Custom Furniture: 90% Perspiration
Last week was spent with two designers from Douglas Durkin Design, Greg Elich and Andrew Horn. They were in Bali to work on a collection of extraordinary custom furniture for a residence in Hawaii.
For those of you who might imagine that creating high-end custom furniture is pure glamour, just have a look “backstage” at the process of design refinement. We spent hours and hours each day in the workshop, a fascinating place, but very dusty, and very, very hot and humid. And lo! Wonder of wonders! A furniture workshop normally has almost no furniture suited to comfortable sitting, so we perched and paced and mopped the sweat from our brows, all the while utterly absorbed with the work at hand.
Haunted by Gervasoni’s Ghost
We’ve found once again an extraordinary line of furniture that just works. Comfortable, stylish, elegant, confidently irreverant. It’s Gervasoni’s Ghost collection, a semi-spooky, seams-out fog of soft seating. When you have a space containing art and artefacts worthy of attention, you can either go museum-bench rigid with the upholstered pieces, or sit back and opt consciously for seating that whispers eloquently instead of shouting. Let’s all sit comfortably to take in our surroundings and the people occuppying them, shall we, rather than poising rigidly while eyeing the nearest exit?
We love the slipcovered nonchalance of the Ghost collection, with its wrinkled ease. Relaxed, after all should be authentically relaxed, yet with good bones and proportions. This is it. These pieces are draped in a way that’s more like a summer home taken by surprise than a stuffy Miss Havisham horror. And Gervasoni’s Ghost collection is emininently practical, one might add. It’s all slipcovered, ready to wash and wear and wear and wear. No ironing necessary.
Here Materials Matter Most
Been looking for alternatives to hard-edged modern-minimalist rectilinearity? Alternatives suited to a non-urban, natural island lifestyle? Here’s one – - furniture, lighting and accessories by Bleu Nature. This is rustic primitive minimalism without apology. Driftwood and hairballs against icy white set the tone of their new 2008-2009 collection. It’s beachy and arctic at the same time.
Bleu Nature’s site is nice, too. Its “about” page is utterly enchanting. First off, it’s not called “about”, it’s called “a nice story.” And nice it is. Founder Franck LeFebvre’s portrait reveals a jovial, robust and relaxed character who is patently French. The very same character flavours Bleu Nature’s collections.
“In our studio we build, nail, adjust, fasten and balance our pieces,” LeFebvre states. “All Bleu Nature creations are born of an encounter between the technical mastery of a French craftsman and the prolonged work of nature.”
That’s a theme I can subscribe to. What would a Barcelona Chair look like if it had been washed up on a beach for fifty years? Interesting.
Test Your Colour IQ
Fine sensitivity to colour is essential for designers, art dealers, and fashionistas. How good is your eye for colour? You can test it online here, fast and free, at xrite, the world’s leading colour measurement and management company.
I did well on the test, with only a few tiny mistakes, all of them in the blue range. Blue is my least favourite part of the colour spectrum. And I have blue eyes. I wonder if there is any significant correlation between favourite colours and colour sensitivity? Between eye colour and colour sensitivity? I know that men almost uniformly have less sensitive colour discrimination than women. I wonder what other genetic factors correlate with colour sensitivity? Do gay men have finer colour sense than straight ones, for example?
Stay Well, Sleep Well in Honolulu
The Aqua hotel in Honolulu has reinvented itself as a green, sleek, design boutique property called Renew. What was basically an uninspired late-century box of a hotel is now rather splendid, thanks to its appropriate reinvention, with metro-tropical Asian interiors by Jiun Ho, Malay-born, San Francisco-based designer, whose career we’ve been following for some time. So if you thought that a tasteful, environmentally-responsible stay in a city like Honolulu wasn’t possible, think again. And rooms are priced below $200 online at various travel discount sites.
Getting tropical design right in a changing world (and in a rapidly urbanising Bali), is something we are very interested in, and here’s an interesting approach.
Architectural Digest: Redeemed
I’m not a huge fan of the American magazine, Architectural Digest. Often, the properties featured cross the border between the extravagant and the vulgar, with unleashed spending taking priority over good taste and good design. My sister, a champion of simple living, refers to the magazine as Barfitectural Indigestion, which is perhaps a bit excessive, but less excessive than the properties AD usually features.
Well, AD has redeemed itself in my eyes with the forthcoming September 2008 issue, already visible online. There is more taste, restraint and reality in this issue than I recall having seen in AD for decades. The most noteworthy contents for me are the Venetian home of one of my favourite dealer-designers Axel Veervoordt (above), and the minimalist Mexican retreat of Michael Schaible (below).
Perhaps the economic “come-uppance” that America is experiencing has inspired a return to sobriety and quality after the wanton material excesses of the past decade.
Liaigre by Liaigre
Christian Liaigre’s new book Liagre will hit the shelves this September. Reserve your advance copy now, at $125. Or click it on Amazon.com for just $78.75. Authored by Liaigre, and Thomas Luntz, with photos by Jean-Philippe Peter, the book features six exclusive properties in Spain, Bora Bora, Switzerland, France and elsewhere. Many of the interior design trends you love now are derived from Liaigre, but go to the guru himself to see how it is really meant to be. You will burn your clumsy clunky wood furniture when you see how it should have been. Taste, proportion, eye, restraint and balance; these are absolutes, and impossible to fake.
Brains + Taste + Restraint = Curated.
I chose to use the word “restraint” here deliberately. Restraint as in “child restraints” or “self restraint.” The concept of restraint is something I sermonise about every day. Good design requires a lot of restraint. There are a tremendous number of wonderful products out there for interiors, from flooring to ceiling light fixtures. But you don’t need to use them all, just because they’re so cool you can’t resist. You must resist. The principles of good design demand it.
I found an interior design studio today that understands restraint. The firm is Curated. They seem to understand restraint in two different ways. They clearly understand restraint in choosing elements to combine in a space. I see a dedication to relevance and appropriateness in their portfolio that is uncommon. They also understand restraint in terms of the designer’s duty to restrain the client when necessary. Good design is not saying “yes” to every whim and watching the total spend spiral skyward (with a smug smile).
It’s All Greek to Me
I love it when I see antique textiles serving as inspiration for new ones. And here is a lovely example: Naxos upholstery fabric by the Pollack Studio in a high-tech cotton blend, woven in Switzerland. The inspiration for this elegant jacquard seems to have been an embroidered pillow cover from the Greek islands dating from the 17th or 18th century. How did I figure that out, you may ask?
While browsing for upholstery fabric for a client I came upon Pollack’s Naxos and remembered a “Textile of the Month” I saw on the Textile Museum’s website about a year ago. The image above shows the old and the new, and that both are very beautiful textiles.
Meditate on This
All is Buddha. Each form, each particle is a Buddha. One form is all Buddhas. All forms, all particles, are all Buddhas. All forms, sounds, scents, feelings, and phenomena are also like this, each filling all fields. – Pai-chang
This great truth can now be made manifest on your walls, affordably. Alchemy Collections of Seattle offers these sandstone tiles to order, with an all over relief pattern of many, many Buddhas. These commercial quality tiles measure 25 x 40 cm, are made of 80% natural quartz and 20% resin, and retail at $30 each. Buddhacious.