Tell us about your background and how it led to “Coast Modern.” I work as a freelance art director, music producer, and more recently, a filmmaker based in Vancouver, BC. I’ve made numerous records and singles for Nordic Trax Records available on vinyl and in the iTunes Store.

I got a little burned out from the club scene around 2005 and embarked on making a film to cleanse my palette and try something new. I was becoming more and more obsessed with mid-century design and architecture and wanted to get to the bottom of it. After working five years part time with my co-director Mike Bernard, we released “Coast Modern” in May 2012 to a receptive worldwide audience. The film has taken us to festivals in Italy, New York, Toronto, Boston, Montreal, Portland, and New Zealand, to name a few. We play LA this June 4 at the Hammer Museum and we’re designing a DVD package with some great bonus materials and a booklet for a June 2013 release. The film is also on its way to the iTunes Store this July. Big shouts to our producer Leah Mallen at Twofold Films and editor Peter Roeck. We haven’t screened in Michigan yet, so maybe Herman Miller could put on an event in Zeeland…

Tell us about yourself and your work: what you’re passionate about, what inspires you, and where you’re going. I’m inspired by my family, nature, music, and food. I like when technology reaches a point where it can facilitate creativity on a large scale. In the early 90s, MIDI technology, affordable computers, and discarded 80′s drum machines came together in a way that made making records at home possibility. Kids around the world pushed electronic music to new levels and I got involved with that and still continue to explore it.

More recently, the DSLR video/high-speed Internet combo and platforms like Vimeo and WordPress have given aspiring filmmakers the ability to produce incredible-looking work independently. I love the Internet and the possibilities that it creates, but I also believe in turning it off. Kids need to learn how to build a raft after a two-day hike into the mountains.

Describe your space. What’s your aesthetic? What do you like or dislike about it? We just moved into a great old Post & Beam in West Vancouver that we’re renovating. It’s classic open plan with an incredible connection to the outside. In the office, we’ve done simple plywood built-ins for records and a long shared table for everyone to work around. My wife Jody should actually be featured here — she has a great aesthetic and the ability to bring ideas to life. We’re soon building a detached music “shed” in the garden out of some renovation scraps, which is very exciting — modernism at its best, intended to connect people to one other and to nature. We’re just building on that 95-year-old idea. One thing I would love is a sunken living room. Why did those go out of style? Bring back sunken living rooms!

You have a few pieces by Charles and Ray Eames in your space. Why did you choose them? We bought our first Herman Miller piece (an Eames Sofa Compact) about 14 years ago while living in Boston. We’ve since added a few other classic Herman Miller pieces both new and used. Every time we add another piece it’s a considered decision that will be with us for life.

The thing about buying authentic Herman Miller is you only have to buy it once. Cheap knock-offs are an insult to everyone — the designers, the manufacturers, the craftspeople that build them, and the landfills they ultimately occupy. Authentic furniture can be expensive, but every piece we buy will serve our entire lives, my daughter’s life, and if we decide to sell it, someone else’s life. Buy something once and get on with living.

Photos: Tina Kulic

Bento box was established in 1999. What led to that point? Surrounded by talented classmates and friends in his final year in the Intermedia program at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, our founder and business director Henry Faber had a hunch that a group of highly specialized artists and content producers — spanning disciplines from animation to film and photography — could do even better work together. At the time, few Web studios were producing successful cross-media campaigns. By coming together as a team to focus on our clients’ root problems (rather than the work as the end goal), we were able to maintain a very lean team and produce truly interdisciplinary work.

Tell us about Bento: what you’re passionate about, what inspires you, and where you’re going. We’ve always been fascinated by scale: How can we better comprehend our clients’ problems, so we can craft meaningful solutions? Over the years we’ve found paring down helps us get to the heart of our partners’ passion. We continuously remove objects and influences that don’t contribute to deeper understanding, and replace them with things that help us focus and bring us closer to our own goals and the vision of those we work with.

By shaping our own space and practice, we are in a better position to help people identify what they really want and make a plan to go after it — and that’s the most rewarding part of our work. Nothing excites us like seeing someone working on turning what they care about most in the world into something sustainable.

In 2006, we moved the business from Vancouver to Toronto, and spent the next five years working from our home offices. We really missed the sense of place we had with our downtown Vancouver office, the opportunities for human connection and play that come with gathering to work in the same physical space. We were also becoming overwhelmed by the enormous scale of our sphere of social participation — our “community” was the whole Web, and all its pockets of tenuous interaction.

So we started a regular coworking meetup at a neighborhood coffee shop, and eight months later had a solid group of regulars gathering around a big marble table, suffering through hours of hunching in too-low plastic chairs for the benefit of human contact. In late 2011, we realized that it was time to give them the workspace they deserved.

Now we draw so much inspiration from the people who share our space. During the day, we work together — artists, designers, and developers pouring their hearts into projects they believe in. After hours, we gather for social events like games night, supper club, and movie night. We focus all of our efforts on our members — collectively, a slice of the huge indie game development community here in Toronto, Web freelancers, and tiny startup teams. The scale is comprehensible to us, so we can create a place that meets their needs, ergonomically and socially.

Tell us about your space. Any special considerations that influenced its set up? Because the coworking space is not our primary business, our main concern was keeping things simple and giving members exactly what they needed without cruft. The space itself is lovely, with huge original factory windows looking out over the city, and wood floors and beams. We didn’t want to detract from that charm, so we opted to keep the workspace completely open, with five big work tables, an open meeting/eating area, and two lounges. Coffeeshops and other public “third places” are not noted for their comfortable seating, so we wanted to blow our members away with support and customizability — that’s why we chose SAYL.

So you have SAYL Chairs, and we’ve heard rumor of Embody Chairs. Why did you choose them? Because different members may use a particular chair on any given day, easy adjustability was a primary concern. We don’t even need to keep the instructions around because the controls are so intuitive — coworkers pop in, plop down, tweak for a few seconds, and get to work.

Our 30 SAYLs are the lifeblood of our workspace, and a huge selling point for new members. They encourage movement, collaboration, and openness — and their futuristic good looks create a pleasing contrast with the warmth and simplicity of the original piano factory features of our space.

Our product director Jennie Faber suffered a sports injury a few years back, and her Embody was the only thing that allowed her to keep working. She found it was an improvement over a standing desk because it encourages movement, like leaning back and swinging her arms, gliding around to chat with coworkers, and relieves pressure on her thighs and tailbone. She swears by it and recommends it to desk workers with back injuries and anyone who finds themselves “frozen” in front of a monitor for hours on end.

We know what it’s like to end the day with back and neck pain and want to spare hard-working devs the aches and regret that come with a day on a coffeeshop bench!

Photos: Bento Box