Design: Hip Styles for Blue Chips

During the past decade or so, interior decorators have been successfully lobbying to upgrade the nomenclature of their trade: they now insist on being called interior designers. Which is fine, except that for all the nominal professionalism, interior design remains for the most part a trivial pursuit that prizes fancy blandness above all. While the other design professions at least aspire to greatness, and even encourage their innovators to provoke the rest of the field, most interior design wants to be pretty and profitable and make no waves.

But not Scott Strasser. At 35, Strasser is a thoroughgoing anomaly. His $ spiky hair and Tokyo-hipster clothing might be unremarkable in Los Angeles or New York City, but he was raised and still lives in conservative Texas. There he is director of interior architecture of the big, conventional, Houston- based architecture firm CRSS, directing a staff of 35. And he has become a leader in a courtier's discipline (Interiors magazine named him 1989 Designer of the Year) despite an aggressively impolitic style. "Corporate design," he says, "is a stupid profession that hasn't learned what it's doing wrong. Most interior design is like elevator music."

Most improbable and intriguing of all, Strasser is being permitted to apply his fluent vision -- joyfully modernist, austere but playful, reasoned, practical, never grim -- to the interiors of huge blue-chip office hives. He recently finished a 1.2 million-sq.-ft., multibuilding IBM outpost near Dallas, and construction has begun in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., on a two-block- long office building for a giant entertainment company. "I don't assume a corporation is conservative and conventional," he says. "I don't feel that as soon as they say 'corporate,' you have to do chickenshit work."

Decor as such doesn't much excite Strasser; he is not one for gushing about some marvelous chintz or a divine settee. "I hate wood," he says, editing that a moment later: "I hate wood used in the wrong place, in the wrong way." "I don't like furniture and fabrics," he says, before once again catching himself: "No -- I don't place a high value on furniture and fabrics." But often he lets the absolutisms stand. "Every time I do a space, I like it better before the furniture comes -- without exception." And when it comes to colors, he says, "I abhor perfect matches -- it's tacky."

What makes Strasser's work refreshing is its liberation from slick superficial image making of either the "traditional" or the trendy variety -- no capriciously transplanted Corinthian columns, no aren't-we-important mahogany wainscoting. "The problem with most interior designers," he says, "is that they just decorate. I try to design architecture indoors."

Strasser the infrastructure nerd (his Texas Tech degree is in architecture and engineering) finds buildings' guts -- beams, electrical outlets, air conditioning ductwork -- compelling pieces of the interior design puzzle. "I want my interiors to be a little raw, stark, to the point," he says. "Architecture is good -- you don't need to cover it up on the inside. But it's hard to get clients to go raw." The severe Texas recession of the 1980s was his big break: with corporate budgets tight and deluxe froufrous out of the question, it became easier to convince businesses of the merits of thoughtful Strasserian austerity.