Mt8 — UPCYCLING: Harford House

LONDON | Carina Harford on the “luxury of immediacy”

WORDS BY MICHAEL ZARATHUS-COOK

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For those of us living paycheck-to-paycheck─about 50% of Canadians and 65% of Americans─the concept of a financial “doom loop” is an intimate one. We buy cheap things because that’s what we can afford, and the short lifespans of these things mean we have to spend more money replacing them at a higher frequency. In short, it costs more money to be poor than otherwise. One of the subtle but significant areas where this vicious cycle is evident is the issue of sustainability. In the aftermath of our high-frequency purchases, where do these cheap gadgets and appliances go? Most likely to the Great Pacific garbage patch, an oceanic trash vortex stretching approximately 1.6 million square kilometres wide. One can feel helpless not just because of the difficulty of escaping this loop but also how much our individual efforts pale in comparison to the carbon footprints of your friendly neighbourhood mega-corporations and top one-percenters. However small the influence of our actions, it does feel good to repair, reuse, and repurpose that piece of furniture you bought 10 years ago instead of tossing it to the curb and heading to Ikea.

It’s this therapeutic practice of upcycling that informs the interior design practice of London’s Carina Harford. Operating under the moniker of Harford House, she engages sustainability not as an inconvenient hurdle but as a design opportunity to make spaces feel more lived in. She’s gathered an enthusiastic following online, partly thanks to her humourous apartment reviews where she assigns attachment types to her followers based on what their living setup suggests about their emotional availability.

Carina Harford

Most of her clients hail from London’s sprawling boroughs and, as she admits in conversation with Cannopy, are of the well-to-do sort who can afford to shell out a few extra pounds for more durable materials. Instead of cowering to the challenge that her clientele doesn’t reflect where most people are financially, she posits an interesting retort: that our overindulgence in the “luxury of immediacy” is a significant contributor to our fast-furniture culture. Whether you agree or disagree with this take, the ineluctible solution to this problem is also the most elusive: more time. That’s the real vicious cycle we’re stuck in, our intentions for more sustainable urban living rarely correspond to the time we have to make like-minded decisions and purchases. Time and city form a Venn diagram of two circles that don’t touch. For Harford, it’s not all doom, and there’s no gloom in her philosophy of making the best of the vintage cards that you’re dealt. From eschewing “virgin materials” to extending the shelf life of that shelf you’re thinking of tossing, Harford House believes you can have your style cake and eat your sustainability one too.  

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Find this and more in our latest print edition — Issue No. 13: