FURNISHINGS COMPLEMENT BEAUTIFUL OUTDOORS
It’s hard to beat nature when it comes to beauty, but some designers are doing a pretty good job at complementing it through home decor and furnishings that accessorize outdoor living and entertaining.
The Sun caught up with two designers whose products encourage us to spend more time in our backyards, on our porches and patios.
Sandy Chilewich launched her innovative textiles company, Chilewich, in 2000, believing the woven vinyl material traditionally used for outdoor furniture upholstery was being under utilized. Seventeen years on, Sandy and her architect husband, and business partner, Joe Chilewich, have successfully grown their company to produce placemats, table runners, flooring, wall coverings and more, for hotels, restaurants and private residences.
This success, says Chilewich, can be attributed to the hard-wearing vinyl material itself, combined with the way they use it — they design their own yarn, and 90 per cent of what they make is woven — designing and manufacturing their products in Georgia and Alabama.
“We make everything from scratch,” she says. “From inspiration through process, we make everything ourselves. We weave everything in one mill and then finish everything in our facility. We have our own factory, and even though we make 40,000 placemats a week in this factory, it’s done by a very small design team, and it’s really built from scratch, testing the limits of what a textile can do, creating an unexpected perspective of both weaving and colour. It’s very personal.”
The material they use is perfectly suited for outdoors because of its durability, Chilewich says.
“We make something that’s very beautiful, but it’s very hard working, especially the heavier woven stuff,” Chilewich says. “You could really try and kill it and it won’t die. The only thing you’d ever have any problem with is if you smother the whole thing in ketchup and let it sit for three days.”
Chilewich products lose nothing in style, in being so functional, and Chilewich attributes this to her team’s fine arts background. Unlike many home-decor companies that draw inspiration from what’s happening in fashion, she says they are mostly influenced by art. “There’s always inspiration on the walls.”
Their just-released blue and white Mosaic and Wave placemats feature “Chilewich’s signature bicolour yarns, in which each strand contains two different colours,” with the effect that the pattern appears and then disappears.
“We have a master textile weaver on my team,” Chilewich says. “We’re constantly balancing the artistry of what we do, but also the accessibility to as many people as possible, through the design, to some extent, and also the price point.”
Chilewich products are also known for their use of colour, and their latest range includes blues, mints and citron in their Fringe collection (placemats that look deceivingly delicate because of their fringed edges), a summery lemon for their Lattice placemats and a “Sorbet” colour combination (which boasts 16 colours woven together) for their Plaid placemats.
“Plaid has this particular connotation,” says Chilewich. “It’s hunting, and it’s Scottish, and it has this traditional kind of backbone, but what we’ve done is really played with that, especially with these colours. We’ve taken a spin on a traditional plaid and made it very, very new and modern.”
If Chilewich knows how to decorate the outdoors in a way that makes you want to throw a party, B.C.’s Paloform firepits are designed to draw a crowd. The company’s Salt Spring Islandbased creative director Khai Foo has taken the humble firepit and transformed it into an ultra-modern outdoor accessory that looks as good as it feels.
“The most distinguishing feature of our product is really the esthetic aspects,” Foo says, a fine-artist-turned-product designer who studied fine arts at UBC. Paloform firepits are manufactured in Mississauga, Ont.; their largest market is the U.S., and they are now expanding into the U.K.
“We’ve seen an incredible shift in how many people, regardless of space, are planning these into their projects,” Foo says. “Part of our approach has been to take a more furniture-like approach. When you talk about outdoor furniture it can really fit in stylistically with a lot of modern furnishings nowadays.”
The beauty of having an outdoor firepit, says Foo, is that it allows people to entertain outside in the shoulder seasons, as well as the summer, as they provide warmth and encourage healthy socialization.
“Fire has the same kind of ability as television does,” says Foo, “in that you just want to stare at it. But without that stream of content, it does encourage talking and socializing more than television does.”