cheap, and invariably became mangled and dirty.
Posters and prints became fixtures of interior design (one of the most famous was the cover illustration for Duran Duran's Rio album). But when was the last time you saw the guitar-strumming vamps of Robert Palmer's classic 1980s Addicted to Love music video outside of a barber shop?
But there was some good stuff, too, such as wall-to-wall mirror bathrooms. This carry over from the disco era brought glamour and a greater sense of space to what was usually a small room. Plus, you could see yourself in 3-D.
The L-shaped sofa took off in the 1980s, thanks to the dominance of TV (the more seating the better). Glass blocks are still cool, having come full circle. These were used to death in the 1980s, but are still a practical way of separating one room from another, and letting light into both. Metal was the favoured material back then (a good thing) and encouraged the popularity of warehouse-style industrial shelving, usually used to hold stereos the size of microwaves.
A flamboyant and unashamedly kitsch furniture style called Memphis was the only major innovation to come out of the 1980s. This manufacturing group was started by Ettore Sottsass in Milan and produced designs from many designers. Most pieces were brightly coloured and toy-like, with simple shapes such as children's building blocks - perfect for aerobics dance posturing.
The other furniture-design movement was the do-it-yourself spirit leftover from the late 1970s punk era. This inspired London-based designers such as Tom Dixon and Ron Arad to teach themselves how to weld, and Jasper Morrison to assemble furniture using simple tools and prefabricated industrial components.
For all the decorative horrors of that decade, there were some brilliant designers. Philippe Starck emerged as one of the world's most famous furniture designers in the 1980s by turning an everyday product, such as a table, into a bold form, often inspired by cartoon imagery that people could recognise, with a smile.
Starck originally studied architecture, but dropped out to assist the fashion designer Pierre Cardin. In the early 1980s, he was commissioned to design furniture for French president François Mitterrand's private rooms in the Elysée Palace, which made his name.