Don’t worry about walking on this art. The charm, colour and composition of Watson Soule’s new line of reversible carpets – perhaps more accurately described as “visually expressive floor pieces” – could have you fight an urge to hang them on the wall.
Toronto designers Janna Watson and Nico Soule are the creative force behind the Twofold collection, which incorporates double-sided, flat-woven wool and features two independent designs in one. The duo sees the floor as a missed opportunity for bold design possibilities, and their latest line taps into that unexpected option with pieces that are contemporary and surprising.
With complementary palettes, the line offers both abstract and geometric options for “the fifth wall,” and is designed so that the intonation will still match your room when you flip it over. These carpets also play into that evergreen decor tip: Update the floor mat to add visual interest to a room – it’s an instant seasonal refresh.
A modern fusion of functional art and high-end craft, the pragmatic and artistic approach of Watson Soule seems to be a byproduct of their combined personality and artistic vision. When she’s not hand-tufting with her partner, Watson is a full-time painter. A fine-arts graduate from the Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University), she’s been represented by the Bau-Xi Gallery for the past eight years and has a solo exhibition on at the gallery’s Toronto location until June 27. Soule, meanwhile, graduated from OCAD in industrial design and was hungry to create something from the ground up.
The duo met in 2012 at Come Up to My Room, a Toronto Design Offsite Festival event at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel, where Watson had an installation of a painting with a mirror-image rug. Inspired by her grandfather, who was also a painter and got into hand-hooking rugs in his retirement years, Watson explains that the experiment intended to “bring value to what the rug is worth.”
“It seems that people will drop a lot of money on a painting, but a rug is just as unique and has the capability to add great energy and style to a room,” she says. “I think [they] demand more attention.”
(Kevin Van Paassen/For The Globe and Mail)
The pair got talking and spent the next year prototyping. They quickly realized “no one in Canada was making their own carpets,” so learned the time-consuming skills of hand-dyeing, hand-knotting and tufting.
Their first, the made-in-Canada Undertones collection, launched at the Interior Design Show in January, 2014. It was there that they caught the attention of Ali Ghassemi from Weaver & Loom, a retailer specializing in artisan rugs, who wanted to support their creative endeavours, eventually backing them to bring a double-sided rug to market.
“It was the quintessential opportunity of what an industrial designer is seeking out,” Soule says. “A manufacturer that wants to launch a new product but is looking for a designer to translate it into something people will understand … he also appreciated that we were committed to the knowledge and tradition of making rugs ourselves.”
As rugs are inherently luxury items, Watson Soule see their work as heirloom pieces with both fine quality and a Canadian-made ethos behind it. All rug designs start in their 401 Richmond studio at the prototyping loom. “We tuft them right there to see what’s working because it’s so immediate, like drawing with wool,” Soule says. Offering people an alternative to the traditional construct of rugs is also a key aspect of their business.
“We’re using techniques that have been harvested for generations,” Soule says. “So even though the design aesthetic [of our collection] is a bit newer, it still has the same quality, the same value. And it’s time for this: Floors need to change. They’re boring.”
Over the past two years, the pair says they’ve homed in on their core values. “People talk about design obsolescence, and that’s the opposite of what we want to create,” Soule says. They both abhor “fast-food design practices where [something is] hot for a minute, looks great on the shelf but two months later it’s dated, it’s trendy, you want it out of there.”
One challenge for Watson Soule is that they sense their work still feels relatively new and edgy for Canadians. And apparently, we’re too polite: “Canadians are always like, ‘Why would I walk on this? I don’t want to step on that,’ and I have to tell them, ‘No, you should,’ ” Watson says. “This is what we want you to do.”
The duo have big design ambitions. They’ve started working on a fall line, with a desire to incorporate Watson’s large-scale, dreamy paintings further into the carpet world. They’ll be prototyping full, silk, hand-knotted rugs as a way to translate her gorgeous, gradient, water-colour effects. “Bold strokes,” Soule says of their vision. “But we’re still sketching.”
The pair may also apply to the Domotex trade fair in Germany, where they have the greatest opportunity to gain some international attention. “We think that Canada has a strong design narrative,” Watson says. “If anything, we are offering people that alternative.”
As good a reason as any to keep your eyes on the floor.