Jim Walrod

Born :

1966

Book culture has also become something that's kind of incredible to younger people now, because of the Internet. If you go to any of the book fairs - PS1 or the MOCA Book Fair - none of the people are over the age of 40 years old there, and they trade and buy books, because they're almost antiquities at this point. They're not really important, in a way, because the Internet is how information is taken in.

taken book people

There's a generation of people that do fetishize books and do fetishize catalogues and do look at them as something important. The same thing with magazine culture: because magazines don't make the amount of money that they used to, it's become important again to another generation of people to actually read them. And it's very, very pinpointed to the select people that actually fetishize and go in and look at them.

important book people

I always look at magazines and wind up standing there like, "Whose house looks like this? Who lives this way?" I never can understand what the point of view is. The only thing you can really do, being a decorator, is put an educated client towards what it is they don't know about. The dialogue between a client and a decorator should be more about, "Let me help you get to the point where you can find a comfortable place to live and be exposed to things," the way that an art consultant exposes a person who wants to buy art to art, instead of inflicting good taste upon them.

house helping art

What does my taste have to do with the personality of the person I'm working for? It's taking them through a journey of exposing them to stuff, and being able to form a dialogue between the place where they live and themselves. Other than trying to match the curtains to the couch, I don't know how to do that. If somebody asked me to design a really beautiful room, I don't know how to do that.

design journey beautiful