Design by committee, in these United States at least, usually is considered something of a joke. Being rugged frontier individualist types, we point to the camel, a really hilarious animal, as the perfect example of what happens when you throw a bunch of good designing minds in the same room and let them run amok.
The Philadelphia Orchestra knows all about this, too. Some years ago, it embarked on a concert tour of Red China, the first American orchestra to do so, and played something called the "Yellow River Concerto," a piece for piano and orchestra. It was composed by a Chinese state-sponsored committee and sounded like a hybrid of the "Warsaw Concerto" and Muzak in a dim sum joint.
The Soviet Union, until a few days ago, was one big committee, and since 1917 that place has been running with the breathtaking efficiency of a Tijuana Rolex.
So it's generally a good idea to give a miss to anything that has been designed by committee. Except, of course, heh heh, this newspaper.
And you might try the Trend House at Design Center South, too. Design Center South, a dizzying array of interior design shops in Laguna Niguel that sell to the trade, is where decorators bring their clients to get them good and goggle-eyed at the cornucopia of stuff available to them (not that you can't do that on your own; you'll just need a decorator or someone else in the trade to strike a deal for you).
If the design center itself is a showcase of some of the best furnishings available in Orange County, its Trend House, which opened this week and will remain open until Sept. 30, is a head-turning example of what can be done with it all in the hands of some of the area's best-known interior designers.
The design center invited 10 designers to convert a large, vacant, black-ceilinged unit into a series of partitioned rooms, each of which would bear the stamp of one particular designer (or design firm) and be furnished exclusively with items obtainable at the design center.
The result is a house that might be a bit unsettling to live in for anyone who prefers homogeneity. However, taken individually the rooms are striking examples of "a more advanced viewpoint in interior design," said Michael Koski, a spokesman for the center. "Here you see the kind of talent you'd see in Architectural Digest."
