A Q&A with Kristie Strasen, Founder of Place Textiles

In 2006, after 20 years as an independent design consultant, Kristie Strasen founded Place Textiles, a collection of her own designs. Herman Miller recently announced an alliance with Place that provides 16 new fabrics for its Classic seating designs.

How did you get started in textile design? I’ve always been interested in fabrics as an avocation, but my undergraduate degree was in English, and I actually taught high school English for three years. Then I traveled to Ireland to do research on folklore. While I was traveling, I became captivated by the weaving that was happening in Ireland at the time. I’d go down a country road and hear this clacking sound, and people were sitting there weaving. I absolutely fell in love with it.

I sent home all my research on folklore, and I traveled to the Orkney and Shetland Islands, through Yugoslavia and Turkey, into Iran and Afghanistan to see the weaving. When I got home, I went back to school and got a graduate degree in textiles.

Describe Place Textiles. Place is really about color, texture, and durable luxury. I love systems of color that integrate well; the entire Place line is organized around a clear color matrix.

I wanted the company to be about the integrity of the woven structure, and I wanted the fabrics always to enhance the sculptural characteristics of the furniture. So the focus of our company is very much in tune with Herman Miller, and in fact, companies like Herman Miller inspired me to start a company like Place—to create fabrics that enhance the seating rather than competing with it.

What does this alliance bring to Herman Miller’s fabric lines? Place provides Herman Miller with a little more upscale choice for its customers. All our fabrics are woven with yarns that have a huge amount of integrity. For example, wool is a fantastic fiber with characteristics that make it ideal for certain types of upholstery. One of the new fabrics, Balmory, is a beautiful nubby wool bouclé. It’s yarn-dyed, not piece dyed, so there’s a tremendous amount of nuance in the color. It will provide really good performance and the durability that a Herman Miller customer would absolutely expect.

There’s a wide range of neutrals in this collection, but where we have color, there’s no timidity about it, so we have some wonderful reds, some bright greens, some oranges.

I feel such a strong affinity with what I’m trying to do with Place and what Miller’s been doing all these years. For me, it’s about the integrity of the woven structure; for Herman Miller it’s about the integrity of the structure of the furniture.

Second photo courtesy of Jean Lin, otto architecture + design

Your Home Can Be As Green As…Herman Miller

Herman Miller has always led the charge in environmental stewardship for corporations. In fact, in 1995 Herman Miller’s Greenhouse helped develop the U. S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) first LEED standards. Now, achieving LEED certification for a commercial building has become a mark of distinction and achievement.

But what about residential buildings? What about your home? Private houses vastly outnumber commercial buildings, and they consume the biggest single chunk of energy (22 percent).

Well, houses can indeed achieve LEED certification, just like commercial buildings; however, seeking residential LEED certification is the decidedly less-traveled road. At this point, only a handful of residential construction firms nationally have on-the-ground experience in the many options for building green homes. “There’s a lot of information available,” says Doug Selby, president and co-founder of Meadowlark Builders in Ann Arbor, one of the few construction companies that specialize in green building. “But it’s hard to put it all together and create an action plan.” Selby’s customers tend to be highly motivated, willing to experiment, and eager to get involved in their construction project.

In the end, economic stewardship is reason enough to build green, but as Herman Miller and other companies have discovered, there are some potent economic motivators as well. Meadowlark Builders recently renovated an 1837 historic home that achieved LEED Platinum certification The monthly bill for heating and cooling this 1,850-square-foot home? $42 per month on average, and it uses 70 percent less water than conventional homes.

Straw bale house, anyone?