Thursday, September 29, 2016

Design Love: The Warren Platner Chair

The Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA, via Ish & Chi

You may have seen this modern and eye catching chair across the interior design world lately and that's because it's pretty amazing. This is one of those stunning designs that have stood the test of time, and remains a flawless addition to a space. The Platner Chair is the design work of architect, interior designer, and furniture designer Warren Platner who released this unique chair design in 1966. This chair works well in mid-century modern interiors, contemporary interiors, and any interiors with a fun, eclectic feel and that's why this chair is my eye-candy of the day. 

Designed by Jonathan Adler via Dwell


Modern French apartment via Vogue Living Austrilia


Home of designer Jayme Armour of Atlanta via myDomaine, Photography Sarah Dorio

Designers John Wooden and Dustin Dorr via Luxe.

What do you think of the Warren Planter Chair? I must say that I quite like it! This gorgeous chair was also in the recent home tour of model Marisa Howard, featured here on Interiors by Jacquin. Take a look at how Marisa styled this iconic chair in her dining room. (P.S. This home tour is filled with amazing artwork!) You can purchase your own Platner Armchair here or go for the wider Platner Lounge Chair for a space like the bedroom. You'll love it! 

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Bloggers at Home: Elegant home tour with pops of Pink

I'm pleased to present the elegant and stylish home of blogger Alicia Wood of The Lush List today. Alicias' blog is home to the latest fashion and amazing home cooking and recipes. You'll definitely want to learn more about this style blogger, mom, and home chef extraordinaire. Take a look at my recent chat with Alicia and her stunning home tour. 

Jacquin: Hi Alicia! What can people expect from your blog, the Lush List?

Alicia: Thanks for having me today Jacquin! The Lush List is a lifestyle blog focused on Style, Food & Entertaining, Clean Beauty, Travel and Design.  I am truly a “List Maker“ and I'm always being asked by others for my ideas and lists, so The Lush List blog is where I share them with everyone.




Jacquin: Being that you come from a long line of cooks, do you garner a lot of inspiration from the recipes you've grown up with when creating recipes to share on your blog?

Alicia: Some of my earliest memories are in the kitchen with my mom or one of my great-grandmothers. Every holiday we went to Arkansas to see family, and food was always the centerpiece – both preparing it and sharing it. One special recipe we make every holiday are these angel rollsWe’ve even adapted them to be gluten-free to be able to continue to enjoy them. My great-grandmother baked a lot and I think of her every time I make a pie. This rustic apple galette is my favorite recipe to make and I think she’d like it very much.





Jacquin: As a foodie, if you could only eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner food for the rest of your life––which meal type would you choose?

Alicia: This is so hard for me! Anyone who knows me very well, knows I love a good soup. I could truly have it for every meal. This Watermelon Gazpacho is a favorite. I have actually eaten it for breakfast, lunch and dinner! It also makes a great appetizer. However, I do also love a great steak with Green Eggs and a glass of Cabernet.

Alicia Wood's Watermelon Gazpacho. Get the recipe here!


Jacquin: What attracts you to certain types of fashion? Where is your favorite place to find fashion that matches your personal style?

Alicia: I realized a long time ago that I love classic style in both fashion and interiors. I’m only 5’2” tall and crazy trends seem to wear me, so I learned how to style my body best. Well-tailored pieces seem to prevent me from appearing so small. Friends are always surprised when talk moves around to height…great heels don’t hurt, either. Grace Kelly, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Kate Middleton, Amal Clooney and Olivia Palermo are women whose style resonates with me.  Because we are such a busy household, I do most of my shopping online, which allows me to find great deals on my favorite designers. Some of my favorite stores are Neiman Marcus, Shopbop, J.Crew, Saint Bernard, Veronica Beard, and Tory Burch. I love the style and vibe at these stores each season. One of the great things about The Lush List is that you’ll always find sale round ups and notices of sales on my blog, simply because I love a good deal!




Jacquin: How is your personal style reflected in your home's decor?

