Designing a Life

I started posting this picture of my garage/office just because it looked lovely last night, in the crisp clear evening, with some strange and rare snow here in Vancouver…

Then I thought – yeah, this is my commute.  I’ve enjoyed a few weeks of blissful “quiet” after a rip-roaring non-stop 6 months of working 24/7.  I realized recently my little interior design consulting company turns 25 this year. How did that happen?

However it happened, and how it evolved, wasn’t really a grand plan. It was one step at a time. I hung out my shingle because I was unhappy and felt stifled in the firm I worked for as a young 30-something designer. I had an opportunity to teach design at a college for international students, and this gave me an out: I could teach a bit to pay the bills and then start my own consulting firm and build it up, without the immediate day to day worry of money.

As my client base grew, I tapered off the teaching. I juggled both for a few years, then had enough work to stop teaching.  I was fortunate to get a lot of work from a health authority, and recall thinking: Boy! What will I do if I don’t have their work? It’s 90% of my billings… Now that client’s billings represent less than 10% of my work.  The industry has changed and project types and sizes have also changed. P3’s (public private partnerships) for health care have been a game changer. I’m involved in many larger, more comprehensive projects for consortiums and care home providers, rather than many smaller projects with local hospitals. Never anticipated that evolution.

In terms of work-life balance, the office has usually been in a spare bedroom or the basement. In this house it’s out back in the garage by the lane.  It’s always kept me close to home and my son. When I became a single mom 15 years ago, it did require a bit of creativity!   Thankfully I found I had the discipline to be able to work and flip back and forth to do chores, run errands, have a bit of time out, and still get the work done.  I’m grateful for that, and the time in-between when I could explore and evolve as an artist.

Taking time for my son, booking off Pro-D days and days when he was sick, and being able to go on some of his field trips, gave me such flexibility in being a mom and raising him. When he was a wee baby I only worked about 10 hours a week; when he was in school my work day was 9am-3pm. Now that he’s a very independent young adult I have more leeway to work the long days and travel that the work requires currently.  I must say that was the key benefit to doing consulting work on a project by project basis. I imagine it would be impossible to be bank manager part-time.  I was able to temper the work load by the number of projects I took on: whether it was 1 project, or 14, they were all of the same caliber – and I could fill the role as the senior/principal designer.

Through my working life I’ve always followed some simple rules: creating solid long lasting relationships,  getting involved in my association, living “marketing” every day, never burning bridges, trying to give everyone as much respect as I would want to get. That has also paid off for me.

I will have no pension, but I have lived in freedom for 25 years, scary… but work always came in.  One of my key clients wanted to discuss “the future” recently. I was worried they would want me to come work for them full time.  I love them, but I realized after 25 years of being on my own, I just couldn’t adapt to a full time in-the-office schedule.

I suppose there have been sacrifices along the way, the absence of benefits and holiday pay, insecurity…but I look back and can’t really think of a “bad” time.  I wouldn’t change a thing.

All that, from a photo in the snow.

I Love My Job

There are days when we get frustrated and have to do the tough or mundane parts of our jobs, but there are also times when everything sings… when you love what you do.

This summer I had the pleasure of starting a new design project, for a large hospital in Penticton. This was the competition phase – where three large firms are shortlisted and each team has to submit a design proposal based on their understanding of the project and also bring their own skills and talents to create a superlative building design that wins them the project.

I went to the Okanagan to research the area and gather inspiration. Part of the criteria involved integrating first nations culture and history into the design. I headed down to Penticton, picked up my Dad, who lives there, and spent the day with him. He accompanied me as I drove down to Osoyoos, toured the Nk’Mip Desert Cultural Centre, and took photos of the landscape on the beautiful drive back. We had lived in Summerland briefly in the 60’s and it brought back memories for us, sparking interesting road trip conversations.

I later had a fruitful session with the wonderfully helpful archivist at the local museum… she pulled out photos and books for me to ponder – and this helped me gather ideas.

It was a wonderful day of discovery…I treasure this part of my job: gathering, gathering, gathering….Not knowing what will come of it, but not concerning myself with that at the time – just staying open and gathering. This is the beauty of the design process, and it is so satisfying when it unfolds organically.

I later found how much I enjoyed organizing and presenting this material to the client group; talking about what I had discovered, and how I would craft and organize the interior design theme, colours, motifs, signage around what I had discovered. There was so much information and so many options – at first I wasn’t sure how it would all come together, but I trusted that it would, in time. All the while I had my architect colleagues giving me free reign to explore and design and then respecting my work and trusting that the outcome would be excellent.

And it was.   There is a wonderful word, naming the first nation in that area: Syilx. I guess it’s the meaning that I find wonderful: the binding and twisting of multi-stranded fibres to create one strong cohesive element, and it signifies not just the collective unification of these fibres, but each individual’s responsibility to play a part in the continual binding and unification of this whole. I thought it was a wonderful metaphor for “community” and this was the backbone of my theme and design.

This week we found out we won the project. I’m thrilled, and really do appreciate what I get to do for work.

