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Gracie
First to recommend
7 people recommended this item
Description
Founded in 1898, Gracie is a fourth-generation gem of a company specializing in handpainted wallpapers. Beyond the exquisite craftsmanship of these pieces, they can be tailored in subject, color scheme and scale to the intended room. Gracie’s artists, who come mainly from China and Japan where this art originated, work for up to six months to realize a custom commission. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
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The Building Block
First to recommend
Description
The Building Block is a 25-year-old New York–based millwork facility that specializes in custom doors, cabinetry and moldings. This closely guarded secret has created some of the city’s most gorgeous wood-paneled libraries and kitchens. Recent projects include Julianne Moore’s townhouse renovation. The doors shown here were constructed of American black walnut carved into a grid pattern. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
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F Product: Flat Drops
First to recommend
Description
Fabrice Covelli began working in construction, then went to art school in Toulouse, France. He graduated a sculptor, and has since transferred his creative energy from the artwork to the substance itself. His resin panels are highly tactile examinations of opposing forces, such as the liquid-solid juxtaposition of Flat Drops, shown. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
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Amy Helfand
First to recommend
Description
Brooklyn-based artist Amy Helfand works in many mediums, but a passion for landscape ties her oeuvre together: Collages of plant life appear in prints, fabrics and carpets. For an exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, she created a collection inspired by the Wild Garden at Wave Hill. Of the show, the museum notes, “In her exuberant designs Helfand juxtaposes the organic and the manmade, nature and culture, fantasy and reality. The results are imagined wonderlands comprising site plans and unrecognizeable, yet distinctly biomorphic forms.” Not bad for wool! (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
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Mansour Modern
First to recommend
Description
Mansour, reputedly the world’s leading purveyor of antique rugs, carpets and tapestries, has a new project. Owner Ben Soleimani and designer Kerry Joyce launched Mansour Modern earlier this year. Joyce’s designs range from Deco to Hollywood Regency. Furthermore, clients have the option of customizing colors, fibers and dimensions. The Satori pattern featured here juxtaposes the lush glow of silk fibers against the organic texture of wool. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
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Ankasa
First to recommend
Description
After meeting at FIT, embroiderers Sachin and Babi Ahluwalia plied their talents in the world of fashion, creating ornamentation for Armani and Oscar de la Renta. Then, just over a year ago, a house renovation spurred them to try their hand at home decor. They began experimenting with couture techniques to create surface textures for bedding and pillows, and today produce a wide collection that is opulently adorned with shells, beading, and their trademark Indian-influenced embroidery. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
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nanimarquina
First to recommend
3 people recommended this item
Description
Nani Marquina rugs’ vivacious colors and extreme textures make you want to sink your fingers (and toes) into the deep, dense pile that characterizes her designs. If Roses (shown) emulates a field of fallen petals, Cuks resembles a bowlful of pasta. Modernism without the minimalism.
Available through Design Within Reach. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
Anne Kyyro Quinn
First to recommend
4 people recommended this item
Description
Anne Kyyro Quinn, a London-based Finnish designer, sculpts industrial felt into a stylish array of home accessories, including throws, pillows, wall panels and lighting. While her signature style is raised-relief detailing, she is also known for unconventional material combinations, such as blending sailcloth, fine linen and wool. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 7, 2006
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Peace Industry
First to recommend
Description
This is the story of a single gift that revived a dying craft. In 1999, Iranian-born Dodd Raissnia visited his homeland after 20 years in the U.S. On the trip, he bought a felt rug for his friend Melina, who then became his wife. Melina, now 35, found that first rug “functional, utilitarian, but at the same time really homey. Felt itself has a healing quality. Instantly the images that come to mind are comfort, nourishment, warmth…It’s an instant connection.”
The couple decided to return to Iran in 2002, to find rug makers who practiced the ancient nomadic tradition of felt production, with the idea of importing their rugs. Instead, they learned that the felt-making skills were not being passed down, so Dodd took it upon himself to carry the torch. “There were no young people doing it,” Melina recalls; Dodd decided to “learn how to do it himself and train people—younger guys that didn’t come from any kind of textile background.”
He started by apprenticing with a rug maker who had perfectly executed one of Melina’s designs (she was enjoying a career as a painter at the time). After completing his extensive apprenticeship, Dodd established a workshop in Shiraz this past October. In a cinder-block factory with 30-foot high ceilings, Dodd’s mentor supervises 15 workers to handle the difficult physical work required for hand felting. “It’s its own set of skills,” Melina says. “When the wool is wet, it is very sculptural. You can actually use tools like a hammer or chisel, and you can make shapes straighter or rounder so all the edges of the rug are hand-shaped.”
Meanwhile, stateside, the couple named their venture Peace Industry, and, in December, they opened a store in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood. Now Melina creates her line of simple modern designs, priced at $31–$33 per square foot, and frequently works directly with designers and architects. She also maintains the social philosophy that she has always had: “I had this kind of proletarian relationship to my work, that I wanted to do something that was really contributing to society and the greater good.” Indeed, she and Dodd have done exactly that. Peace Industry still commissions one felt maker to create traditional tribal rugs. Their Iranian employees who are new to the craft enjoy steady pay in a country with typically staggering unemployment. But perhaps more so, “They are proud that people in the West think so much of their tradition. And they know that this is the only workshop of its kind in the world, and it’s in Iran; it’s from Iran,” says Melina. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 6, 2006
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Customweave
2 people recommended this item
Description
Gentle and soft like cashmere. Fine and clean like linen. A less expensive alternative to silk. Related to edamame.
The Australian design house Customweave employs a sophisticated soy yarn for its Soy Luxe line of custom hand-tufted rugs. A Soy Luxe rug is “therapeutic to walk on and evokes the senses,” says Katherine Power, Customweave’s in-house designer. Besides its calming effects, the rugs are hypoallergenic. They also provide a balm for the soul, since the yarn comes from what remains after a soybean’s meal and oil is extracted, which would be wasted otherwise; the fiber that wraps around the soybean’s husk is processed into yarn.
It took a Chinese scientist well over a decade to turn raw soy byproduct into usable form; Customweave’s Frank Ricco spent another year making the soy yarn suitable for rugs. The company now custom-manufactures the fiber, which is stronger than wool and possesses an eerily lustrous quality, as the Soy Luxe line. Purchasers choose unique combinations of weight, pile height (from 12 millimeters to deep shag), thickness, density, and shearing. Designs frequently blend textures and include contrasting materials, such as leather cut pile or leather stitching. One especially interesting combination: Power fastens rods, made by Sydney glass artist Benjamin Edols, onto rugs to magnify the soy fiber’s texture; the glass also exaggerates the glossy patterns endemic to the fiber. The Soy Luxe line will expand to include a less expensive machine-made carpet range in the future. (via Elements of Living)
Updated Jun 6, 2006
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