Three Layer Cake

Grace Bonney:  Full Time Design*Sponge

            The multiple daily posts on design*sponge, as effervescent and sunny as they may be, pale in comparison to the real live woman who writes them.  Grace Bonney, a Virginia-native living in Brooklyn, is the voice behind the design blog which attracts over 12,000 readers a day.  Now that she’s on her own, she has the potential to go even farther.

            Grace is extremely articulate and focused.  She has very clear ideas about what she likes and dislikes and makes no bones about it.  That’s not to say she’s brash—she’s the exact opposite, but even with her demure demeanor (Southern like her accent), she makes her opinion heard and respected.  She grew up in Virginia Beach, graduated from William and Mary in Colonial Williamsburg with a degree in art and art history and for the past two and a half years worked full time at a record label and as an assistant at a Brooklyn PR firm that handled large design accounts like Vitra. Working so closely with the design community, Bonney rekindled her passion for interior and product design and, as of March 6, she’s a ‘minipreneur’, running her own design website and working as a freelance design writer and consultant for various national publications.

            Thanks to the considerable visibility Grace has built for herself and design*sponge since she started it in August 2004, she is now able to run design*sponge full time as well as write a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, consult to CondéNet on making some of their websites as magnetic as her own, and.write for various national publications about trends in the design world.  Now that she’s her own boss, she’s even flirting with the idea of moving her operation somewhere closer to home in the not-so-distant future, perhaps Richmond, Virginia.  Most design junkies used to the big city design fix and being in the mix would never even entertain the thought of moving away from a hub and incubator like New York, much less below the Mason-Dixon line.  But Grace is a Southerner to the core and that’s where her family and her heart have remained.  (She tried the New York thing once as an undergrad at NYU, but transferred back to Virginia after two years!) “I love Brooklyn and the opportunities that exist for design there, but with the connection that the internet allows, I’m finding it less and less crucial to be in a design hub year-round. I couldn’t ever leave the South or New York completely.”

            It’s always interesting to explore the stories of successful people to see how much of their success is casual and how much of it planned, how much is genius and how much is serendipity.  Grace started her blog with no agenda except to give an outlet to her uncontainable passion for design and all things beautiful.  Of course it didn’t hurt that she worked in a PR firm which handled design accounts, so she had excellent access to ‘raw’ material all day long.  Casual.  Additionally, she probably already had an idea of her ability to attract an audience:  In undergrad, after transferring to William and Mary from NYU, her roommate was the music director for the campus radio station.  She offered Grace a ‘graveyard’ shift on the radio station doing what Grace calls “a hippie music” show (Phish, Grateful Dead, etc.).  Grace worked hard to move it into a prime time slot and on the day when the radio station held its shows outdoors, all the listeners she never realized she had showed up to support her.  She had the highest turn out of all the deejays.  Genius.  design*sponge was a lot like this for her, except she didn’t really work hard to bring it to prime time, it just kind of happened thanks to her addictive personality and topical comprehensive coverage of American design, especially Brooklyn and New York locals, independent and student designers.  Serendipity.

            design*sponge coverage is about everything that Grace finds beautiful.  “It’s always been and will always be about what I like, what I find beautiful.  If I don’t like it, it’s not going to be on the site.  I am not interested in putting something on there just because it’s hot or the thing of the moment.  That’s just never going to happen,” she said.  It is, therefore, laugh-out-loud funny that she doesn’t seem to own anything she reviews on her website (“I’m a big-time window-shopper on a small-time budget”, she said laughing), which was redesigned at the beginning of March to include more features to inform and involve her readers, including reader supplied photos, mini-trends, shout outs to other sites with interesting content, and soon will include podcasts.  The new format ties her posts and professional and personal experience in the field to more tangible, more useful, and more insightful content.  Most importantly, Grace has designed more opportunities to use her tremendous potential, which is, as of yet, hardly tapped.  (Hard to believe given how far she’s gone!  But true.)

Where did the design bug come from?  I guess my design bug came about as a result of my parents.  My mother is a wonderful floral designer (in her spare time) and cares very much about how our home looks and feels. I really grew to appreciate how much time she put into our home and creating an environment in which we all felt comfortable and welcome.  She really instilled in me valuing the place where you spend the majority of your time.

My dad was always interested in architecture and photography.  Our house was always covered in architecture books, his drawings and tiny paper models of famous buildings.  I think my mother’s love of interior and floral design, combined with my father’s eye for architecture, lines and photography crept into my subconscious and created my love of design.

What’s your design philosophy?  What you’d like someone to tell a friend about Design*Sponge.  I would just like someone to say “Hey, it’s a great place to go if you’re looking to find great new things happening in the design world.  It’s really friendly, low key, informal.  A happy place to gather around and talk with people who care about contemporary design.” 

