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Hi, I'm Nathan Turner with Pottery Barn, and today I'm at the Lion Arboretum, in Honolulu, Hawaii,
and we're talking textiles. I have Sig Zane, a local Hawaiian textile designer,
and he's going to walk us through the park and show all of his real-life plant inspirations.
So textiles is kind of a specific thing. How did you get in to textile design and manufacturing?
I think I fell into it. We used to go to a lot of swap meets, and buy a lot of fabrics from Samoa, Tahiti, like that.
And they all have that same tropical love of life, that joy,
and so I thought, why don't we do Hawaiian plants, so.
And there it happened. So, speaking of Hawaiian plants, you seem to know a lot about them.
Well I think the neat part about growing up in Hawaii, we're surrounded by all that,
and later on in life, especially in Hilo, I got to learn all about the medicinal value,
the cultural value, the significance of it.
And when I started learning more about those things, it became more evident that this is the real stuff, so,
why not surround ourselves with it? Especially what we put in our homes,
then we have this spirit, the whole culture, and the significance with us.
I like that.
I first think of the plant and its significance, and that's what I kind of want to offer to the universe, really.
This plant is the Liko. And it is the very tips of our tree, the Ohia tree,
that covered all the islands at one time, but these tips also signify, like, royalty.
It is the symbol of the highest parts of a tree, and so this is what we use in our lei,
especially for dancing for the gods.
I love that you're telling a story. And that's what, kind of, textiles can do to a room,
they can tell a story of who lived in that house, and what the people are like, and I think that that
personalizes a room, and that's how you want to live. Exactly. You want it to be personal.
That's what it's all about, is really selecting things that are dear to you, and,
one of the things that I like to play around with in the layout, is not only the positive spaces,
but it's the negative, because the negative is just as valuable as the positive.
And it's that harmony, it's that balance, and I think that visually, if you can capture that,
in your surroundings, everything is in harmony, in balance.
Right, it's all about balance, right?
This summer, Pottery Barn has a great selection of textiles based on vintage Hawaiian shirts.
I would imagine that maybe plays into some of your work, too.
It definitely does. We grew up with those shirts. It wasn't vintage at that time,
but now they're vintage. Yeah, but they still inspire me, you know,
the capturing of that time, that era, I think, is so romantic, and that's the whole thing that,
I think that we gotta keep in our textiles, is that romance, that sense of paradise, that bliss.