CURATOR OF ENVIRONMENTS
Erica Tanov branches out with home textiles, furniture and new store
Berkeley designer Erica Tanov stays true to her artistic aesthetic as brand grows.
“I’m inspired by nature on every level,” says Erica Tanov, as she wanders through her Berkeley home, a 1926 Mediterranean beauty with a captivating view of the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge. The house, which the 51-year-old designer shares with her husband, musician Steven Emerson, son Hugo, 15, daughter Isabelle, 21, and a spaniel mix called Lily, is filled with well-worn objets and furniture she mostly finds at flea markets and estate sales.
There’s an early ’70s geometric Plexiglas lamp with nylon string that Tanov found at the Alameda flea market, a midcentury sofa that was her first purchase on eBay, an antique wooden dining table she picked up at an antiques collective for $100, a Chinoiserie credenza from Ohmega Salvage in Berkeley, and a green-and-white flocked lampshade from Urban Outfitters.
“The shape of a leaf inspires me,” muses Tanov, whose clothing has achieved cult status with those who appreciate her elegant, timeless style and keen eye.
“The fern for my wallpaper was a shadow on my porch that I drew. The inspiration can be something subtle, like a color palette, or deeper, like a branch of a tree. But mostly it’s just the sense of place, the feeling I get from being in nature. It’s very grounding, the trees, the smell, the quiet. It’s the feeling I need in order to design and create.”
Tanov’s love of nature is clearly reflected in her designs, which have expanded over her 27 years in business from her subtly sexy, meticulously constructed, boho luxe styles (gossamer party dresses, embroidered tops and skirts, silk crepe de chine tunics, sumptuous jackets, denim dresses and tailored trousers), to a fullfledged lifestyle brand.
She now produces bedding, table linens, fabrics, wallpaper, ceramics and furniture, all of which is available at her stores in Berkeley and Larkspur, and from her Web store. A new space in the Row DTLA, a mixed-use compound in downtown Los Angeles, opens Sunday, Oct. 15.
There’s the romantic, hand silk-screened wallpaper featuring gold leaf fern leaves on a cream or charcoal background, and clothing and home wares in a white, pink and green cotton fabric Tanov calls Lovebirds. The fabric, imprinted with a painterly pattern of birds sitting on trees blooming with lush pink peonies, was inspired by an antique Chinese kimono that Tanov interpreted into table and bed linens, and silk chiffon dresses and blouses.
She named the walnut armchair and sofa Ciervo (Spanish for deer) that she designed with fellow Parsons School of Design alum Russell Fong, for the animals that regularly visit the garden of her home. And in 2016, she debuted cement tiles for Clé tile in Sausalito, one of which looks like a series of waves in front of mountains.
“The tiles are beautifully representative of Erica’s love of vintage textiles and books,” says Clé founder and creative director Deborah Osburn. “Being both graphic and organic, the patterns work in a multitude of environments.”
Tanov’s foray into home design began with a limited bedding collection in 2007 and expanded to a full bedding and home goods collection in 2012. The line echoes her affinity for nature and how it can be reflected in the material world, a subject she will examine in her first book, “Design by Nature: Creating Layered, Lived-in Spaces Inspired by the Natural World,” to be published by Ten Speed Press in April. In the book, Tanov uses her love for textiles to create timeless, Bohemian interiors informed by nature’s textures, colors and patterns employing elements of flora, water and wood.
“My goal with the book is to open readers’ eyes to the beauty and often overlooked aspects of nature,” Tanov says. “How the simple everyday things can be inspiring and lead to creativity.”
The East Bay native’s design career has itself developed organically, based on and inspired by the people and places around her more than the demands of the retail market. Her designs for the home are, she says, an extension of her personal life and the things she loves. “Designing home ware came from wanting to create an entire lifestyle using the fabrics and textiles I work with,” she says. “I wanted to see the same fabrics I was using for clothing appear as a quilt on a bed, for example.”
And as much as she is moved by nature, “I would prefer to live deep in the woods,” she says. Working with other artists has been just as inspiring, invigorating her business and her spirit. The designer, herself an artist — a delicate print of wilting petunias from a drawing she did 15 years ago and recently found in a sketch book is featured in her fall collection — has long hosted exhibitions by local artists in her stores. In recent years, Tanov has increasingly worked with artists to create prints using their art.
