What is Luxury?

If anyone knows, it’s Steve Nobel, co-founder of the Luxury Home Alliance and a consultant to luxury brands such as Kravet, where he recently started a blog.

“Luxury today is a state-of-mind or state-of-the-soul, rather than a statement on the size or elasticity of one’s wallet,” he writes on Inspired.Talk. “We believe that luxury is really much better described as an intimate and exclusive experience with time, quality, and imagination.”

Huh? He goes into laborious detail about what time, quality, and imagination mean, but he lost me. As they say, though, a picture is worth a thousand words, and the few images he’s chosen to illustrate luxury (shown below) say it all. Steve, please post more of them!

The grouping of art, along with the dramatic black sculpture and statues on that huge coffee table, frame the luscious colors and shapes of the rest of the room. Luxury is the ability to pile on objects, patterns, textures, colors, and shapes into a whole that is perfectly cohesive and not … piled on.

You don’t have to be a dog lover to appreciate the exquisite layering of fabrics and patterns here. Luxury is wrapping yourself in deep, dramatic folds – everywhere you turn.

Only an artist can successfully mix all the prints you see in this room. Non-interior designers, don’t try this at home. Luxury is achieving this stupendous balance of pattern and hue in a way that makes your heart sing.

This space is so cool and confident, yet serene in understatement. Luxury is knowing how to edit a room down to the barest and most beautiful essentials.