Alicia: It would be a tie between my kitchen and my master suite. My kitchen is one of my favorite spaces in my home. We remodeled our home about 2 years ago. I was able to completely start over and create these rooms for the way we live. Every drawer and cabinet in the kitchen was designed for the way I cook. I have a huge refrigerator because with our food allergies, I don’t use much packaged or dry goods and it’s always full with fresh fruits and veggies. My favorite element is the huge white marble island that is always full of cooking prep and someone doing homework or eating a snack. The breakfast area features one of my great-grandmother’s dining tables that I had refinished. The Hermes scarf was a gift from my husband that I only wore a few times. After we remodeled, I was looking for art for this wall. I had always wanted a vintage Hermes scarf to frame. When I realized it was the exact color of my chair cushions, I wasted no time having it framed. It is such a happy room that really pops with my signature pink!

The master is calming and serene. A great escape from the world. I wanted lots of white and shimmering details. I’m so pleased with the way it turned out. The monogrammed chair at my dressing table and the fretwork on the built-in cabinets are my favorite details…and the two chandeliers!






JacquiYou menn: tioned on your "About me" page that you go overboard for birthday parties. Share a story with me, please!

Alicia: I love birthday parties! There is nothing better than celebrating someone’s special day. A few years ago, my middle daughter requested a Nancy Drew Party for her 8th birthday. I created clue invitations that set the tone for a missing puppy mystery. The clues were hidden all over our home and yard. The girls each had a notebook to collect the clues that were written in crazy ways: backward to be read in a mirror, with invisible ink and in code. It was so fun to watch them work together to solve the mystery! Party favors were inspired by Nancy Drew mystery #8.

My youngest daughter loves the color blue so I created a Bluealicious (think Pinkalicious) party for her. I had special decorations designed to match the invitations, games with blue prizes and everyone wore blue, too! The candy buffet was her favorite because I found so many different nut free and gluten free candies and popcorn for her to choose from! That is a true dream come true for a food allergy kid!

I have always made my girls birthday cakes and love to create their vision. My favorite cake was a Frozen themed cake with white and blue rock-candy towers making Elsa’s castle. Baked Alaska is a tradition for my oldest daughter who wants to run the Iditarod one day!



Jacquin: Where is the most extraordinary place your wanderlust has taken you?

Alicia: My husband and I love to travel. For our 20th anniversary, we decided to go literally halfway around the world and spend time in the Maldives. He loves to surf and I love blue water and white sand, so this was the perfect spot for both of us. Because we have a busy household with three girls ranging in age from 15 to 8, I have used a pallet of calming colors of whites, grays and blues, similar to the ocean, throughout our home. I also love a bit of the unexpected, so I’ve used a pop of fuchsia throughout... from art, accessories to flowers, I like to keep it fun! My husband is ok with it though because he has “his” study in a darker, more masculine color palette of gray and blue.

Photo of blogger Alicia Wood vacationing in the Maldives. 

Jacquin: How has blogging and founding The Lush List influenced your life so far?

Alicia: I think the biggest influence the blog has had on me is to continue to push me to learn new techniques and recipes to share with others. My readers inspire me with their questions and suggestions. The Lush List has certainly enhanced my life and I hope it inspires others for many years to come.

Photos by Mary Summers-Hafner and Aaron Doughtery

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Artist Spotlight: Senorita Lylo's Embroidered Collars

I have been so inspired by embroidery artist Lylo Ghirardi, a Spain based creative entrepreneur bringing the fiesta to your shirt collars and more! I love that Lylo's collar designs are colorful, creative, and always one-of-a-kind. I definitely NEED one of these amazing collars in my life! Lylo is turning average outfits into celebrations one embroidered collar at a time. 

Jacquin: When did you first become interested in embroidery? How long did it take you to master your embroidery skills?

Lylo: I started embroidery around 7 years ago. I had the urge to distract my myself away from the computer screen and work closer with craft materials and create work with my hands. I’ve always had curiosity with crafts, as a child I was an advanced crafter! I loved creating things with my hands, and I used to play with clay and used plants/flowers as condiments of fictitious salads. I started a course that opened the door to learning a whole new world step by step. I studied with different teachers, some with more technical profiles, others more playful. Overall, the techniques, the tricks, visions and advice of my teachers guided me, and later on gave me the courage to create my own style. Every experience and style left its footprint. Alongside the cocktail of stitches, textures and secrets, I started to visualize my projects.

