Eye Candy:

Joseph Holtzman is an interior design practitioner and the former editor-in-chief of the interior design journal nest (26 issues printed from Fall 1997-Winter 2003/2004). Holtzman’s highly embellished interiors readdress prevailing assumptions regarding authenticity and the socio-cultural pleasure of decorated environments.This paper evaluates the private residence of Joseph Holtzman as an interior liberated from traditional concepts of appropriate discretion. By subsuming the perimeter planes and surfaces with voluble expressions of material excess, Holtzman’s residence challenges the understanding of interior design as a mannerly expression of built form. In foregrounding rather than problematising the connotations of artifice and embellishment, Holtzman’s work explores qualities of decoration that provoke, subvert, and renegotiate understandings of propriety in contemporary interior design practice.