The Summer 2024 issue of Spruce brings some great ideas for quick style updates in your home.
Take it Easy
The West Coast Lounge Chair by The Stables Woodshop Fine Furniture & Design (now in downtown Victoria) is a striking yellow piece inspired by the raw beauty of B.C.’s West Coast. The locally sourced wood, together with felted wool, seagrass and brass, represents the warm tones of Victoria’s coastline on a sunny summer day. This lounge chair, custom created by The Stables founder Jeff Mann, features traditional mortise and tenon joinery and has been made with the intention of lasting a lifetime.
While the piece itself was a custom fabrication, Mann hosts a spectrum of other craft furniture in his shop, from artisanal butcher blocks and Shaker tables to rolling pins and wooden mallets.
Artistic Reframe
If you’re getting tired of seeing the same old art on your walls, use the excuse of a new season to switch up those pieces. The Summer Small Works Show & Sale is happening at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from June 13 to August 31, bringing a deluge of work from local artists into one room where you can peruse them at your leisure. From paintings and prints to photography and ceramics, the annual show offers the perfect opportunity to bring a few new conversation starters into your home and turn your walls fresh again.
Prey-Proof Designs
Home-design tech has reached a new niche, with an AI-controlled cat door that won’t let your furry friend bring their catches inside. The Flappie — a Swiss-built concept cat door that launched this year — gives selective-access control that automatically senses when your cat wants to enter with its prey. The system can identify prey from mice to birds via a detection camera, and immediately closes its entrance. It’ll even send a report on when and how many times Trixie had to be shut out, with push notifications, analyses, videos and photos of your cat sent directly to your phone from the Flappie app. Of course, if owners want to take a chance and let their princess in despite the warning, users can control all settings of the cat flap remotely. The door will set buyers back about $400, but eager owners will have to wait with tails flicking — the Flappie’s initial drop isn’t expected until the end of 2024.
Books to design change in your home
Spirit of the Sea
There’s a magic to coastal living. Whether or not your home is facing a beach, however, there are ways to bring the inspiration of the sea into your own designs. That’s the mission of Lauren Liess in her new book, Beach Life: Home, Heart & the Sea (ABRAMS Books, 2024). The work explores why we are drawn to life by the sea and the therapeutic benefits of being near the ocean — or at least adding its motifs to our homes.
Roll out your favourite beach blanket and escape into sunshine and surf with this work of interior design advice. The book is filled with explorations into mindfulness, stories and even seasonal recipes, and will capture your own spirit of the sea to bring home.
Breathe In Home
A home has one primary function: to work for the people who live there. That’s the pillar that American architect Gil Schafer holds to in his latest book, Home at Last: Enduring Design for the New American House (Rizzoli, 2024). Renowned as a leading expert on contemporary traditional architecture, Schafer’s work captures how he translates history into the houses he works on and how those houses adapt to the needs of the families that live in them.