The key to achieving a non-traditional embroidery piece is the media you use. Being creative and imagining a canvas on almost any surface, like on a pair of sneakers, a gate or a piece of garment is the secret. The stitches and materials may be the same, but the object is transformed!
Jacquin: What gave you the brilliant and unique idea to put your embroidery designs on shirt collars?

Lylo: Two years ago a gallery-shop in Madrid invited me to organize an embroidery workshop with them. It was my first time teaching that made me think about an original project, which usually takes me about 6 or 7 months to finally develop the idea for an embroidered collar. The idea was to apply embroidery to something useful and utilitarian, and the idea of shirt collars came to me. Not just teaching how to make stitches, but teaching new ideas on how to utilize embroidery techniques creatively. The response from my students and the community to these embroidered collars was incredible… So I started to produce other collar embroidery themes. This was a enjoyable process and added something new to my products (including Mexican, Finnish, and Portuguese collar design inspirations) I also make collars with patterned fabrics and then embroider over the patterns and imagesthis is another embroidery applications that has a really unique look.


Jacquin: What inspires you creatively?

Lylo: Anything could inspire me, I’m very curious, and I’m walking in life with a lot of attention to anything that happens around me. A little detail of a scene could inspire an idea for a new project.

Jacquin: How are your introducing embroidery to the community in Barcelona?

Lylo: I also am part of the Barcelona based collective “La Guerilla DeGanxet”, where we knit and embroider wonderful creations out in the public by taking the yarn and thread bobbins out on the street of Barcelona. Through our creations/projects we expose and tell stories to protest or express messages that are important to the community. We usually knit or embroider on a large scale with an XXL cross stitch, using the urban outdoor furniture and fences or decorating an indoors staircase with geometric shapes made out of yarn for special community events or editorial commissions.


Jacquin: What has been your favorite embroidery design you created so far? Why?

Lylo: I am currently working on a personal project (my favorite) that consists of embroidering the street names where all the women in my family lived or are still living onto pieces of garments used by these women in my family. Each woman in my family gave me a piece of one of thier garments to use as my canvas. The work is composed of numerous pieces, starting off with a handkerchief of my great grandmother Maria who was from Sicily. She was a brave woman in her time as she crossed the ocean to Argentina alongside her two children to find a better future for her family. Passing over to my grandmother Fina who decided to live her destiny in Argentina, followed by my dear mother Alicia, who inherited the gift of preparing delicious food and filling the hearts of her children with love, and last but not least ending with me, who is constantly searching for new horizons here in Barcelona while staying connected to the heritage of my family.

Each address is a typographic composition respecting the original type fonts of the street names, as well as the other elements that complement the composition, like the house numbers, the traffic signals of the cities, the city and country they’ve lived in. I’ve recompiled photographs taken from my recent travels back home, visiting our old and new neighborhoods. I aim to keep a lineal sense when building the compositions and transmit my emotions when embroidering. I don’t like working on independent pieces, but rather I prefer to include various elements to tell the story. As a designer, I apply my vision so the composition and the colors used have a meaning. I take it as embroidered typography. 
From great grandmother, to grandmother, to mother and to daughter...a generation of women laced together by passion to find a home and be happy in it. I really hope to someday exhibit this story in a gallery!
Jacquin: What other things would you like to embroider in the future? Any especially unique items that you would like to try embroidering?

Lylo: I would really like to make audiovisuals and videos out of my embroidery pieces to create artwork and to teach. I would love to use embroidery to create animated works, for example stop motion. I look forward to working on an audivisual collaboration with embroidery someday.

Jacquin: What would a perfect day be like for you?

Lylo: Embroidering (of course!) Being outdoors…. near the beach or with a wonderful view of the mountains.

Photo credit: Leire Villar

If you can't wait to wear your own custom embroidered collar you can place an order directly with Lylo. I am seriously excited to order my own! If learning to embroider excites you, Lylo offers an online embroidery course, too. Although the course is in Spanish, it is very visual and still accessible to those who do not speak the language. You can learn more about this online embroidery course here. For the latest information on Lylo's designs, visit her FacebookTumblr, or Instagram pages. Thanks for reading!

Monday, September 5, 2016

Unique & Inspiring Furniture Design From Dubai's Khalid Shafar

Illusion Pearl Chair designed by Khalid Shafar. 

