In some homes, the latest design feature isn’t something you add, but something you remove. Analogue rooms, spaces designed for reading, listening to vinyl, or ‘just being’ (as an emerging wave of Gen Z aspiring Luddites tell me on TikTok, ironically), are catering to a new kind of luxury: being unreachable, at least for a while.
In our always-on culture, there is something faintly unnerving about the idea of a room in which the USP is absence. Maddie Cordle, co-founder of the architectural and interior design agency MIRAHSTON, describes it as “almost reminiscent of a panic room”: a contained space you retreat to escape a force (technology) that has taken over the house. And there’s little denying that tech has taken over. Where once there were boundaries — a computer in the study, a shared landline coiled on the wall — tech today is ever-present and, quite literally, wearable. We carry our connectivity with us 24 hours a day. The analogue room attempts to reverse that.
