I've always been a late starter. I was the last of my friends to buy a mobile phone, have not yet acquired a Blackberry and have been stubbornly resistant to virtual shopping. I always prefer the real thing. The same goes for decorating. While I love to browse Cath Kidston's website, nothing beats the adrenalin rush of entering one of her shops and being overwhelmed by shabby chicness. Ditto the feeling of going down Marylebone High Street in London and arriving in that nirvana known as The Conran Shop or the kitchen heaven, Divertimenti. You don't get the same feeling as you sit at your laptop, and browse the stores online, credit card at the ready.
But maybe now you can. In the interiors world there's a new website which has been making waves with the decorati - mydeco.com. Its bona fide aim is to make design accessible to not just industry professionals but also DIY enthusiasts around the world. And they've got some heavyweight design stars on board to help promote it. The website's advisory panel boasts Philippe Starck, Kelly Hoppen, Tara Bernard, Kirstie Allsop and Sir Terence Conran. The site was launched by Brent Hoberman. If you aren't familiar with the name, you probably will be with his former success - the travel website lastminute.com. This time around he's helping people visualise empty spaces, without needing to visit hundreds of stores to get the look they're after. In practice, mydeco arms users with all the right tools to mix and match, to compare prices and get great discounts as well as share tips with fellow users or even showcase their work as an aspiring interior designer, all with the click of a mouse.
That's quite a feat. Who hasn't sifted through numerous catalogues, textile swatches, colour cards or even bought things on a refund basis before achieving the look they're after? For me, that's actually part of the fun, but perhaps I'm in the minority. Mydeco seems to save on the mileage and halve the angst into the bargain. Their three-dimensional renderings help you to create virtual rooms using hundreds of products from its online boutique. And they've done their homework. You can select furniture and accessories from around 1.5 million products from such popular names as Habitat, John Lewis, Laura Ashley and Dwell. If you want to go high end, there's a dedicated design boutique too, where you can purchase one-off pieces, artwork and accessories.
To help you get started, there are ready-made home decor styles from well-known designers. Interior designers such as John Stefanidis provide style pointers too, but the idea is that customers set their budgets from the start (cheap to pricey) and then 3D versions of the furniture you select are "dragged and dropped" into the virtual rooms. Uploading real room photos can make for an even more accurate selection and even to a technophobe like myself, it's all surprisingly simple. Even though the site is still in its beta-testing phase, user-friendly it most certainly is. You just need some patience to acquaint yourself with the options and to try out the various permutations.
No wonder Philippe Starck is involved. Known for advocating affordable designs for the masses, he compares mydeco to the music venture Napster, which opened up new ways to obtain music. Essentially mydeco allows consumers to follow their own tastes rather than have them dictated by a handful of star designers. While I appreciate this contribution to design democracy, and I've definitely incorporated a browse on mydeco into my weekly routine, my verdict is that it still won't reduce my expenditure on home decor magazines, nor the legwork involved in mall trawls. Call me old-fashioned?