“It started when I opened my home store on Claremont Avenue in Berkeley,” says Tanov, who grew up surrounded by art and does all her creative work in her home studio. “The store featured both antique and modern furniture and home furnishings. I wanted to complete the lifestyle approach by having artwork on the walls.”
Her first collaboration, which came out of one those exhibitions, was in 2012 with Berkeley multimedia artist Emily Payne, who exhibited at Tanov’s Berkeley store in 2009.
“I fell in love with Emily’s work and she’s become one of my dearest friends,” Tanov says. When Tanov’s daughter was working on an eighth-grade wire-art project, Tanov suggested she approach Payne to act as a mentor. Payne invited Tanov and Isabelle to her solo show at Seager Gray Gallery. Afterward, Isabelle remarked on the common thread between her mother’s and Payne’s work and suggested they work together.
Tanov and Payne obliged with a bedding line based on Payne’s collages of discarded book cloths, along with her whimsical wireand-fabric hanging sculptures inspired by spider webs. The resulting vibrant patterns were hand-blocked and screen-printed onto quilts, duvet covers, pillows, shams, napkins and more by artisans in India, and made into clothing. One featured colorful little pinwheels to echo Payne’s circular sculptures.
The two are working on a collection for
spring 2018 based on graphite drawings Payne is doing for the opening of Tanov’s new Los Angeles store. The artist is drawing the outlines of her hanging-wire sculptures on the store walls.
“It’s kind of an open-weave look, so I’ll probably do some crochet garments to go with that,” Tanov says.
“It’s very exciting to be making artwork that then gets translated into a whole other medium,” says Payne. “I’m a visual artist working on my own, and then Erica comes in and says, ‘Let’s try this piece and that piece,’ and she’s thinking of it like a pattern maker. Her expertise gives my artwork a whole other meaning.”
In 2013 Tanov selected works of disabled artists at the nonprofit art center Creative Growth in Oakland to interpret into prints. She chose a black and white image of a sassy girl wearing a tiara and poking her tongue out overlaid with gold embroidery — an adaptation of a drawing by artist Merritt Wallace — as a border for sheets and quilts. And she created shirts based on a psychedelic, fluorescent orange, yellow, green, white and navy pattern by noted origami artist Charles Esseltine, who creates geometric patterns based on origami folds.
“Charles was quite a renowned origami artist,” says Creative Growth’s director Tom di Maria. “He had a brain injury but remembered origami. Erica did these wonderful designs around it, and it was great for him to see the way his work could be expanded and brought to life and shared by others. Origami is a very private thing, and to see it in dresses and sheets was phenomenal, and Charles loved it.”
Tanov says pairing up with artists was an obvious progression, “one that came from meeting such talented artists whose work I showed in my stores and feeling a deep connection,” Tanov says.
The collaborations gave her a kind of freedom. “Working with artists I didn’t know, artists who didn’t know about the things involved in having fabric printed, was great. Not knowing your restrictions can free you up. It brought the community to what I do and to my stores, and really expanded my world. ”
It also gives Tanov more control over what she creates. The Bay Area native stopped wholesaling her collection a couple of years ago, but early this year she started offering the Erica Tanov Signature Collection to about 20 to 25 retail stores around the country. The 12piece collection comprises essentials that every woman should have in her closet, Tanov says. Fabrics and color may change, but the tried and true silhouettes remain the same.
The denim group includes an A-line dress with three-quarter sleeves, pockets and a pleated front, and wide-leg, high-waisted trousers. There is also Tanov’s iconic Lola — her signature, lace-trimmed, bias-cut slip dress in black and ivory silk charmeuse that was part of her original 1990 capsule collection, pima cotton cardigans and leather items, including a shoulder bag in metallic gold.
Her fall 2017 collection, available only in her stores and online, is a highly textural line inspired by what Tanov calls “nature’s beautiful and often overlooked process of decay.” The rich, muted color palette of dark basalt, fig, prune, raisin, dusty rose and pale mist echoes the drying, withering petals of a flower, she says, while a vibrant chartreuse fabric threaded with metallic gold represents lichen-laden tree branches. A car coat in fig-colored cashmere/wool is lined in the palest blush silk charmeuse , as is a gilded fading rose tapestry coat with bell sleeves.
Tanov’s successful crossover between the worlds of fashion and home design is “a natural evolution. Designing home goods started out as love for items that I brought into the store, not as something I wanted to take to market. Because I like to create a whole story, to complete a whole vision. I’m not a fashion designer. I’m more a curator of environments.”