Since the launch of this eponymous brand in 2010, Emirati designer Khalid Shafar has been focused on bringing a truly international flavor to an aesthetic born in UAE's desert nation. Quitting his corporate role in marketing and communications, Shafar followed his passion in design and has built a furniture and lighting décor line that presents his experiments with shapes, motifs and forms borrowed from his home country. While wood remains the predominant base for most of his designs, the signature pieces from his line include materials such as marble, textiles, metal and locally sourced leather. Traditional crafts from the region are expressed through his work in elements such as palm leaf weaving and reinterpretation of the egal, the black headband from men’s traditional Keffiyeh attire.

Octa Dress vanity set with vanity table, mirror, and stool by Khalid Shafar.

Among his furniture collections is the ‘Decohaus’ collection, inspired by the international design movements of Art Deco and Bauhaus of the 1920s. The collection reinterprets local materials, in this case camel leather, and combines it with the octagon shape found in Middle Eastern and Islamic designs. The range features items such as the ‘Octa Dress’, a vanity table designed on a modular system with side drawers handcrafted from leather.

2:4 Seats Collection by Khalid Shafar.

Another limited edition collection is ‘Puzzle’, which features three unique editions of handmade wool rugs woven in Afghanistan.

“These were designed by me and woven in collaboration with FBMI (Fatima Bint Mohamed Bin Zayed Initiative), a social initiative dedicated to provide women in Afghanistan with employment and to offer them and their families critical social services in healthcare and education,” explains Shafar. 

Puzzle Collection of wool rugs by Khalid Shafar.

The collection’s puzzle design is inspired by the patterns, which allow any two or all three rugs from the collection to come together and form a large piece. The collaboration with FBMI also involved contributions in design by the Afghani weavers who chose variations of the ‘mauri gul’ motif, which is typically woven by nomads in Afghanistan's western province of Herat.

Talli Collection of rugs & wall hangings by Khalid Shafar.

A new carpet collection created with FBMI will be launched by Shafar during the upcoming Dubai Design Week this October 2016. Looking ahead, he aims to continue his experiments with recreating signature patterns in three-dimensional forms. There are multiple collaborations with lighting installations and homeware designs on the horizon as well. “I would like to focus on my furniture line and working with multiple silhouettes and patterns. Early next year I am looking to launch a new collection, which has already been developed and is at the prototyping stage,” says Shafar.

Furniture designs from Khalid Shafar career from 2010-Present.

This article was written by journalist Manika Dhama, featured here on Interiors by Jacquin in 2015. I am so glad Manika brought my attention to this world-class designer. Khalid Shafar's designs are quite impressive. My favorite designs from Shafar include his gorgeous 'Illusion Pearl Chair' and 'Octa Dress' vanity, both shown above. We look forward to seeing Shafar's new collection of rugs this October 2016, which will be launched during Dubai Design Week.

LeCreuset.com!

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Artist Spotlight: Fine Art Photographer Alma Haser

Copyright Alma Haser 

I have an amazing contemporary photographer to share with you today. It's fine art photographer Alma Haser and I must say that I am loving her portraits. I was drawn in by the creativity and curiosity behind her work, which I'm sure you'll notice right away. Alma was born into an artistic family in Black Forest, Germany and she specializes in carefully constructed portraiture that creatively deconstructs the human face. Alma's portraitry catches the eye and captivates the mind.


Alma's collection "The Eureka Effect" is one of my favorites. The images above are from The Eureka Effect where Alma creates layers to the human face in unexpected ways, from layering plants, flowers, and abstract paint elements unto the human face, distorting the identity of the subject. Alma Haser's work is truly vibrant yet mysterious at the same time, indeed the mark of a great artist.



"Cosmic Surgery" is another recent collection of Alma Haser in which she creates portraits with unique, origami overlays which become a central feature of the portrait. This is such a fun and interesting collection. I love Alma's name for this collection too. "Cosmic Surgery" is one of those genius titles that explains what cannot be put into words. You simply have to see the photographs. 


Copyright Alma Haser

Alma Haser has additional collections on display on her website that are definitely worth checking out. I am really looking foward to seeing what this artist creates next. Visit Haser.org for more information on this fine art photographer.