When Did Linoleum Get So Luxe?

FOR DECADES linoleum has been shorthand for downmarket and drab, the stuff of dingy, unrenovated kitchens and hospital corridors. But lately that bad rap is fading, thanks to creative, environmentally conscious designers who are approaching the material with fresh eyes. In the linoleum renaissance, the colours are rich and sophisticated, the patterns unexpected. In cabinetry and furnishings as well as underfoot, these new, elevated versions argue persuasively that the utilitarian workhorse can deliver practicality with panache.

Patented in the 1860s by English inventor Frederick Walton, “linoleum was actually quite fashionable and cutting edge when it was created,” explained Alexandra Lange, a design critic and author of five books on 20th century design including “Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall.” That popularity, she added, endured for over a century. By the 1920s, companies like Armstrong Flooring (which no longer produces linoleum, but was a major player throughout the 20th century) offered hundreds of designs, a tempting menu of textures, hues and patterns that ranged from simple marble swirls to Persian “carpets.” But by the 1990s, attitudes—at least in America—shifted, leaving lino in limbo. “Around 2000, you started to see a fetishisation of luxury and ‘natural’ materials like stone and wood,” said Ms. Lange.

Despite its cut-rate reputation—and the way it is unfairly lumped together with plastic products like laminate counters and vinyl flooring—linoleum remains one of the “greenest” materials on the interiors market. Made from organic components like cork dust, linseed oil, and jute, it can be easily renewable and recyclable. Also, said Ms. Lange, lino is light and inherently soft—as low-impact on the body as it is on the planet.

Daniel Rabin and Annie Ritz of And And And Studio, a Los Angeles design firm, say environmental motives were among the reasons they began experimenting with linoleum as a cabinet veneer in 2018. “Because of the rules around VOCs, painting cabinets is almost a non-option in California these days—the paints that are truly hard-wearing just can’t be used,” explained Mr. Rabin. “[Coloured] lino performs almost the same way, while also hiding fingerprints and being super durable.”

At a midcentury home in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighbourhood the duo chose furniture-grade linoleum by Forbo—the Switzerland-based brand preferred by all the designers we spoke with—to clad both the kitchen cabinets and the walls running along a curving butler’s pantry and powder room. While many other so-called “modern” finishes lean hard and cold, “the haptic quality, the touch of [linoleum], is warm and soft and matte,” said Mr. Rabin. “It has this beautiful way of interacting with light and sound.”

In London, Malcolm Weir and Tom Jarvis of the kitchen workshop West & Reid have taken to using linoleum on everything from custom cabinetry to their own office desks. “As soon as clients touch it, they get it—especially if it’s a colour they like,” Mr. Jarvis said. As with luxury paint company Farrow & Ball, Forbo’s furniture linoleum comes in limited hues, but the narrow selection—including a pale pink and moody pistachio—tends to be sophisticated and cannily on-trend.

Reform, a kitchen design firm in Copenhagen, collaborates with international architects on a range of cabinets, drawers, and panels that pay homage to the traditions of Nordic modernism. In 2014, its first line, BASIS, included a lino option; eight years later, those linoleum cabinets remain the company’s best seller, said CEO and founder Jeppe Christensen. “It was not so big a leap for us because so many of the innovative midcentury Scandinavian makers who inspire us, like Arne Jacobsen, were creating wonderful things with linoleum in the ’50s and ’60s.”

Beata Heuman, the Swedish-born, London-based interior designer known for crafting playful, cosmopolitan interiors, also credits her affection for linoleum to her childhood in Scandinavia where, she said, it never really fell out of fashion. “There’s something really subtle and lovely about it—it’s a big part of my repertoire,” said Ms. Heuman.

In a hotel project currently underway in Paris, Ms. Heuman has run linoleum along the walls of a powder room in the manner of a dado panel. For past residential assignments, she has used lightly marbled sheets of linoleum flooring everywhere from tidy living rooms to family bathrooms. The material, she said, has a wonderful way of warming up the space and “bring[ing] luxe finishes back down to earth.”

In kitchens, lino squares remain classic. “Checkerboard can feel a little cliche, but we recently put pale cream and gray together and that felt really peaceful and serene,” Ms. Heuman explained, noting that the sometimes aggressive pattern assumes a gentler personality when executed in neutrals. For the mudroom of a family home in Notting Hill, the designer updated a mosaic linoleum she spied in a photo of an Art Deco-era New York City vestibule. “There are so many possibilities,” she said with a laugh. “Honestly, my total fantasy would be to partner with Forbo and design a range of linoleum for them.”

Linoleum is “really good at crossing the high-low line,” said Rustam Mehta of the New York firm GRT Architects. Indeed, for a current project—an ambitious, top-dollar reimagining of a Harlem townhouse—Mr. Mehta uses the material not just as a luxe, powder-pink drawer facing in the kitchen and dining rooms but also, in hunter green and deep red, to top two custom-millwork desks. “It evokes a classic leather writing surface,” he explained.

“We’re at this interesting place,” said Mr. Mehta. “It’s like subway tile or penny tile—people love to elevate these simple things. Americans know what linoleum is but might not know what it can be.”

I wish to protest the current ugliness. I see it as a continuing trend, “the uglification of everything.” It is coming out of our culture with picked-up speed, and from many media silos, and I don’t like it.

You remember the 1999 movie “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” from the Patricia Highsmith novel. It was fabulous—mysteries, murders, a sociopath scheming his way among high-class expats on the Italian Riviera. The laid-back glamour of Jude Law, the Grace Kelly-ness of Gwyneth Paltrow, who looks like a Vogue magazine cover decided to take a stroll through the streets of 1950s Venice, the truly brilliant acting of Matt Damon, who is so well-liked by audiences I’m not sure we notice anymore what a great actor he is. The director, Anthony Minghella, deliberately showed you pretty shiny things while taking you on a journey to a heart of darkness.

