Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
i've been a long time buyer of merida's rugs, sisals and their wool products and I am constantly
wanting to customize things, and I found it so much easier to design what you want
when you have, you know a specific project in mind, but then to take what I have learned
from each project to build a collection and put it into the marketplace because, um, by
the time the project is finished and you've, you
know worked with a more rarified color palette I think you get a much more exciting piece
of art than you would just shopping what's already available.
I work in a creative environment where chaos is what we expect every day, and there's something
just miraculous to working through an orderly, business process, and creating a custom piece.
I love working with the creative and technical and
marketing minds inside Merida because I love working with people who know what they're
doing and I love learning. In this collection we sort of had two brainstorming sessions
the first was what textures and what patterns we wanted to create, independent of color.
So, it was more a, um, a learning process for me about what materials behave in what
way and what looms can produce different patterns. And then the second phase of the project was
all color, and that was inspiration from florals to foods to fashion, really combining and
juxtaposing to see what felt like vigorous, new, delightful color combinations.
I did find myself getting really greedy and wanting to make like you know fifteen different
color ways its really impossible to narrow it. Well when I'm designing a collection I'm
dealing a little bit more with my own multiple personality disorders, um, because I have
so much freedom, and I'm getting to do it with myself in mind instead of a particular
client or their way of life. I use the information of multiple jobs and processes and an understanding
of how people live in their spaces, but its so freeing and fun to, you know, to do it,
to kind of please myself. The whole reason I worked on the black and white project was
to try to refreshen my interest in design and look at
something from a totally different vantage point. And, just researching the work of my
peers and going through thousands of photos, it makes me so excited its almost like being
held back at a door when you want to kind of go into candyland
because I learned a lot. It was hard, but it makes me so much more respectful and excited
about the career I have. I'm going to sit back on the books for a while, they're killers.
I'm working with Schumacher to put out a wallpaper line this fall,
I'm looking forward to doing more rugs because this process had become just addictive, and
I'm working on a furniture line that will come out with Henredon in 2013. And, you know,
continuing my normal day to day business of private client residential interiors.