Stylin' sneakers.

Last Friday night, over 100 people showed up for the final judging and party for the Puma Shoe Design Competition at the DWR Southlake Studio. Over 60 people entered the competition by designing a pair of Puma running shoes using Puma’s design website, Mongolian Shoe BBQ. It was great to see what so many people did with the chance to get creative. And with such great prizes, who wouldn’t want to give it a try? Puma awarded the top three winning designers with a pair of the shoes they designed. Plus, the first place winner, Carmen Menza (shown above), was given a limited-edition white leather bag from their new line, Urban Mobility. (Only 600 of these bags were produced. Ever.)  All of the guests got an opportunity to view the entire line of Urban Mobility clothing and bags, and got a sneak peak at the new Spring 2008 footwear line. As a huge Puma fan myself (last count of shoes was 54 pairs), this was a great opportunity to share a passion of mine – other than well-designed furniture and accessories – with the DWR community.

Posted by E. David Goltl, Proprietor-DWR Southlake Studio.

Linda and Marge in Paris.

Glenda Bailey’s Harper’s Bazaar, in my opinion the best fashion magazine in America, isn’t afraid to take itself less than seriously. This is precisely why the easy-to-read and unstuffy Bazaar made the perfect choice for a new editorial spread featuring supermodel (and DWR fan) Linda Evangelista, Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld and the Simpsons.

Marge Simpson finally lets her hair down as she sits with Donatella Versace and Homer gives Lagerfeld a run for his money in dark glasses and gloves. Maggie ends up in Jean Paul Gaultier’s Hermes bag and Bart’s made the front row for Louis Vuitton. Bazaar’s spread is a throw-back to the day when new fashions debuted in fashion magazines as illustrations and not photographs. It is also a nod to the fact that fashion design has become a part of mainstream pop culture. I only hope that more people in the fashion press took these risks. Besides, Lagerfeld and Gaultier have been caricatures for years. This just cements that fact.

Little pink (and red and blue and yellow) houses.

Apartment Therapy posted recently about colorful houses in cities across the world. I thought it complemented the discussions here recently about Schnabel’s pink Manhattan building. The collection of homes at More Ways to Waste Time, found via a Flickr image search, illustrate my opinion that there are too few of these bright-hued homes amongst us. These pictures are fun and refreshing. And being a Baltimore native I am very interested in tracking down the home in the above picture. Baltimore is full of red brick row houses and I’d love to discover this block the next time I’m home visiting Mom.

High-flying art.

Molly Peck just sent me a link to something very strange and beautiful, two of my favorite adjectives.  The French artist Hubert Duprat shies away from traditional artist tools and creates his work with much more interesting materials: gold spangles, turquoise, opals, diamonds and caddis fly larvae. Yes, he makes art with bugs.

Cabinet magazine has stunning photos of the work and an interview with the artist up from their Spring issue. In the wild the flies create larvae casing from spun silk and found particles of sand, fish bone and the like. In Duprat's world the extremely adaptive buggers (ha, ha) play with finer materials resulting in living jewelry. It’s avant-garde art not for the squeamish.

Cubit-Creativity contest.

   

Calling all storage enthusiasts. Are you using Cubits or Cubitec? Enter the Cubit-Creativity Contest. Your creative use of Cubits or Cubitec could earn you a DWR gift certificate* ($250 for first place, $100 runner up) and a featured posting in the DWR blog. To enter, show us your creative cube usage by emailing a photo to storage@dwr.com. Winners will be notified by email. Entries must be received by August 10, 2007.

* No purchase necessary to enter or win. Entrants must be 18 or older. Void where prohibited.

Trailer talk.

Last week I headed over to Piedmont with a colleague from Design Within Reach to attend an art talk. The talk was with Lucinda Barnes, Deputy Director, Programs and Collections from the Berkeley Museum of Art and Andrea Zittel, a contemporary artist with an impressive catalog of work. Zittel’s sculptures and installations transform everything necessary for life—such as eating, sleeping, bathing, and socializing—into artful experiments in living. Blurring the line between life and art, Zittel’s projects extend to her own home and wardrobe. Andrea’s A-Z roots date back to  the early 90’s when a friend hired her to help him find a boyfriend. She gave him pointers on everything from home decorating to what shoes to buy.

