it’s not everyday we get to show off the home of a reality tv star, but today we’re getting a great sneak peek into the home of goil amornvivat, former contestant on bravo’s top design and an on screen designer for TLC’s trading spaces (in addition to being a professor at parson’s school for design). goil and his partner, tom, recently moved into this new place, and thought what better way to show it off than here. they see the place as a laboratory where they test and experiment with new ideas, while at the same time serving as a road map to their collective lives. click here for additional, full-sized images of their pad. p.s. keep your eye out for the set design these guys did for a new show whoopi goldberg is putting together for discovery! {thanks goil and tom!} -anne
{in the words of tom and goil: The interior of this house is a construct of memories, both personal and cultural, as well as a constant reminder of the future. It is a place we experiment and edit constantly, expressing profound concepts of dwelling through whimsical details. When discussing our motivations to create a studio that designs and builds ‘with meaning’, one of our mentors asked, “how can stone and mortar have meaning?”. Our response shot right to his passion-opera- with, “how can sounds and words have meaning?”. The parts alone have no particular meaning, no investment of thought or emotion. The investment of meaning derives in the composition, and this carries through past the utility of every project we create.}
The images of our current house contain a collection of found and made items that contain meaning in that they provide a road map of memories and aspirations. Miniature mirror encrusted (disco) elephants found on the roadside in Bangkok sit next to a set of walkie talkies plucked from a tag sale in Westport, hints of adolescent adventures complimenting a nearby trophy won in a junior high school wrestling match. All of these are housed in a knoll cabinet set atop street found filing cabinets whose paint chip color coded drawers were filled with buttons when discovered and obtained.
CLICK HERE for the rest of Goil’s sneak peek (including all 8 images on one page) after the jump!
As the house faces northeast, we have used high contrast colors and patterns to elevate the feeling of lightness in all areas. Proudly standing above the Saarinen womb chair, a Philipe Stark FLOS gun lamp mocks a Mooi ‘rabbit’, all the while Kartell Ms. K’s glare from their respective nightstands. Several photographs came from Jen Bekman’s genius 20×200 website while the original works are a mix of pieces obtained from Yale Art Students and our friend Eric Shiner, an expert in contemporary Asian art and curator of the Andy Warhol Museum. Surrounded by lurid orchids atop a coffee table/ storage unit, a miniature terrarium contains a bronze finch within a gold lined ceramic version of a tin pie pan. The bird’s upturned feet delicately carry a century-old photo of well dressed friends, whose unknown identities are overshadowed by their symbolic presence at the core of our home and lives.
Home is a special place for us. Like many New York residents, we are not native, but there is nowhere else we call home. Several experiences forged our relationship with the concept of home and our current neighborhood, Williamsburg Brooklyn where we have resided for nearly ten years in three different spaces. The arrival in Brooklyn was preceded by the loss of our every possession in a Manhattan apartment that had caught fire. Our first place in New York, a dark and unpleasant spot, was in stark contrast to the second, a light filled railroad flat whose pink bath fittings and a turquoise floors were wrapped in neighborhood standard issue olive green aluminum siding. From this perch we witnessed September 11 and the Blackout, a night from which we remember people singing rounds from rooftop to rooftop. Our first collective creative endeavors began there, and continued on to the next place, whose abundant space fostered the development of the diverse ventures with which we are now occupied. It was live work in name only, a work/work space being a more apt description until we moved the office into a separate studio space. Our neighbors thought we were moving out, and the division of work/live from a spatial standpoint led to reassessing spatial needs, and the compacting of ‘live’ into what we now call home.
Left over fabrics from episodes of Trading Spaces produced both a healthy pillow collection and a emergency tutorial in sewing. Discarded chairs from a local high school were married to gold, creating “P.S. Bling” a set of seats complete with untoward inscriptions and a subtle comment on the value of education. Rethinking the chair makes an encore performance with the “sheep chairs”- the double entendre applied to cafe chairs reupholstered in lambs wool referencing the DIY cost savings and the striking resemblance to their livestock cousins.
