Designer Joy Moyler recounts how architecture influences her approach to design

It's everywhere you look. Simple, complex, inviting, or eroding. It can evoke much conversation with its dramatic flair, or make you feel empty and lost when something is missing. It offers shelter from the storm and envelops the lives we create for ourselves. 

It is architecture. The diversity of styles expands the test of time, across all civilizations. One of my favorite design library treasures is Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture. You can find me lost in the drawings, balustrade designs, and expanded style definitions, and I’m always on a quest to discover more. 

My primary professional focus is interior design but it is architecture that brought me here. A trip to Spain started it all when a chip of stone from the facade of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia hit me in the face. Literally! Thoughts of studying fashion design soon faded and my foray into the architectural rabbit hole began. 

Joy Moyler

Joy Moyler, H&G's new columnist, is a US-based interior designer and creative mastermind. Before launching the A-list interior design services Joy Moyler Interiors 12 years ago, she worked for some of America's best interior and architectural design firms including, Skidmore Owings & Merrill and Kohn Pederson Fox, and as head of Giorgio Armani Interior Design Studio.

To date, I love spaces with a historical reference. New York’s Metropolitan Museum is a favorite structure. It is a classical beacon, and I am a classicist at heart. A highlight of my career is the opportunity to work on international projects. One is a golf resort outside Moscow. The building’s architecture was designed by my dear friend Gregory Tuck and the brief was ‘to create classical architectural spaces with both contemporary and traditional decor and furnishings, decorative elements and references’. Happy to say, we nailed it!

Another is the restoration and refresh of a 19th-century listed estate in Middlesex, England, for a young family. The challenge there was holding on to the structure’s rich history – original wide plank floors and deep mahogany millwork – while creating timely new modern spaces for young children to relate to.

Both projects excited me a great deal. I love studying the history of a space, the culture, the people, the design references, the exhibits. It becomes full immersion. My approach is to let the architecture inform the interior. They need to be relatable. I do not want to design a space in England that does not respect the history, or a home in Italy that is devoid of its culture and craftsmanship. Integrating traditional and modern items into a space tells a stronger story when respect is present. I am always led by the people –the culture first.

This is not to say I don’t appreciate the cleanliness of super-modern architecture. Often, it is a breath of fresh air. A visual cleansing after all the heavy details that come from neoclassical, beaux arts, and Victorian styles can be quite refreshing. Strangely, it can be more time-consuming to detail seamless modern architecture, as any defects show in its crispness.

No particular architectural style may be a favorite. But perhaps, if nothing else, it creates interest. A sense of wonder to travel a rabbit hole into inquiry. Perhaps a series of ‘why and how’ will create a new path. What fun it is to pause and to give in to the things around us. We may see a building every day, and then one day it stops us in our tracks. The sun may hit it differently. And perhaps we may even get hit on the head by a crumbly bit.