The idea started out as a simple weekend trip to Carlsbad for a Forte reunion party at Chris's on Saturday with some other possible stops. It ended up a five-day whirlwind through San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Carlsbad/San Marcos, El Cajon, and LaVerne, before we landed back at home last night.We'll start with San Francisco.
Last week I wrote about our having spent the weekend previous in SF "helping" Dylan build some furniture and a new website. The focus of the all the activity was an annual design contest at the SF branch of DWR (Design Within Reach), a very nice contemporary furniture gallery with stores across North America. So, we, of course, traveled to the event scheduled for Thursday evening, making it the first stop of our journey loop.
Dylan had been quite disappointed the night before. Let's just say the previous statement is a pale shadow of the real situation. He had completed the building of three pieces on very short notice, two of which he'd sent out to a professional finisher to be, well, finished professionally. When he went to pick them up on Wednesday (to transport them to DWR for the event), he found out that she had ruined the, uh, finish. On both. Yipes! He took them back to his shop instead of to the gallery. In the end, he was only able to buff up the Stink Tree table a bit and had to live with it the way it was (sort of splotchy). For the Cornered table, though, there was no hope. There was a months-old dusty prototype version of it, with some imperfections, that had been living at the shop for awhile, so, on Thursday morning, he and his intern, Mark, cleaned and waxed it best they could. Then, with a bit of a heavy heart, he took all three pieces over to the store.
We arrived mid-afternoon to find that he'd become calmer and more philosophical about it all and had resolved to make the most of the opportunity, anyway. It's a classy place, DWR, full of contemporary furniture, some classically so, priced somewhat ironically, out of reach for most people, I'd say. I love most of it. One of my faves, because of the humor, was the enormous desk lamp you see in the first picture with Tom. Dylan, as mentioned before, had three pieces in the contest, chosen from a couple hundred submissions unlabeled as to designer during the judging. The judges were, then, quite surprised to find that three of the final fifteen were submitted by one person. Here's an article posted before the final prizes were announced referring to Dylan's accomplishment: http://joshspear.com/item/modern-design-function-exhibition/
The other twelve pieces were wonderful, too, to my eye. Mostly tables and chairs of different sorts. A beautiful bentwood cradle; a bench that looked a bit like a spider's web. I'd estimate about 200 people showed up to see the pieces (and for the food and drinks, as well, I'm thinking--the merinque cookies were killer) including Rachel and Emi. There were quite a few of Dylan and Rachel's friends, some of whom we've known for quite awhile, some not. It was a very cool gallery event.
Toward the end, the manager of the store began the announcements phase by introducing the four judges, one of whom is associated with the Museum of Modern Art, another of whom is an editor of Dwell, a prominent home-design magazine. They introduced the designer-finalists next, all of whom received polite clapping--except for Dylan, who got the big, noisy applause, whistles and shouts as if at a sporting event of some kind.
There were three awards. The first was the "best furniture" won by a woman who'd made a lovely birchy-wood chair. The second was "most environmentally responsible" (so, I can't remember the actual name of the award, but that's the gist), which was given to another woman for a nice chair made from recycled materials and some beautifully-formed steel. The final award was "best in show", which went to---Dylan!! For Cornered!! Woo hoo!! So amazing! So fun! And so ironic!! They loved it! He had been making connections all evening with other folks in the industry (including recommendations for a new finisher), but after the announcements, he had great conversations with most of the judges and it looks like there'll be a feature about Dylan's furniture in Dwell Magazine toward the end of the year!
There's Dylan with the winning table and a mural of prominent designers, such as Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames looking over his shoulder.He was surprised and, well, pleased, of course, though Dylan never goes exactly overboard with excitement. It was such a relief and such a confirmation! So many friends were there to help celebrate! Afterwards, we went to a fun Mexican-food establishment to celebrate more.
We know Dylan has the design chops. He's gradually pulling in all the right kind of attention for his work. A few more things need to be set in place. One of them is the new website, which is nearly ready. Dylan's been waiting for the photographer to return from out of town so as to get the most recent photos up onto the site. Should happen this week and I'll post it as soon as it's ready.
So, our little trip got started off on quite a positive step! Heading south...
