Excerpt from A Tale of Two Hotels: The Gladstone (Part 1), November 2011
We were lodged in Room 303, the Red Room (or the ‘REDRUM’ as I joked in my best Jack Nicholson voice), designed by Kate Austin and Kristin Ledgett of RUCKUS. It was, all at once, intimate, stylish and homey… In a strange small-world occurrence on Friday, I ended up eating downtown at the bar of the Queen Mother Cafe, corralling the only empty chair in the whole lunch-packed place. Apparently, as I would find out while researching this entry, I had seated myself next to Andrew Jones, an award-winning architect-turned-furniture/lighting-designer. Turns out he is the co-designer of Room 312 (Re:Fresh). And, as I would also realize, I had transacted with Kate Austin, half of my room’s design team, when I made an early Christmas purchase at her shop The Knit Cafe that same day. Even in such a large city, this small hotel is obviously succeeding as a magnet of art, design and culture.
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Almost exactly three years later, Andrew Jones landed in my inbox with a pretty cool announcement and a feature in The New York Times. This Toronto-based furniture and lighting designer has added another award to his collection, beating out 678 other competitors with his design for a signature chair for New York City’s Battery Park. It features a petalled, curvaceous, open-flower shape and is cheekily named “Fleurt.”
Jones was awarded a $10,000 cash prize and will see 300 of the chairs, in four shades of blue, bloom on the park’s brand-new lawn as early as late 2015.
I think of the memorable hours I’ve spent in the slightly-reclined aluminum chairs of the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, watching the world go by. Contrary to what Freud might have had to say about it, sometimes a chair is not just a chair: it’s a springboard for the imagination.
Photo credit: Fleurt rendering from Andrew Jones Design