What do you listen to while you work? Depends on the task and the time of day. If I must really concentrate, or even study, then I need classical or jazz music, like Coltrane, Monk, or Miles. If it’s my regular day-to-day work routine, then anything goes. I will dance in my seat to Parliament Funkadelic, Queen, The Stuyvesant’s, and Bob Marley. If it’s been a really pleasant day and I‘ve received good news, or if a client gives me high praise, then I get up and take five-minute dance breaks.

How do you listen? If I’m in the kitchen, I usually hook my computer up to my stereo and listen through the house speakers; but, if it’s just regular work, I usually listen through the speakers on my computer. Sometimes I want to feel the music and hear every nuance, and that’s when I use my ear buds. I am dying to get the Beats by Dre or Bose headphones, but I fear I will never be able to go back to anything else after using them.

Do you have any favorite music websites/providers? I have 23 stations on Pandora.  I used to really love Live365.com, but I haven’t been on in a while. I’ve got to check out Spotify and see what all the fuss is about.

Does music influence your work? Music is one of the best modes of creativity, and it always informs my work.  I need music just to get work done. If I sit in silence and try to work, my mind will wander. With some songs, especially if I hear it for the first time, I can almost visualize them with colors, textures, and scenes. I create a lot by feeling and emotion. Music is a big part of that equation. I would love to design a hotel room based on Tom Brock’s “I Love You More and More” or a restaurant inspired by Shona Mbira Music.

Where do you find music recommendations? Who influences your musical taste? Everywhere and everyone! I hardly listen to the radio anymore so I depend on my best friends, NPR, people I know on Facebook, movie and television scores, Pandora suggestions, and Apple genius results to keep me in the loop. The Shazam app is one of the best creations on the planet, just grab and go. I also pay attention to my favorite music artists and find out what they listen to. I once heard Maxwell (whom I adore) talk about Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.” I play “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” every day now. Fantastic.

What song or artist best represents the work you create? I can only hope to one day be like Sade. Her work is just as ethereal as it was almost 30 years ago. Somehow she knows how to be timeless and fiercely contemporary. I saw her in concert last year. Man — I would love to do set design like that. I believe she works with Sophie Muller, whom I believe is a genius. The best artists create work that endures, and that is a principle I am willing to devote my energy to.

Ideal place to sit and listen to your playlist: The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman with the Black Leather and Santos Palisander Veneer, while someone else is sitting next to them on the Ottoman. The craftsmanship of the lounge chair is amazing with materials that are great to the touch. I would hope my playlist is good enough to go from the office on Friday afternoon, to being played at a hot house party toward the end of the night.

AISHA’S PLAYLIST:

1. Exactly Like You, Nina Simone
2. Jigsaw Falling Into Place, Radiohead
3. Flying Overseas, Theophilus London
4. Never Stop, The Brand New Heavies
5. Time’s a Wastin’, Erykah Badu
6. Limit to Your Love, James Blake
7. Come Undone, Duran Duran
8. Space Rider, Shaun Escoffery
9. Phoenix Rise, Maxwell
10. Didjital Vibrations, Jamiroquai
11. You Will Rise, Sweetback
12. Aisha, John Coltrane

Photos: Aisha Densmore-Bey except top, Ben Gebo Photography.

What do you listen to while you work? It depends on what I am doing at the moment. If I am in the studio, I usually start with R&B or bossa nova. Bossa nova seems like the perfect sound to ease into the day. And for practical purposes, it is just there and enjoyable without having to hit you over the head with its presence. But usually I end up back at the R&B vault. Lately, toward the end of the day, I have found myself tuning into jazz-inspired electronica artists like Shigeto and Shlohmo.

If I am in the workshop using sanders and saws, I put on reggae or jazz vocalists from the 50s and 60s. Especially Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. Even when what I am doing is super noisy, I can still hear the music.

How do you listen? I should be a sales rep for the Bose Companion system. We have four of these. They are great for hooking up to your iPod or iPhone and also streaming Pandora or Last.fm. We use these while shooting or making surfaces.

At my desk I use Sony headphones (that I had bought to use for recording sound for video, but ended up mostly using to listen to music) and my iMac or just the iMac.

Do you have any favorite music websites/providers? We jump back and forth from Pandora and Last.fm. Maybe a bit more lately with Pandora.

