One Room Challenge Week 08: The Library Is Open, Officially!

Welcome back to week eight and our big reveal on the One Room Challenge. We would like to pass on our congratulations to the One Room Challenge team because this is their 10th anniversary since its founding. We would also like to thank their sponsors, including some of our favourite brands BLANCO (sinks & faucets) and Mitzi (lighting and our project’s brand sponsor). Without leading sponsors like these, and of course media sponsors like Apartment Therapy, we would not have the opportunity to showcase our creativity, community, diversity, and of course… our style!

You have been following our One Room Challenge project that is combining our work-from-home space and dining room. The room is a proper living room of a 112 year old multi-family, full-service building. Our inspiration all started with the book Biblio Style by Nina Freudenberger and Sadie Stein where they featured a Parisian dining/library concept that brings together the elements we needed: entertaining, working, and living. This hybrid way of working and living is perfect for our needs because we provide both full-service and online design services, in addition to Corey’s brand and industry consulting. Plus his instructional delivery work at the Visual College of Art & Design (VCAD) Vancouver Campus.

Looking through the windows of Parisian salons in vogue like a voyeur, is not how I wish live anymore. Instead, I wanted to bring our experiences into our everyday home and live with the culture, flavours, and styles we have both come to adore. Visually integrating a mixed interplay (melange) of vintage, antique and modernist design styles speaks to the jaw dropping Parisian interiors I have come to relish and savour in all the top shelter magazines. We have the bones of a heritage-grade apartment, collections to reveal, a love of colour, and retro 80’s pieces that helped us create our own unique and visual story.

The room has many competing focal points like the bay window and fireplace. The design featured a colour-blocked bookcase to feature our entire library. “So, how am I supposed to find anything?” I asked Corey. I knew what was involved, and that my objections meant we would be dissecting all the books by category, and by colour. Although we have titled ourselves as “design-nerds”, this was one of those moments where I trusted in Corey’s vision.

I have been a bibliophile since I learned to read and I adore the smell of a good used bookstore. I chose to categorize the volumes by topics and assign them to a common height on the shelves. The arrangement of bookcases came from the same collection from a big-box retailer in a triangular form. All my beloved cookbooks were separated by colour and were assigned to the same height so when I was standing at eye level so I could walk in from the kitchen and grab the recipe I needed. This was the same for our hoards of art, sociology, and design books. The most important volumes are accessible when we are sitting at the table working (especially for Corey’s collection of texts) and I mixed fiction with literature, biographies and history books at higher and lower sections. So our bookcase is now organised into blocks of colour going from warm tones starting on the right hand side to the cool tones on the left. It just meets your eye the moment you enter the room by positioning the art opposite the bookshelf .

The colour-blocking and interplay repeats in our Victor Vasarely optical art print that is constructed of circles and squares in specific colours to achieve an OP art effect. The Coco chandelier by Mitzi which will be arriving later references the circles as well. It is becoming a stunning backdrop for our virtual meetings. The serigraph required a complete reframing and some restoration because it had become attached to the glass in its original frame. I chose a purple matt to suspend this studio print over top of, with a thick, black (and grounding) frame.

Watch more about Victor Vasarely and optical art below:

I came prepared with rug options that brought in a Memphis Design Style and/or Bauhaus format to the space and my heart stopped when I found this white and black wool rug with an asymmetrical motif. It lined up perfectly with the historic architectural elements and features of our room (and was very weirdly Memphis Design Style). Thank goodness it is wool (a material that has a natural resistance to staining) or else I would not have allowed myself a white rug in a dining room.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had these rosey-pink dishes left by Sydney. It’s almost a full set of the iconic American Modern dinner service designed by Russel Wright that started production in 1938. It was designed for dishwasher use with groundbreaking shapes and these forms have been adopted by a variety of designers and artisans. Funnily enough, they connected directly with the unique tones of the Vasarely and everything began to make sense. For additional serving pieces I will use my collections of vintage danish stainless steel and handmade pottery by local fine craft artists. I also have a goblet collection I would like to use. Everyone appreciates how intimate blown glass pieces can be when you handle and use them as functional pieces of art and I only collect one of a series per artist so I can represent what is possible in the medium with this primary purpose of taste.

