March 2012

As much as we may groan at the sight of Easter as it prematurely crowds grocery store shelves, there is something light & lovely about this time of year, and the pastel and sugar infused goods that come along with it.

... Not to mention the traditions around baskets, nests and eggs - and who doesn't like these three things all year long? Eggs, though, are especially apropos, as they contain life beneath a hard, yet-to-be-broken barrier. Like crocus emerge from recently thawed ground, and leaves burst forth through buds split open, chicks peck their way through shell coatings, and life is born into being.

The springtime/egg association is thousands of years old, as is the accompanying decorative history. Color, pattern, and detail are what we think of when conjuring images of painted eggs. But with the plasticization of eggs, it's easy to dismiss the actual, and actually beautiful, tradition that led up to the throwaway, jellybean-holding vessels of today. The real egg-as-canvas is remarkable on several counts. One, it's small. Two, it's curved, and irregularly so. Three, it's fragile (from the outside in, but not from the inside out. Just ask a recently liberated bird for the gory details). Four, it's bottom heavy. And six, it has no feet to stand on, nor edges for propping.

So, as you pass the synthetic symbols of spring that now dominate our seasonal senses, remember that you're likely an aisle or two away from the real deal, and therefore that much closer to an authentically decorative and celebratory time of year.

Oh, how sweet it would be to walk Gaelle Villedary's living path in Jaujac, France...

Like a living, breathing painter's stroke, it delicately flows through streets and parks, over bridges and up hills. Some walk on it, others alongside it... It lays gently and easily on the landscape that hosts its trail.

This installation, a recent feature on HYPENOTICE, celebrates and integrates the town's existing built and natural environment. Building on the beauty of stone, moss, and trees, the path offers viewers a chance invert assumptions of competing landscapes. 

Typically, living land is expansive. Forests, fields, pastures - even yards - suggest possibilities of growth. In contrast, paved places are finite and controlled. They're made for and by humans, with little consideration for the green spaces they overwhelm. Gaelle Villedary substitutes one (green) for the other (non-green) in this lovely, living line of grass. It meanders like a coy little riddle through its hill-hugging town, spelling out the heart of good design: Clever, efficient, and aesthetically fine.

Designer Reality: Styles change rapidly.

Consumer Reality: Changing styles cost money.

Economic Reality: Styles change too fast and at too great a cost for most buyers to maintain the pace of what's new, different, and hip.

And sometimes, more rarely than not, such realities are fractured by other ways of doing things. Enter Sweden's Pretty Pegs, recently featured on DesignSponge. It's a little company, making little wooden products, and giving new life to furniture you already have, especially furniture you bought with affordability in mind.

It's quite savvy to build a business around the most ubiquitous maker of home goods: IKEA. For design and budget minded people, the superstore of furniture, accessories, and delicious soft-serve vanilla frozen yogurt, meets multitudinous needs (to the near exclusion of others). But as we all know, the design we buy isn't always the design we absolutely love, nor is it necessarily what we want forever and ever (amen). IKEA compatible design allows for affordable customization; slight shifts in style; and a chance for little companies to work with, rather than in the shadow of, the mightiest (and mighty frustrating to assemble) maker of most things home.

Now, let's be clear; there's a lot to be said for solid color. Rural Modernists know and love Furniturea's beautifully-smooth applications of pigment on wood. But as fond as we may be of monolithic beauty, we also know that patterns, whether simple or complex, are as important in design and decor as uninterrupted swaths of light from ROY G. BIV .

We also know that too much solid or too much pattern can be disastrous for spaces, although there are of course exceptions. There are the uber cluttered, crammed and cacophonous spaces on one extreme, and the impersonal, androgynous, empty spaces on the other. Usually, though, personal styles fall somewhere in the middle - achieving the air of possibility that comes with emptiness, along with the swaddled comfort of closeness.

The patterns we live with are at once familiar and engaging. We may have chosen them carefully or had them handed down to us without consent. However they arrived in our homes, and however they faded out of and into focus over time, the good ones remained -appearing as young and fresh as their moment of first introduction. Sometimes, you just know.