Where do you find music recommendations? Mostly online. I’ll spend time going through the iTunes store and one thing leads to another. I also tune into NPR and Soundcheck. And of course there’s nothing like having an assistant or client plug in their iPhone or iPod to get a whole new outlook on music.

What song or artist best represents the work you create? I would say it is a toss up between Sergio Mendes and Stevie Wonder. The song “So Nice” from Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’65 is fantastic as it straddles jazz and pop and has an amazing vocalist in Lani Hall — not from Rio, but from Chicago! And “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing” from Innervisions by Stevie Wonder is an all-time favorite and Latin-soul inflected. Upbeat and beautiful.

Ideal place to sit and listen to your playlist: The Eames Aluminum Group Management Chair in black. I’m all about fun and function, plus beauty ranks pretty high on my list of things to have.

JIM’S PLAYLIST

1. Mais Que Nada, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66
2. He’s Misstra Know-It-All, Stevie Wonder
3. Got to Give It Up, Marvin Gaye
4. Love T.K.O., Teddy Pendergrass
5. Soaring, Shigeto
6. The Look of Love, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66
7. Let’s Stay Together, Al Green
8. Didn’t Cha Know, Erykah Badu
9. Sumthin’ Sumthin’, Maxwell
10. Places, Shlomo

cred

Photos: Jim Franco

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.

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.

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.”

“Three weeks later the Twin Towers fell and we lived in downtown NY below 14^th street. We were in the thick of it. The city really transformed itself. Business as usual stopped and for 2-3 months and you felt the extraordinary power of change. People opened their doors to their neighbors.”

“[That new feeling in the city] fit with what I was doing. It was a helping service business. I got to be the connecting tissue and to bring knowledge to people and help them. Very simple. Nobody else was doing it. I’d send an email out once a week to subscribers with things for sale and places for rent. I was also working as an interior designer and it was that work that paid the bills.”

“I couldn’t be everywhere at once. My brother had worked in Silicon Valley for 5 years and told me about these things called blogs – he said it was a great application for what I wanted to do and he was right. He started ‘AT’ with me and then returned to do other work.”

“In 2004 ‘AT’ the blog began. I’d blog in the morning and then work for clients in the afternoon. I liked it. I like blogging a lot – it was easier than dealing with contractors and traveling all over the city to be with clients. Eventually I hired a team of 4 full time staff and with no strong financial plan we started. There were cash flow problems and I had to borrow money but the traffic started to really take off when we went full time. We’ve got 5 sites now and that’s how I wanted it to work – we cover all the home, all of the home.”

On being called “one part interior designer, one part life coach”: “That came from Daily Candy in 2002 – they succinctly named what I was trying to do. I have no problem with it because I’ve felt like I am trying to be a teacher. I am trying to get you to do it better but I don’t give you a fish, I want to teach you to fish.”

“I have a strong conviction that American culture is not helping - it’s hard to find a path to a healthy life within it. I am very conscious about preaching – I used to do it, but you know, some people are just looking for advice on what color to paint a living room. I don’t do direct sermons to an audience anymore. I want to show it rather than say it. Now we model it – my wife and I – we do it ourselves and blog about it.” [Below is a drawing by Maxwell. He made a new year's resolution to draw one image a day and then posted the images on the site.]

“But when I see an opening, someone really looking for something, for an answer, I will go further. Like getting rid of your TV and see how that feels. How does the house feel without a television?”

“[The immediacy of] blogging allows you to try a couple of those approaches during a day – I can get flamed for one story and then move onto something else. I always feel with blogging that you keep moving – fresh donuts, you know.”

On the power of color: “Warm are great for social rooms like a living room. They are expansive and stimulating. 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.”

On the home office: “Home offices that stand out for me are homey – comfortable and not office-like. Most of the ones I find come from European publications. I like a balance between vintage and organic materials. I like natural textures – wood rather than laminate.” [Below is the blogger's office Maxwell designed for Bloomingdale's Big Window Challenge]

“In America home offices seems to be moving in an ‘Apple’ direction – cleaner machines, less wires – much more minimal. Computers serve as art in the workspace, they are a part of your home – like the clock screen saver you posted about. We’ve got so many devices and Apple really puts them together so smoothly. At home that is really important.”

On working from home: “We do work from home, unfortunately. I don’t have any of the office trappings there. There’s no a dedicated space at home. I work all over the home with my laptop. I’ve got the same bookmarks and drop boxes as the office computer so they work together.”