There’s a new version, a streaming series from Netflix, called “Ripley.” I turned to it eagerly and watched with puzzlement. It is unrelievedly ugly. Grimy, gloomy, grim. Tom Ripley is now charmless, a pale and watchful slug slithering through ancient rooms. He isn’t bright, eager, endearing, only predatory. No one would want to know him! Which makes the story make no sense. Again, Ripley is a sociopath, but few could tell because he seemed so sweet and easy. In the original movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman has an unforgettable turn as a jazz-loving, prep-schooled, in-crowd snob. In this version that character is mirthless, genderless, hidden. No one would want to know him either. Marge, the Paltrow role in the movie, is ponderous and plain, like a lost 1970s hippie, which undercuts a small part of the tragedy: Why is the lovely woman so in love with a careless idler who loves no one?

The ugliness seemed a deliberate artistic decision, as did the air of constant menace, as if we all know life is never nice.

I go to the No. 1 program on Netflix this week, “Baby Reindeer.” People speak highly of it. It’s about a stalker and is based on a true story, but she’s stalking a comic so this might be fun. Oh dear, no. It is again unrelievedly bleak. Life is low, plain and homely. No one is ever nice or kind; all human conversation is opaque and halting; work colleagues are cruel and loud. Everyone is emotionally incapable and dumb. No one laughs except for the morbidly obese stalker, who cackles madly. The only attractive person is the transgender girlfriend, who has a pretty smile and smiles a lot, but cries a lot too and is vengeful.

Good drama always makes you think. I thought: Do I want to continue living?

I go to the Daily Mail website, once my guilty pleasure. High jinks of the rich and famous, randy royals, fast cars and movie stars, models and rock stars caught in the drug bust. It was great! But it seems to have taken a turn and is more about crime, grime, human sadness and degradation—child abuse, mothers drowning their babies, “Man murders family, self.” It is less a portal into life’s mindless, undeserved beauty, than a testimony to its horrors.

I go to the new “Cabaret.” Who doesn’t love “Cabaret”? It is dark, witty, painful, glamorous. The music and lyrics have stood the test of time. The story’s backdrop: The soft decadence of Weimar is being replaced by the hard decadence of Nazism.

It is Kander and Ebb’s masterpiece, revived again and again. And this revival is hideous. It is ugly, bizarre, inartistic, fundamentally stupid. Also obscene but in a purposeless way, without meaning.

I had the distinct feeling the producers take their audience to be distracted dopamine addicts with fractured attention spans and no ability to follow a story. They also seemed to have no faith in the story itself, so they went with endless pyrotechnics. This is “Cabaret” for the empty-headed. Everyone screams. The songs are slowed, because you might need a moment to take it in. Almost everyone on stage is weirdly hunched, like a gargoyle, everyone overacts, and all of it is without art.

On the way in, staffers put stickers on the cameras of your phone, “to protect our intellectual property,” as one said.

It isn’t an easy job to make the widely admired Eddie Redmayne unappealing, but by God they did it. As he’s a producer I guess he did it, too. He takes the stage as the Emcee in a purple leather skirt with a small green cone on his head and appears further on as a clown with a machine gun and a weird goth devil. It is all so childish, so plonkingly empty.

Here is something sad about modern artists: They are held back by a lack of limits.

Bob Fosse, the director of the classic 1972 movie version, got to push against society’s limits and Broadway’s and Hollywood’s prohibitions. He pushed hard against what was pushing him, which caused friction; in the heat of that came art. Directors and writers now have nothing to push against because there are no rules or cultural prohibitions, so there’s no friction, everything is left cold, and the art turns in on itself and becomes merely weird.

Fosse famously loved women. No one loves women in this show. When we meet Sally Bowles, in the kind of dress a little girl might put on a doll, with heavy leather boots and harsh, garish makeup, the character doesn’t flirt, doesn’t seduce or charm. She barks and screams, angrily.

Really it is harrowing. At one point Mr. Redmayne dances with a toilet plunger, and a loaf of Italian bread is inserted and removed from his anal cavity. I mentioned this to my friend, who asked if I saw the dancer in the corner masturbating with a copy of what appeared to be “Mein Kampf.”

That’s what I call intellectual property!

In previous iterations the Kit Kat Club was a hypocrisy-free zone, a place of no boundaries, until the bad guys came and it wasn’t. I’m sure the director and producers met in the planning stage and used words like “breakthrough” and “a ‘Cabaret’ for today,” and “we don’t hide the coming cruelty.” But they do hide it by making everything, beginning to end, lifeless and grotesque. No innocence is traduced because no innocence exists.

How could a show be so frantic and outlandish and still be so tedious? It’s almost an achievement.

And for all that there is something smug about it, as if they’re looking down from some great, unearned height.

I left thinking, as I often do now on seeing something made ugly: This is what purgatory is going to be like. And then, no, this is what hell is going to be like—the cackling stalker, the pale sociopath, Eddie Redmayne dancing with a plunger.

Why does it all bother me?

Because even though it isn’t new, uglification is rising and spreading as an artistic attitude, and it can’t be good for us. Because it speaks of self-hatred, and a society that hates itself, and hates life, won’t last. Because it gives those who are young nothing to love and feel soft about. Because we need beauty to keep our morale up.

Because life isn’t merde, in spite of what our entertainment geniuses say.

When Did Linoleum Get So Luxe?

Seduced by its versatility and velvety good looks, designers are putting the old-school staple to surprising use in cabinetry, flooring and furnishings—proving it’s not only sustainable but chic.

Artistic culture has taken a repulsive turn. It speaks of a society that hates itself, and hates life.