C A N N O P Y
Art is True North
Upcycling: Harford House
Design by Carina Harford
Carina Harford on the “luxury of immediacy”
Words by Michael Zarathus-Cook
ISSUE 13 | MATERIALS
For those of us living paycheck-to-paycheck─about 50% of Canadians and 65% of Americans─the concept of a financial “doom loop” is an intimate one. We buy cheap things because that’s what we can afford, and the short lifespans of these things mean we have to spend more money replacing them at a higher frequency. In short, it costs more money to be poor than otherwise. One of the subtle but significant areas where this vicious cycle is evident is the issue of sustainability. In the aftermath of our high-frequency purchases, where do these cheap gadgets and appliances go? Most likely to the Great Pacific garbage patch, an oceanic trash vortex stretching approximately 1.6 million square kilometres wide. One can feel helpless not just because of the difficulty of escaping this loop but also how much our individual efforts pale in comparison to the carbon footprints of your friendly neighbourhood mega-corporations and top one-percenters. However small the influence of our actions, it does feel good to repair, reuse, and repurpose that piece of furniture you bought 10 years ago instead of tossing it to the curb and heading to Ikea.
It’s this therapeutic practise of upcycling that informs the interior design practice of London’s Carina Harford. Operating under the moniker of Harford House, she engages sustainability not as an inconvenient hurdle but as a design opportunity to make spaces feel more lived in. She’s gathered an enthusiastic following online, partly thanks to her humourous apartment reviews where she assigns attachment types to her followers based on what their living setup suggests about their emotional availability. Most of her clients hail from London’s sprawling boroughs and, as she admits in conversation with Cannopy, are of the well-to-do sort who can afford to shell out a few extra pounds for more durable materials. Instead of cowering to the challenge that her clientele doesn’t reflect where most people are financially, she posits an interesting retort: that our overindulgence in the “luxury of immediacy” is a significant contributor to our fast-furniture culture. Whether you agree or disagree with this take, the ineluctible solution to this problem is also the most elusive: more time. That’s the real vicious cycle we’re stuck in, our intentions for more sustainable urban living rarely correspond to the time we have to make like-minded decisions and purchases. Time and city form a Venn diagram of two circles that don’t touch. For Harford, it’s not all doom, and there’s no gloom in her philosophy of making the best of the vintage cards that you’re dealt. From eschewing “virgin materials” to extending the shelf life of that shelf you’re thinking of tossing, Harford House believes you can have your style cake and eat your sustainability one too.
CANNOPY x Harford House
Sustainability vs. Longevity
CAN — Is there a worthwhile distinction between these two words? Or is the fact of longevity and quality in design the best way to contribute to sustainability?
CH — I would say that there is a distinction, but both terms are poorly defined in the world of interior design. “Sustainability” tends to be applied to current production processes to suggest that strategies are in place to minimise emissions and or waste materials. Producing almost anything emits carbon, so mitigating this is preferable to not mitigating it. The degree and quality of that mitigation is, however, relatively unregulated.
“Longevity” is also a loose term. I consider Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment (FFE) items with over 60-year lifespan to be an item with longevity. Poor-quality, “fast furniture” pieces do not last that long (they often barely last 2 years), and trend-led pieces are also unlikely to last from a design-appeal perspective. When recommending vintage and antique pieces to clients, I like to think that the embodied carbon of the item’s production has already been “paid off” by its length of use. In general, I would say that reuse, followed by minimising the production of new items made of virgin materials, is the most sustainable approach we can take in the field of interiors.
Class Divide
CAN — It almost goes without saying that people who can hire your services are likely in a higher household income bracket. How can sustainable interior design still be relevant to populations of varying incomes?
CH — While interior design services are absolutely a luxury, a DIY sustainability approach is accessible across income brackets. I started in interior design when I moved to my first flat and had a very small budget to decorate it. I bought the majority of my furniture at auctions for low prices, collected decorative pieces from charity shops (UK equivalent of thrift stores), and found quite a few of my favourite items in the street. It was an inexpensive approach but it was time-consuming. Within the “unattainable triangle” concept of low price, quality, and convenience (in which you can only have two of the three)—my process usually rules out convenience immediately! The difficulty is that lots of people don’t have the time to dedicate to hunting around for vintage and antique pieces, meaning that fast-furniture becomes the next most accessible option.
Letting go of the luxury of immediacy and choosing to dedicate time to the process is how sustainable interiors become more affordable than fast furniture. Looking at local auctions or resale sites, considering what can be reused or updated, asking friends and family what they have in their attics or garages—all of these things are accessible across price brackets.
My second point is that I don’t think this issue is divided along wealth lines. Renters are significant contributors to furniture being sent to landfills (currently about 22 million pieces are sent per year in the UK; most of this is fast-furniture). The often transient nature of renting, combined with the prevalence of flimsy flat-pack (chipboard wrapped in plastic) furniture, means that a huge amount of material is wasted by this demographic, and the common materials of flat-pack are un-recyclable. This is not to blame renters but to point out that this issue isn’t easily attributed to one socio-economic group rather than another. Instead, I think an overarching short-term attitude towards furniture and interiors is the problem across most income brackets.
Client Psychoanalysis
CAN — While the attachment-style videos you do on Instagram are slightly tongue-in-cheek, do you have to do a version of that when you're meeting a client for the first time?
CH — I make no efforts to discern a client’s attachment style, that was just an internet joke that has gotten out of hand! I’d guess I’ve had clients with the full spectrum of attachment styles. There is a line of friend–therapist–designer that gets blurry, especially early in consultations when we start discussing big feelings quite quickly: What does home feel like? How do you relax? Who’s important in this space? What significant pieces might you have from your family? Clients often tell me that they’ve never felt listened to about their hopes and fears for their spaces until they hired me, or they tell me things that they haven’t felt comfortable telling anyone else. “Home” is so emotive and I think part of what people are drawn to when they choose to work with me is that I am genuinely emotionally engaged with them as individuals. I won’t, for example, let them dedicate a space that’s for them 98% of the time to the 2% of the year their in-laws come to stay. I try to hold space for the client and their needs and push back a little if I feel they aren’t prioritising their own day-to-day needs and wants.