Working life: A loft with room for inspiration
21.05.12
Leafing through a 1960s shelter magazine recently, Linnea Gits landed on a piece about
shibumi , a Japanese aesthetic. She tacked a list of its seven qualities to the chunky cork mood board inside the River West loft she shares with partner Peter Dunham, as a distillation of the values they have always lived and designed by: simplicity, implicitness, modesty, silence, naturalness, everydayness and imperfection.
Those principles influence every object — custom furniture, tabletop accessories, limited-edition prints — that the couple create for their almost 2-year-old design company Uusi. That sensibility also permeates the 2,500-square-foot live/work space that they gutted and rebuilt starting in 1996, in an industrial building once occupied by a furniture company.
A woodworker and furniture-maker, Dunham executed most of the rehab, with artful unconventionality. There is no living room, formal or otherwise. "One of these days we will get a sofa," Gits
Source: Chicago Tribune