14 April 2009
april newsletter
Dear friends of furbish,
Here I am just leaving the MOMA a few weeks ago, with Aadi of course, and with my coat back on! I know. The weather is not cooperating with our need for spring.
I have a cure. I hope you all have heard about the gallery event we are having at furbish this week. The lovely botanical art we will be showcasing will definitely help fill the void left by the weather. And the food and wine will help get us to a place of festiveness. I sure hope to see you in person!
Today's article is about doing away with "design labels." Here is the thing. I am done with trying to sort out whether our style is traditional or modern. The reality is that most of us can get excited about pieces that would technically fall in either camp. Style today is global. It is eclectic. And it IS these things because WE are exposed to such a broad range of influences in our everyday living. I feel fortunate for the diversity of inspiration in my life. Join me in celebrating design liberation!
Be well,
Uma
in this issue
quick links
come celebrate art, design, and spring!
You will be inspired by original artworks curated with spring home furnishings!
GALLERY EVENT at FURBISH
presented by SUSAN FREI NATHAN
APRIL 16, 4 pm to 8 pm
Wine and cheese will be served.
Furbish is hosting a showing of contemporary botanical art. Master botanical painters work from real-life specimens, capturing the beauty of nature in watercolor and drawings on paper and vellum. The gallery-like space of furbish beautifully showcases the paintings and drawings among interior design vignettes. On view through April 30. Visit our website for more details.
Please come join us! Click here for contact information and directions.
introducing our favorite new arrivals...
SILVER BIRDS
These sweet silver birds come as a pair. I am so fond of looking at them perching at various places in the store. And I can't think of anything that better says spring then a set of these placed beside a vase of spring buds. Available in furbish now. $36.00 for pair.
INLAY BOX
This box of bone and horn is truly magnificent. A wonderful statement piece for a bookcase or top of chest. Store your treasures, your journal, your jewelry. Anything special and close to your heart will feel extra precious kept in this piece. The current furbish staff favorite. Available now in store. $199.00.
CEYLON LAMPS
There is a pair of these lamps, by home decor dynamo Bungalow 5, in store waiting for you! The pale green ceramic with crackle finish and creamy shades are inspiringly beautiful. This is the designer favorite. Available in store now $369 each.
All featured items are available NOW! Call 973.761.0311 or visit Furbish to buy.
the poufs are here!
Many of you expressed excitement over the moroccan poufs I previewed a month ago. Well, they are HERE and they have added so much COLOR and FUN to the store! You can also special order in any color and we can have it in store in just a few days for you to take home.
As serendipity would have it Elle Decor had lavender-ish poufs on the front cover of this month's issue!
doing away with design labels
I had a moment over the last week. I had just met with so many of you, in the store, in your homes, in the city. We were talking design and I was learning about you, your preferences, and it hit me: we are at a moment in time when we are SO beyond design labels. Beyond the labels of "traditional" and "modern" for sure, but beyond labels all together I think. Such labels have been useless to me all week long as I work to translate the taste and styles of clients into rooms that work and give them what they need. They have been useless as I work with customers in the store to consider how a piece might work in their spaces. None of us seem to want to be in one camp or the other these days.
I was just reading an article about interior design in the 1930s and the author defined the interior styles then as complex negotiations between tradition and modernity. Here we are nearly 80 years later and we are making the very same negotiations. It occurred to me that this is nothing new at all. In all decades and eras we as humans are negotiating past and present continuously. And we all have very specific needs at specific times in our lives. Sometimes we need convention or history or rootedness in our own pasts. And other times we need adventure, new perspectives, and freshness.
What we want, what we crave these days, seems to be quite simply beauty. Let me add a few more words I think define what we want: beauty, classic style, a bit more color, optimism, peace, fluidity, functionalism-but softer around the edges, and a combination of clean lines and character. Yes, character. So many of us seem to be seeking for things with some level of authenticity to them. And by authentic I mean self-expressive. The overwhelming majority of us want spaces that feel current, but that also feel like us.
I think the labels are holding us back. I think they are useless because they interfere with the self-expression. If I am modern then why is it that I love that Rococo mirror? If I am traditional then why am I pining for the Saarinen table? Ack! Labels. Let us put them to bed until they seem useful again. But for now, we are living in today. A world where mid-century modern signifies classic style just as easily as an English roll arm sofa or an 18th century French chair or an in-laid table from Morocco or a Chinese chest. Hooray! It is liberation really. Let us be driven by our desires, by our longings, by things which simply catch our eye and strike our fancy. This instead of endlessly worrying if a piece meets the definition of some word that we think should apply to us. This to me is peace. It is where style begins and ends. It is about being ourselves and then using the principles
of line, color, scale, light, space, texture, proportion to get us to a place of beauty. Hooray again.
Let the future decide what labels should be applied to us. For today, let us just act on what moves us today. Read below for some tips on liberating your inner design wisdom.
3 tips for design liberation
Get rid of the things that don't say you. We've all heard it before. Reduce the clutter. But have you really done it? I am clutter prone, but I have tackled some rooms in my home and it has made such a difference. Getting rid of décor that doesn't make you happy is SO uplifting. It leaves empty spaces, yes. But it also gives your imagination more room to think about what you really would love to see sitting on your dresser, bookshelf, wall, or floor.
Take your time. When people decide to decorate a room or a house, I have seen the seemingly universal instinct to want to have it all done NOW. That rarely leads to the best solution and it definitely doesn't give you the time to express yourself. Take a few extra days to pick the paint color or look a little harder for the right pillows. Self-expression requires a little introspection, and some faith that a better solution will come up. And that all takes a little bit of time. On the flip side, if you have been searching for something that you have only seen in your head for months and months, it might be time to think outside of the box about what else could work in your space.
Go to inspiring places and see what moves you. If you are interested in creating a beautiful and unique home, you need to spend time in beautiful places and looking at beautiful things. And you need to listen to yourself while you are there. I tend to be inspired by random sightings as I go through my days, but that is because my mind is often trained on it since this is my work. But even still I NEED to spend time in places that are set up to spark inspiration. On my blog you will find that botanical gardens, city streets, bookstores, and definitely museums are places that I frequent. After my recent visit to the MOMA with Aadi and Michael, I came up with a simple process that you can use on your next museum visit to track what inspires you. You can
find it on our website here. Try it and see what comes up for you.
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