Honestly, I’m getting bored with primarily blogging about Vegan Soul Kitchen and various efforts to promote it. So I decided that I will start sharing more thoughts on additional interests such as music, art, design, fashion, and other people’s food. So here we go. . .
For as long as I can remember I have had an eye for design. It all goes back to junior high school when I started decorating my room with album covers and posters of my favorite hip hop artists. I used to meticulously tape the back of my artwork in a grid-like fashion to ensure that each piece would stay put. On one wall I placed several album covers of my favorite artists at the time: Run DMC’s King of Rock; The Beastie Boys’s Licensed to Ill; Audio Two’s What More Can I Say?; and Public Enemy’s Yo! Bum Rush the Show. Another wall was covered with cutouts from magazines (Word Up!) forming a collage of the newest-latest-dopest MCs. From there, I would treat my whole room as a gallery: lining up trophies on my dresser in chronological order with plaques, certificates, and ribons on the wall above; organizing my book shelf using the Dewey decimal system; arranging my Star Wars figurines–as I had seen them in glass display cases at toy stores–on the built-in shelf at the head of my bed. Call me anal retentive (my sister did). But I saw myself as a curator, exercising complete aesthetic control on the only space in the house that I ultimately had any power over.
Fast forward to 2009. I have a whole house over which I am the DESIGN KING (yeah, my lady trusts my aesthetic choices)! My style is most influenced by mid-century modern architects and designers (and a few that came before them) such as Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Mies van der Rohe, Russel Wright (thanks McKinley), and the Bauhaus school. Several years ago I committed to buying a piece of fine art and one vintage item every year to slowly build my collection. While I have splurged on a few nice pieces of furniture (e.g., killer pair of bentwood chairs from the ’60s; Herman Miller Mira chair for my home office; and replicas of The Barcelona chair and ottoman by Mies van der Rohe), my pockets aren’t deep enough to purchase a lot of vintage furniture and accoutrement. So I have used creativity to give our home a mid-century feel with an early twenty-first century budget.
One of the first things that I scored was a pair of school chairs for the dining room. That’s right, my buddy who teaches high school in Oakland had a cache of them in his home basement (was i supposed to share that). I asked if he could let go of 1 yellow and 1 orange, and they fit perfectly. Yesterday I popped into the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse to see if I might find something interesting. Wouldn’t you know, the first thing I saw after walking in was two large boxes of counting blocks that are used to teach kids how to count, add, and subtract. I thought, these would make nice coasters, so I bought 12 of them. Cool that they match the chairs right? I guarantee if I packaged these nicely I could sell them for 100 bucks at Design Within Reach. Lesson learned: the public school system in America has something of value to offer people decorating their homes.