We were invited to the talk to hear about BAMs newly acquired trailer from Andreas’ show commissioned for the SFMOMA in 1995. Andrea is such an engaging and interesting artist, I won’t begin to try and put her words in here, but please check out more about her here. She’s just starting up a stint at the Headlands Center for Arts and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Emeco or bust.

Emeco is consistently named a favorite manufacturer amongst DWR employees (see the 1006 Navy, Hudson and 1951 collections, just to name few). Maybe it is the small-town roots of the company. Perhaps it is their reinvention courtesy Philippe Starck and Norman Foster.  It could be the fact that the company uses 80% recycled aluminum in their seating. No matter whom you ask at DWR, you’ll always get the same response: We love Emeco. My personal favorite piece of Emeco trivia is the fact that their iconic Navy chair uses the butt mold of Betty Grable. Chairs don’t get better than that.

My friend Eric Lee and I took a scenic road trip through New York, Pennsylvania, Marylandand D.C. last week.  One of our stops was Emeco’s headquarters in Hanover, Pennsylvania. It was a short, but memorable, experience. The Emeco plant seems almost untouched since the 1950s. The windows are mirrored, and the factory is small, uncluttered and full of chairs. I got to tour their “museum,” an interactive display and work room full of prototypes and one-offs. If only the powder-coated pink Navy chair had seen the light of day.  Julian Schnabel would surely snap some up.

McDonald's goes fully licensed classic.

I’ve clearly taken large swigs of the DWR Kool-Aid. Let me explain: I was in London to see my fiancé perform with his band. I was walking through Camden on my way to the gig, when I spotted what I believed to be Egg chairs. I looked up to see the name of the establishment, because I thought to myself, “Who’s bold enough to put a bunch of fake Egg chairs in the window like that?”

Much to my surprise, I was looking right at the Golden Arches. McDonald’s! McDonald’s using Egg chairs? How could this be? Later that evening, I dragged my fiancé to the restaurant and we stood at the door like some kind of knock-off crusaders. What exactly would we do if we found out they were fakes? Would we call Ronald directly and complain? We marched in armed with a camera phone to take a photo of the “evidence.”

I was shocked to find that not only did all the seats have tiny red Fritz Hansen tags woven right into the seam but there were also authentic Series 7 and Swan chairs all throughout the dining room too!  I was tempted to put the Series 7 upside down and jump on it to prove its remarkable contract quality, but I was looking crazy enough jumping from chair to chair screaming, “It’s real! It’s real!” So I tried to leave more quietly than I arrived.

Posted by Melissa Howard, Studio Account Executive-DWR Rosyln.

Head of the class.

 

Brooklyn is a hotbed for hipster fashion and typically I turn a blind eye to that genre of clothing. But I was just sent a link to silkscreen shop HeadHoods via David Report and I must admit I’m totally smitten.  Screen-printed by hand, the hoodies feature images of clowns, gorillas and Audrey Hepburn. Now we’re talking. And who doesn’t want to walk the cold summer nights of San Francisco disguised as Elvis Presley? And though they claim to not be “cheap,” HeadHoods do custom prints. I am thinking one with Charles Eames on the left and Ray Eames on the right. And like any good hipster brand they’re up on MySpace.

Congratulations to…

…us! DWR has been honored with a 2008 Gold Award in advertising by Graphis magazine. You may have seen our ads in fine publications like The New York Times, Dwell, The New Yorker or Elle Décor. Kudos to our creative team (senior designer, Tina Yuan; senior copywriter, Gwendolyn Horton; and marketing manager Frank Wild, all under the guidance of VP of marketing/creative director Jennifer Morla). Graphis was first published in 1944 in Zurich, Switzerland and is global in scope – aiming to document the most significant and influential communication work being produced today. We could say it’s an honor just to be nominated, but, to be honest, we’re really quite proud.