Whether the middle classes consider these designs extravagant or ostentatious, it’s worth realizing that excessively wealthy homeowners such as belong to the royal class are the first to experiment with interior design styles. It’s from them the masses glean ideas of how to adopt the high life without paying heavily for it and without being−perhaps− quite so toney.

Projects by designer Stanislav Orekhov and VisCorbel, a company that turns graphic designs into psychical decor, demonstrate an aesthetic sense few people of outside of Buckingham Palace or the Royal Saudi family would dare to broach.

Orekhov’s project, upon close inspection, reveals a Middle Eastern indulgent residence. When paired with the VisCorbel design it seems curious that living amongst royalty grants homeowners romantic notions of 18th-century Europe. Luxury in Orehkov’s case reveals itself through dense and unrestrained combinations of fabrics, textures, colors. Detail abounds everywhere: Romantic wallpaper, gilded wainscoting in the loo, multilayered ceiling treatments with their own lighting schemes, and an inability to leave any void untouched.

Orekhov

Orekhov

Orekhov

Orekhov

Orekhov

Orekhov

Orekhov

Orekhov

Orekhov

In the VisCorbel work, the relation between form and function seems to dissipate. Instead the décor is an attempt to implement and layer heavy, detailed, almost decadent design elements upon one another just for the sake of beauty. Furniture is brocade silk. Every surface appears gilded, from a sidebar beneath an almost lifesized portrait to door and mirror frames, and from accents within niches to structural supports of immense crystal chandeliers.

Viscorbel

Viscorbel

Viscorbel