The Globe and Mail
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Four years ago, when my partner and I bought our first condo, we decided not to spoil our new space with the old, worn-out Ikea futon we had in our rental apartment. We were both happy to leave the couch on the curbside when we moved, but it was a full four years before we…
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Like many people in their late 20s and early 30s, Heather Payne and her husband, Shawn Konopinsky, are bright, ambitious and successful – but they don’t own the place where they live with their one-year-old baby. Instead, they own a cottage. For the past five years, they have rented their apartment in the downtown Toronto…
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It’s a familiar, often unfortunate equation: a designer (industrial, fashion etc.) from a wealthy country has a trend-setting idea, manufacturers it for pennies in an impoverished country and then sells it for a premium without sharing the riches with the labourers who made it. Dutch designer Pepe Heykoop is trying to create a new paradigm.…
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Ceramicist Chari Cohen always admired the elegance of her mother-in-law’s Shabbat dinner table, laid as it was with stately silver candlesticks and a white tablecloth. She always thought the scene was slightly marred, however, when a basic box of matches would be set next to the finery (more so when a burnt-out match would be…
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To many people, knitting might just be as anachronistic as an episode of Downton Abbey. And maybe it is. (It’s certainly been around longer than Maggie Smith.) As fusty as knitting may be, the craft is cool again. It’s been embraced by just about everyone, from athletes and movie stars to urban hipsters and biology…
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Geof Ramsay is a modern Maritimes designer. He was raised in Moncton and lives in Halifax, but learned his craft in Detroit, Ottawa and Amsterdam before setting up his eponymous studio in 2009. His witty Steps seat reflects both his East Coast roots and international influences. The piece is a play on people’s tendency to…
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As a reaction to mass manufacturing, the burgeoning slow furniture movement is a painstakingly careful, anachronistically plodding way to produce chairs, desks and credenzas. Everything is made using time-honoured carpentry techniques, out of elemental materials, without computer-guided machines and routers. Acclaimed, Toronto-based Heidi Earnshaw is an advocate of the trend. Her designs have the subtlety…
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In all of our lives, there are short, daily rituals that become so routine that they are almost done unconsciously: a habitual, early morning jolt of coffee, for example, which is chugged for its caffeine rather than savoured for its flavours. To designers Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen—who run an award-winning studio in Vancouver called…
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When an Australian bowerbird wants to attract a mate, it surrounds itself with eye-catching, often glinting things like shells, feathers and scarps of metals. Humans, of course, have a similar mating ritual: adorning bling. Which is why Montreal-based designer Zoë Mowat, after reading about the birds in National Geographic, was inspired to create her Arbor…
Matthew Hague 