Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.I’m not sure many rational designers would set out to emulate, or even to echo the interiors in David Lynch’s films. These are rooms that haunt us: the chevron carpets, the red velvet curtains, the peeling wallpaper suggesting that our environment is somehow theatrical, temporary, a dream — an expression of the subconscious.The director, who died on January 15, worked with production designers, but he conceived of these rooms as spaces with every bit as much character as the actors. The folksy, wooden interiors of TV series Twin Peaks, which first aired in 1990, were contrasted with red-velvet-lined lobbies and endless corridors — settings for scenes that saw dream-sequences leaching into reality. His unsettling, uncanny use of space has been a huge part of what made his movies so memorable. Lynch — a long term practitioner of transcendental meditation — used interiors and set design to bring to the screen a vision of the psyche. The Red Room in Twin Peaks, with its black-and-white zigzag floors, scarlet curtains and Venus de Milo, is a disorienting space that has the potential to provide meaning — yet, just as the director did himself, refuses to offer clarity. His early films delivered a monochrome shock, a dark world of shadows and industrial noise, simultaneously Victorian and post-apocalyptic. Any of us who watched Eraserhead (1977) at a late-night screening with sticky carpets and fraying seats will have been a little scarred by Henry’s apartment as he struggles with the arrival of an alien baby: a place with the look of a shabby 1930s hotel, its surfaces bubbling with glue and decay, its radiator harbouring a cheese-faced miniature cabaret singer in its sweaty recesses. Here too are the zigzag floors that would become a recurrent motif, always an indicator of a half-dream. Postmodernism from a future gone bad; a dark retro-Deco stripped of glamour.In The Elephant Man (1980), based on the life of Joseph Merrick, Lynch brought that sensibility to London, creating a shadowy city of smoke and danger, barely illuminated by hissing gaslights. Then came colour. From Blue Velvet (1986) to Mulholland Drive (2001) via Twin Peaks came the vivid, lipstick-scarlet curtains, those black and white floors, interiors seen from a wardrobe — the hint of the viewer’s voyeurism reflected on screen. The domestic interior was transformed, as Hitchcock had done in Rear Window, into a peep show.Just as neo-noir Blue Velvet — starring Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini — kicks off in a suburban demi-paradise, conceived as a place of plenty and perfection, Twin Peaks had its 1950s diner, all cherry pie and hot coffee. But Lynch created a brutal contrast between the twee, nostalgic settings and the dark underbelly. White picket fences and roses are the backdrop to the discovery of a severed ear. Some of the most unsettling scenes are simply lingering shots of a ceiling fan on a nondescript landing.So many of these interiors seemed to date from an era that was postwar but not yet mid-century, weighed down with heavy leather club chairs, brown doors, thick layers of overpainting and wall sconces. The rooms in his 2002 series of sinister shorts, Rabbits, are dated, dark, windowless — a subversion of the sitcom living room. It’s Friends, but a nightmare, evoking a claustrophobic and intense interiority.And then there’s LA. Mulholland Drive, which follows an aspiring actress played by Naomi Watts, seems to depict the Hollywood dream: the fantasy and the seedy reality, but you are never quite sure which is which. In architectural terms, LA has everything, from Snow White cottages to Mediterranean revival, Modernist monsters to suburban ranch houses. Lynch employed it all. He even used his own strange, concrete, almost-Brutalist 1963 house in 1997’s Lost Highway, whose narrative structure he likened to a “psychogenic fugue”. It’s a house that looks so odd it must surely, you would think, have been built as a movie set. I love curtains. There is something so incredibly cosmically magical about curtains opening and revealing a new worldIn a move that would seem to be the reverse, the director designed spaces in the real world. The Silencio nightclub in Paris, opened in 2011, was inspired by the fictional version in Mulholland Drive. It looked even more surreal: infinite mirrors, fetish finishes, neons, eerie glows, skeletal trees in a smoking room and, of course, red velvet curtains. Last year, he designed one of his final works, “A Thinking Room” at Milan’s Salone del Mobile — a dark space with a throne-like chair attached to a tangle of golden cables above, like slender searchlight beams. And, again, curtains. “I don’t know where it came from, but I love curtains,” Lynch — famously reluctant to explain his work — said in 2014. “There is something so incredibly cosmically magical about curtains opening and revealing a new world. It resonates on a deep level with people.”It is in our own heads that Lynch’s incredible sense of the crepuscular and the creepy lingers most strongly; in the notion that our homes are contiguous with our subconscious and whatever is hiding there. His spaces are those in which curtains are always there, and yet we sense we should probably never look behind them. Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s design and architecture criticFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
