Playlist: Designer Aisha Densmore-Bey

Boston-based designer Aisha Densmore-Bey is a multi-faceted creative who works in mediums from architecture and interiors to film and painting. Aisha recently wrote, produced, and directed an architectural short titled “The Built Perception: Boston” which explores our relationship with the built environment. In her installation “FOLD!” at Boston’s center for Architecture and Design, BSA Space, she investigated the interaction of creases, pleats, curves, and computational patterns within all aspects of design. One might wonder what such an eclectic artist would listen to while contemplating the design of the physical world. Let’s find out in this week’s Playlist.

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Playlist: Photographer Jim Franco

Jim Franco is an interiors and lifestyle photographer who also paints and makes surfaces for the prop-rental house he co-owns. And that means that his work space spreads out between two studios and the prop house itself. One studio contains his office upstairs, which allows him to shoot downstairs. The second gives him room not only to photograph, but also to drag out his saws, sanders, paint, and plaster to craft the prop surfaces. “My work spaces are either super neat or very messy,” he explains. Get a glimpse at the tidy side of his life and take as a listen to the music mix playing throughout his day. Read more

Cool Color

After interviewing Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, Apartment Therapy’s co-founder, I’ve been thinking a lot about color. Maxwell said “cool is focusing and contracting – good for private rooms. Colors should support those activities – it’s hard in say a rental where the rooms are all white and there’s no change from space to space – that feels deadening. A home office for example should be a cool color.” I’ve collected some great cool-colored offices.

Click on the image to find out more about each office. We’d love to see your office. You can send photos to cerentha_harris@hermanmiller.com.

High Five

Here’s our weekly round up of must-see sites:

1. BBC News You’re wondering why I’ve included a news site? Well they have an excellent section called Day in Pictures that collects really striking images from around the globe. Where to start: Today is pretty cool (Feb 19) – you’ll get floods in Indonesia, the start of Fashion Week in London and rebuilding in Haiti.

2. W Magazine Another left of centre choice but the home tours on W’s fashion site are wonderful. They are as opulent and fabulous as the fashion covered in the magazine. Where to start: I love the Marquess of Bute’s estate in Scotland. Now that’s a home office.

3. Inhabitat Great green design news. Where to start: Their interiors section – this clamp lamp would make a great desk light.

4. Living Etc If it’s good enough for Apartment Therapy’s Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan it’s good enough for us. In a recent interview with Lifework Maxwell mentioned this British interiors magazine as a great source of inspiration. Where to start: The excellent photo galleries. Here’s the home office gallery.

5. Material Girls Put together by 5 designers it’s loaded with great images and well-researched reads on design. Where to start: A great post on desk chairs.

Apartment Therapy’s Founder Talks Shop

Photo: Jim Franco: www.jimfranco.com

Talking to Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder and New York editor of Apartment Therapy, is fascinating. You start to understand why this online community, with its 4 million monthly visitors, is so popular. During the course of the interview Maxwell manages to move seamlessly from a discussion about blogs versus newspapers and his time as a Waldorf teacher to European home offices and what color works best in a living room. Every topic, big or small, is given serious consideration. There is an underlying kindness to Maxwell that permeates the site. As he says “Apartment Therapy isn’t snarky, or edgy or even fast, it’s not the newest latest thing we are covering. The whole goal was to help people with their homes, to get them over the finishing line, most would love help from an interior designer or architect but don’t know where to start.” Apartment Therapy has become a very good place to start.

But, enough from me, here is Maxwell:

On blogs: “My wife is a real magazine reader and there’s so much discussion around the demise of magazines and whether blogs are undermining them. Blogs don’t compete with magazines – we compete with newspapers. You post on a blog and then move onto the next thing, it’s very forward looking, fast. And much closer then to a newspaper model than a magazine model.”

On his years as a Waldorf teacher: “[Those years] very much inform my work – now it’s just a much bigger classroom! After teaching for 5 years at a Waldorf school I could have gone on and taken a new class. But I wanted something else. I wanted to live on a larger plane, schools can be small parochial places. I wanted to be rid of the politics.”

“And I had studied design, my first job out of college was as a designer. And I was still very much interested in design. Waldorf is connected to design right down to the chairs and desk and furniture and the color of the walls through all the grades. Design is central and there is a strong belief that the right design can have a very positive effect.”

“I did home visits and the children who had ‘good’ homes – neat, clean and well organized, did better in my classroom. Not necessarily the smartest – it was the ones with a good home foundation. And I thought a lot about that. I was fascinated with that. Being a teacher you need to live the model life. You have to start where you are.”

On starting Apartment Therapy: “At this time I found myself reading the business section of the newspaper more than any other section. It was that time in America before Bush where there was a real optimism in this country around business – business was creative and practical and honest. I craved that opportunity.”

“So in 2001 I started what turned out to be an early version of Apartment Therapy in the summer and gave myself a year to try it out. If it didn’t work I would go back to teaching.”

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