 

Good News Shoes

I worked very hard this summer. I had two large project competitions going at the same time. Once the dust settled and they were submitted we then had to wait to hear….hear if we had won the project.

It was hectic at the time and I was putting in long days, seven days a week for months late this summer and fall. It’s always nice to have a “carrot”, a reward in mind. So one day I said: “If we win one of the jobs, I get a pair of Fluevogs.”

If you live in Vancouver you probably know what that means. John Fluevog is a master craftsman, creating gorgeous, playful, and artful handmade shoes and he has an international and celebrity cult following.

I remember in the 1970’s it was Fox and Fluevog for fantastical one of a kind shoes, but ten years later Peter Fox and John Fluevog went their separate ways. John Fluevog renamed the business and focused more on designing shoes. “The company was like a big art project where I could discover more about myself” he was quoted as saying. He continues to create magic making shoes and now decades later has a fabulous flagship store very near the original Fox and Fluevog location in Gastown, a heritage district of Vancouver..

If you know me, you probably know I love shoes. Yeah…I have….a lot… of shoes. Too many I’m sure. But I didn’t have a pair of black and ivory ones…till now.

Early in December my team found out we did win the big care facility project in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory. It represents a fair chunk of my project work for the upcoming year. I will be on the team that will take our design to completion over the next year and see that wonderful project become a reality.

And that meant I got to go shopping and buy my first pair of Fluevogs, because I felt I deserved a treat after that good news.

On the origin of this shoe style, with its contrasting heel and toe accents, known as a “spectator” shoe:

John Lobb, the famous English footwear maker, is said to have designed the first spectator shoe in 1868 as a cricket shoe. In the 1920s and 1930s in England, this style was considered too flamboyant for a gentleman, and was regarded as a tasteless style. As it was popular among lounge lizards and cads, who were sometimes associated with divorce cases, a nickname for the style was “co-respondent” shoe: a pun on the colour arrangement on the shoe, and the legal description of a third party associated with the guilty party in a case of adultery. My! What a racy little history note about a shoe!

I am waiting on the results of the other project competition. Wish us luck hearing more good news in January.

Forts are for Adults Too

Do you remember as a kid how fun it was to create forts in the living room with quilts and blankets draped on top of chairs and tables?

Although it is not scorching by other North Americans’ standards, it’s pretty darn hot for Vancouverites here on the Wet Coast. (That’s not a typo). It’s been in the 90’s for over a week, and we are just not used to it! Hardly any of our homes have air-conditioning, as we only get “hot” summer days a few days per year. Combine this with some forest fires nearby which have created a post-apocalyptic looking smokey haze, hampering air quality and preventing us from opening our windows, and you have an extremely uncomfortable situation!

We are all scratching our heads and don’t know what to do! It’s too hot up in my little attic bedroom, so I slept on a blow up bed in the basement one night and I slept on the sofa (main floor) the other night. Not comfy.  Looking at the forecast for the week ahead, I decided to take action. Thank goodness I have a basement: I just had to make it work for me!

I treated it like a design exercise. Space: I moved a large layout table in my painting studio corner out of the way in order to have a space big enough for a double mattress. Furniture: I took the two narrow mattresses that zip together from the folding sofa/bed in the guest room, upstairs (they are pretty comfy) and brought them down. Finishes: The walls are rough-ish flake board in my unfinished basement, so I found some draperies and staple gunned them to the wall so I could lean against the wall and not get any wood slivers. Lighting: I attached a little spotlight beside the bed for late night reading.

It’s also kinda cobwebby down there, so I took a hanging mosquito net and placed it above the bed for double duty. I discovered a tiny old TV that had a built in VHS player, and also found a box of old VHS tapes with Sex in the City episodes, so I put that on a couple end tables I had in the storage room. I added some sheets and pillows and presto: I have a little fort where I can relax and stay cool. I feel like I’m glamping!

It was a fun project for a quiet Sunday night. I had my first good night’s sleep in a week.

Styling in an Instant

I’ve found a new art form. One that is immediate, easy, fun, and infinitely creative.

I worked in advertising prior to returning to school to study design. In design school I found our Theory Plate exercise (dubbed Pinky Plates for the U of M professor who initiated this process) such a fun exercise. It allowed me to use my nascent skills and understanding of the principles and elements of design and put them to work: organizing a layout, finding balance, playing with scale and colour, as well as shape/mass/form.

It’s been a while since then….I’ve spent 25 years as an interior designer by day and an artist by night. In the last ten years, single home ownership and motherhood has taken a lot of my free time – there hasn’t been much space to create art, in the form of painting, although I keep saying “I’ll start soon”.  I’ve realized though, that I have been “creating art” continuously, as I carve out a creative existence and live artfully every day.

I’m loving working on a book right now, which is the documentation of that creative experience, and I’ve chosen this as my priority to pursue right now. I’m really enjoying it. Along with that, and to support that, I’ve been blogging here on WordPress and posting on Instagram. Instagram has opened a door to a whole new world of visuals and inspiration. I’m following food bloggers, stylists, photographers, and foodies from all over the world.

