The Great Indoors Awards

The competition's winners are intended to be inspirational, of course, but also instructive. With a shortlist that ranges from superstars to the up-and-coming, the awards showcase the breadth of talent in the industry. The prize-winners, however, are united by their innovation. Individual project winners encompass the famously irreverent Zaha Hadid's design for a wine-tasting pavilion at the López de Heredia Winery; Heatherwick Studios' sculptural East Beach Café; Ryuji Nakamura's optical illusions for a Tokyo optometrist; and item idem's recycled grunge flagship store for Bernard Wilhelm. Each design is radical in its own way, testing the limits of interior design as a discipline. Wonderwall, chosen as the 2007 Interior Design Firm of the Year, epitomises this trend, with a portfolio that playfully challenges the conventions of interior design.

Collectively, the winners point to current fields of strength in interior design and areas of weakness. Where three of the four winning projects were nominated for the retail category, no public buildings or workplaces were deemed worthy of the honour. Similarly, three of the five major award winners were Japanese, signalling a degree of investment and interest in interior design in the far east. In contrast, not a single winner was American, although Japanese firm Wonderwall's portfolio includes the UNIQLO megastore in New York.

If the awards aim, on the one hand, to map the current state of the discipline, they also have a broader mandate. In its structure and its choice of winners, the Great Indoors constitutes a manifesto for interior design; both a snapshot of its present and an exhortation to its future.

The competition categories, Show & Sell, Relax & Consume, Concentrate & Collaborate, Serve & Facilitate, emphasise that interior design is, in essence, functional. Its aim is always to do something, to enable a specific range of actions within a given space. Unlike architecture, it is not monumental; an interior can be impressive but never aloof. Instead, its value is its intervention in the everyday, its attention to interactive spaces.

The Great Indoors winners all create spaces that are tactile and responsive; spaces to move through and live within rather than regard from afar; item idem's design foregrounds texture, urging visitors to reach out and brush a hand along it. In contrast, the customer is invited to get lost amongst the almost illusory pillars of Nakamura's optometrist. Somewhere between these poles of movement and touch, Hadid and Heatherwick's architectural designs offer immersion. As visitors to the López de Heredia Winery move around inside the flask-shaped pavilion, diners at the East Beach Café find themselves similarly ensconced in the undulating abstraction of Heatherwick's design.

Lived space moves rapidly to living space as the rooms develop a sense of personality. The jury's report lauds the humour of Wonderwall's designs, the private jokes inscribed on seemingly sophisticated tiles, the quirky addition of conveyor belts and spinning mannequins and the more outlandish use of merry-go-rounds and marching apes. Wonderwall's sleek, reflective surfaces and sophisticated attention to detail produces good interior design in a classic sense, but these playful touches make it great by imbuing the spaces with life and light-heartedness.

The personalised room, unique and lively, is an inevitable result of the jury's emphasis on originality. Pushing at the conventional boundaries of interior design, at the line between architecture and interiors, at the aesthetics of newness or the openness of space, each of the winning projects is defined by its digressions. Animated and unusual, each project is a gentle pun on the familiar vocabulary of interiors.

It should come as no surprise, then, that retail is the big winner in innovative design. By imbuing space with personality, these interior designers transfer the identity of the space to the identity of the brand. Innovation and playfulness becomes functional at the point where interior design meets branding. From the anti-design rebellion of Bernard Wilhelm, to the dizzying sophistication of Jin's Global Standard optometrist, to the López de Heredia Winery's melding of old world elegance and cutting-edge innovation, each design speaks volumes about the company it houses. Interior design becomes a signature, foregrounding what is unique about the company, and putting space into the service of its inhabitants.

One of the largest prizes in interior design (the prize money totals 50,000 Euros, or just under $AU84,000), supported by a conference and a series of workshops that both attracted luminaries of the discipline, the Great Indoors Awards are positioning themselves to set the agenda for interior design. Its ambitious mandate ensures that it will become both a showcase of the best the interior design world has to offer and a focus of debate and dialogue about what that ‘best' should look like. All of this is to the great benefit of the discipline as a whole, at once promising to define interior design and to reward those who defy that definition. It is an exciting prospect for a discipline approaching maturity. +

PREVIOUS Combining organic form and industrial materials, Heatherwick Studio's East Beach Café in Littlehampton, UK was awarded with one of the four major prizes. 1 Zaha Hadid’s wine-tasting pavilion at the R. López de Heredia Viña Todonia winery, located in the Haro la Rioja in Spain won one of the four project awards. 2 Jin’s Global Standard, an optometrist’s shop located in Chiba, Japan and designed by Ryuji Nakamara Architects, was another winner. 3 Also awarded was item idem’s edgy design for Bernard Wilhelm’s Tokyo flagship store. 4 Wonderwall, the 2007 Interior Design Firm of the Year, was rewarded for its elegant combination of traditional interior design and quirky details - such as this conveyor belt housed within the sleek glass displays of high-class retail.