We had two last minute changes to our proposed space plan. The first was a bar cabinet with a grid of burled wood was sourced off the floor of a retail show room. It was the right amount of storage and space as an activity zone. Given that the traffic flow limited the size of what could exist in that location, we realised it was the one. We chose to move the black acrylic waterfall console to the centre of the bay window instead. The Greek Revival library table ended up being moved to the corner of the room. So the only things which are not complete for our space are the re-caning of 2 of the four chairs (which will happen in the Fall) and the light fixture which will arrive in Mid to late July. I am stunned by how the bar just fits the design and thrilled by the additional storage.

If one looks at the interior design magazines of the 80’s showcasing the Memphis Design Movement and the movie Beetle Juice. There is a juxtaposition of design classics from the past 100 years with this new repertoire of startling design forms. Making it stark and sculpturally different from the frills and copies of colonial style furniture that were also common during the 80’s. You see architects and designers like Rennie Macintosh and Marcel Breuer still being relevant over a hundred years after they created their iconic design classics. With the groundbreaking Memphis Group started by Ettore Sottstass in December 11, 1980 they celebrated new manufacturing techniques, materials, and technologies in their designs. Their creations imply the optimism when designers create like this to not just spark change in the industrial complex. We use this unconventional inspiration to layout the bookcase in an asymmetrical triangular form as well as inform a curatorial layout to view our art collection.

One side note: the title of the movie poster?… In Spain during the 1960’s there was no equivalent for the phrase “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” so it became “Breakfast Of Diamonds”.

It was around this same time period (1980’s) that the studio glass movement began to achieve international notoriety. The same attention to detail, values, and individuality unique to creators, artists, and designers alike is shared between the Memphis Group and the studio glass community. This is one of the reasons I am drawing the parallel to my collection of sculptural glass. As it also started with a group of creatives striving to re-create old techniques and develop materials that were consistent enough to be repeatable in a small studio setting, and they ended up founding an art scene that did not exist before. The topic of glass art and the local glass scene is the theme for our upcoming bonus article.

“There have been those dogged and persistently creative glass artists who, having attained success and established a reputation for one form of glass, have had the courage to abandon it for something new, only because they simple had to try. They have been the leaders; and fortunately there have been several” ( c1986 . Paul Hollister, New American Glass: Focus 2 West Virginia Exhibition Catalogue; Studio Glass Movement; pp 25)

Besides the loads of character in our space we are in a central part of the city of Vancouver, so I only get into a car about twice a week at most and I am a 7 minute walk to the beach or my art studio. These are some of the very same reasons people live in Paris, a city with a long history of a liveable urban density. Vancouver being one of the most expensive cities in North America means that our population density is on pare with New York. Urban spaces are usually smaller than traditional spaces in the suburbs. They require storage options and a thorough planning to optimise their functionality. As you can see in our portfolio this is a niche of ours.

As people return to work in different ways our home bases will need to mirror our ever evolving needs as entrepreneurs and independent work forces. We as a design studio continue to apply new technologies to create efficiencies and communicate in different ways. We used some of the same technology we use to capture, measure, and communicate our projects, to showcase our Biblio Style dining room in the virtual tour of the space.

We hope you enjoyed our behind the scenes peak into not only our process but our home base of operations. The One Room Challenge gave us the opportunity to re-envision how we work and live in this historic space with a combined Biblio/Memphis vision. It allows each piece of art to be showcased without being over shadowed, which is difficult sometimes depending upon the strong colours some of them have. Stay tuned for our bonus GlassAholic article coming up!

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Articles in this series