When I first saw some of these stunning images, in particular a gorgeous aesthetic that’s coming out of Scandinavia right now, I thought: “OK! I GET this…I can do this….” It had never occurred to me to take, let alone stage, photos in such ways. Of course at first I thought I would mimic or replicate some of the styles I saw, but I quickly realized that I had my own style developing.

Now I go through my day and I find all kinds of opportunities to capture and document beauty and design. How to show a particular meal in a beautiful way, share a gorgeous view of something, a captivating leaf or flower. It’s made me up my game. And I’ve found that it is second nature, and it flows with ease.

I pull a piece of beautiful fabric for a complementary background, I wander into the garden for something to add that accentuates the visual. I look in the cupboard for a beautiful dish or plate. All this happens in five minutes or so.

I usually lay things out on the back porch, where natural light abounds, but is soft and gentle, without hard shadows. No additional light required, and usually no filters needed….

I find it’s like painting….instantly… I snap a shot or two with my phone. Then, if it’s a meal, I sit down to eat. Maybe it’s a visual blessing of sorts; creating some reverence for the bounty we usually consume in a less mindful state….As I try to eat healthier, slower, more mindfully, I find this practice enhancing that experience.

I dug up my original Pinky Plates, from my first year in design school, 1987. I still like them.

Ravishing

Had the pleasure of catching a fabulous exhibit at the Museum of Vancouver the other weekend. It was called “From Rationing to Ravishing” and exhibited women’s fashions from the 1930’s onward, through war time, and the impact that the war had on clothing styles and designs (think scarcity of materials as well as a paradigm shift regarding luxury and extravagance).  There were many lovely examples by haute couture designers from both North America and Europe.

   

It was sublime….and more so because I went with a lovely friend who works in costume design for television. We were throwing around terms about sewing and fabrics that may have had others scratching their heads, but we understood each other beautifully and had a blast reveling in the gorgeous examples, fabrics, colours.

What a wonderful day!

(one of my fav’s, a Balenciaga coat…)

Ode to Ruska

Hard to believe one could write a few paragraphs about one’s dishes! My dishes have an interesting story.

Arabia of Finland’s “Ruska” pattern was designed by Ulla Procope in the early 1960’s. My big sister worked in an independent kitchen boutique in the late 70’s where they sold these dishes, and she fell in love with them and bought a half dozen place settings. While she moved back home, I was getting married and in gathering mode so we made a deal. Now they were my dishes. They were pretty cool, and very Scandinavian: which was both exotic and cool.

The coolest thing is that they were designed in 1960’s, and then apparently won a design award in 1989, which is a testament to their classic style. In fact, years ago at the Canadian Craft Museum, here in Vancouver, there was a display of 5 decades of housewares and furnishings and two of my types of dishes were in the museum display: Ruska, and Russell Wright’s Iroquois stoneware (but that’s another blog post!).

The most fortunate thing was one day a designer friend of mine (who notices things like this, naturally, she’s a designer!) stumbled upon a box of dishes at a garage sale. She called me up: “Uh…Mary….I think this is a box of your dishes…for $10….shall I buy them?” “Yes!” I responded enthusiastically over the phone. In the box was a coffee pot, some soufflé dishes, more bowls and cups and saucers – worth over $300.

Over time, I’ve needed more when ones have broken or when I wanted to expand place settings, but they’ve gotten hard to get, and expensive: $30 per piece or so….so I’ve supplemented with another pattern from IKEA that is super reasonable and blends quite seamlessly.

I see them occasionally in print advertising, usually in soup ads…the chocolate brown colour is rich and warm. Their provenance is rich and warm too…and cool.

Warmth

A close friend of mine who lives in another part of B.C., was getting ready to host her parents: they were coming to stay with her and her husband, travelling from a smaller community to the city hospital where her father would receive radiation treatment. They would be required to stay for 5 weeks.

My friends have a lovely, spacious home, but felt the lower floor guest suite and living area lacked the warmth needed to create a supportive environment that would make her parents stay a little easier.

We were talking on the phone, as we often do….(for hours…)… and I said: “I wish I could help you get it organized!”. She said: “Come and help! I’ll fly you up here for the weekend.”

So I went the other weekend, Friday night till Sunday night. We planned and talked Friday evening about what we could do to improve the space. She had made one purchase of some lovely red recliners.

Saturday morning, after a fabulous breakfast, we shopped and shopped. Throws, cushions, a large rug, investigating some furniture options. I can make quick decisions and give advice pretty easily, having been an interior designer for 25 years…I think it helped. At the end of the afternoon we got busy, prepped walls and painted the bedroom. Then put our feet up with another glorious meal – her husband was keeping us well fed!

Sunday morning we got up, painted another coat in the bedroom, shopped some more, hung drapery hardware, sewed a few seams, ate some more and then I headed home. Even though I had a sore throat and felt quite under the weather, it didn’t phase me.

We had a blast, got to talk and talk, and talk…and made such progress. We worked side by side and were so satisfied with our efforts and the result. The room is done, and it will serve her parents well later this year….What a wonderful daughter and son-in-law they have. How caring and generous and supportive. What wonderful friends I have. I was so happy to help.