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Fight the fakes! Great design for every budget

Focus on dining The new indoor/outdoor furniture, plus best buy chairs, tables and stools

Easy updates How to transform your home with flowers

Smart shopping Beautiful basics to love forever

Editor’s letter

June: The expectation of cheap

Posted: April 18th, 2012

Why as a nation do we seem to worship at the altar of cheap? The wear-it-today, chuck-it-tomorrow Primark mentality? Why buy three fashion-fix sets of sandals when you could invest in one great pair? Variety of choice? Maybe, but crappy shoes will ruin your feet. And then you’ll spend the money ‘saved’ on foot creams, if not the chiropodist. In other words, short-term thinking inevitably has a later cost.

It’s often argued that cheap offers accessibility, a way to get designer style for less. After all, detractors bleat, why should only the wealthy have access to great design? Except this is rubbish. Good design doesn’t mean expensive. Good design is the way something works, not how much it costs. And let’s distinguish here between inexpensive and cheap. Ikea is able to produce some cracking stuff at very low prices because of the sheer volume of units it produces. This is democratic design. On the flip side, things generally cost more the fewer you make of them, and you can add a premium if the making involves any element of handcrafting. Cheap, on the other hand, is badly made tat designed only for maximum profit. Here, anything of value is cut to save money: investment in labour, quality of materials, ecological considerations. Net effect? A big long-term price we’ll all end…

Editor’s letter June

Editor’s blog

Why the future of the high street is NOT in our hands

Posted: May 14th, 2012

A lot has been written recently about the state of our high streets and what needs to be done to get people shopping on them again. The Portas Review, published last December, is probably the most comprehensive document, compiled by retail guru and TV maven Mary Portas at the request of David Cameron. It was subtitled, “An independent review into the future of our high streets” and presented 28 recommendations for change ranging from the implementation of “Town Teams” — enthusiastic locals to champion and run their towns — to introducing a public register of high street landlords, in order to hold them more accountable when premises lie empty. Portas also suggested that the government run a number of High Street pilots to test her theories, inviting local councils to make a short film demonstrating why they should be picked to be a “Portas Pilot Town” with a government grant of up to £100,000. As she told me, “The future of our country will be led by people getting off their arses to do something!” And judging from these films, freely available to view on YouTube, it seems there’s plenty of people who care enough to do just that. “This is about co-creation rather than being passive consumers,” she says, the core thrust…

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The ELLE Decoration British Design Awards

Recognising useful, beautiful and original new work by British designers, in association with John Lewis and supported by the Telegraph Magazine.

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The ELLE Decoration British Design Awards