The new Design*Sponge has a mini-trends section.  In broad terms, what things do you think will stay on for a while, and which do you think have waned?  I think the things that are going to stick around for a while are non-traditional materials—eco slant –cork, reclaimed wood, all of that seems to be really big right now and there’s a huge demand for it.  If designers can take that and make it look high end it will definitely stick around.

As for waning, I hope bent plywood wanes!  I can’t take anymore new bent plywood designs.  I know, that’s not answering the question.  But I’d love to see new materials, and not just knockoff versions of stuff that’s already out there.  If you’re going to do it, do it well.  But I’d rather see people focusing on the way furniture is joined and put together, you know, quality construction in new materials, with new components.

Best city to live in for design?  New York and San Francisco, for me at least.  

Which country do you think will produce the next big design phenomenon (like the Bouroullecs)?  I’m gonna step out there and say the U.S.  I know the Dutch are doing amazing things,   but there’s a lot coming out of design schools here, yeah I think Brooklyn, too.  The West Coast has lots to offer, too. Portland, Seattle, and Austin have great indie design scenes as well, but I’m gonna say Brooklyn for sure.  If it’s not a designer per se that makes the change, it might be a design “director” and “trendsetter” .  I think Dave from Future Perfect is a great example of that- someone who took a fledgling scene and really brought it to the forefront of national design. I’ve been really impressed with how he’s taken Brooklyn designers to the next level.

How would you distinguish American contemporary/modern design from European design?  Is there a difference?  I think it has a lot to do with materials.  I feel like Americans are a little bit more raw and more into things that look unfinished.  You can feel the craftsmanship in them.  I tend to think of American designs as what I see in New York right now.  There’s a lot of earthiness to things, eco materials.  European looks edgier in a high-end way, it looks more expensive.  I would say the difference between the two has to do with materials and craftsmanship. But that said, I’m probably not the best resource for European designs, I just don’t have the same closeness to it that I have with American design.

What is “good design”?  What attracts you most about an object?  I think good design is something that makes me respond to it in an emotional (usually positive) way.  If I look at something and immediately find the shape or color pleasing, then it’s good design for me.  I am definitely an aesthetics over function person.  If something’s beautiful, I tend to really enjoy it. For example, as much as I don’t like Karim Rashid’s popular work, I love his Method soap bottles- they’re a nice shape, a nice style, very simple..  It’s visually pleasing.  It doesn’t elicit anything more than a gut reaction to me.  It’s different for everyone.  That’s what I like about design and art in general.  When a lot of people respond positively, I think general culture decides it’s “good design”.

What about a designer?  I think it really depends.  I don’t often come to designs through a designer.  I very rarely see the designer before the design.  What keeps me intrigued is someone who manages to find a balance between what’s in the market and what clients need and their own creative impulses.  I think the best designers are people who are creating what’s within them- they tend to create what inspires them.  I think people who keep their heads down and are buried in their studios create amazing work.  I am attracted by designers who are driven by their inner need to produce their own things.

I think I’m also attracted to independent artists/designers because they move through phases like artists due to their flexibility and lack of constraints imposed by a manufacturer or client.  I like an artist I can watch and see them grow.  I think a lot of famous designers are stuck in the designs that made them famous, so their things all tend to look the same for a while, which is really sad.
 

You post 7-12 times a day on Design*Sponge, presumably all things that you’d love to have in a home of yours in some way or another.  How do you make the decision on which products to buy and which not—do you have a personal philosophy on purchasing?  I don’t own many of the things that I have on my website.  I live on a budget that is fairly small- it doesn’t support buying everything from my website or any other website really.  As a consequence, I rehab pieces I own or that have been handed down to me.  I do love accessories, though. I tend to be inspired by pieces on my site and try to find a way to bring a  “version” of a particular piece into our home, whether it’s homemade or just a similar style. I think what we can learn from beautiful design is a general idea- for example- if gorgeous blue and purple floral pillows from Hable are hot, what I’ll take away is the idea of incorporating those colors together in my home. I don’t feel restricted by not being able to buy designer goods all the time.

I like to feel a designer in a piece.  If I am going to invest in a larger piece of furniture, I want it to be from a local designer, someone I can see making it.  I really try to support the smaller artist.  Any of the artwork we have is from the world of independent artists I’ve been lucky enough to befriend through my site. Whether it’s Amy Ruppel from Portland or Stacy Pancake from San Francisco, I try to fill my home with pieces that my friends made- they mean so much more to me that way.

I also love to frame letterpress cards- it’s a fun way to have small pieces of art all over your home without dropping a ton of money. It’s all in the framing.

More about Grace on the next page...