Finding a balance between interior and exterior materials for your home

The balance between exterior and interior is at its most obvious when it comes to materials, writes Des Breen, as he delves into a thumping tome on the retro-minimal world of MR Architecture + Decor

When David Mann set up his firm, MR Architecture + Decor, in New York in the mid-90s, he looked back eight decades for its guiding principles. In particular, to Germany in 1919, when Walter Gropius and his groundbreaking Bauhaus school came up with the idea of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’.

It may sound as pretentious as it is multisyllabic, but all it really means it total artwork, a synthesis of all the arts into one unit. For Gropius, an architect, the ultimate aim of all the visual arts was what he called the ‘complete building’.