Total Clodagh: Designer's ingenuity and love of texture make her a star
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Perhaps you can understand how a designer with a gargle of a single name - Clodagh - can strive to become a household name if you understand something about the woman herself.
A former fashion designer who was internationally successful even though she never studied fashion design. A current interior designer who's yet more successful even though she never studied you-know-what. That didn't stop clients like Robert Redford from flocking to her.
A Pisces whose approach to interior design reflects her belief in astrology, aromatherapy, color therapy, feng shui and a really well-edited closet.
A witty New Yorker who can charm a crowd, as she did a few days back in Seattle, with a blend of humility ("you can ask me anything except my waist size") and the kind of reach-for-the-stars inspiration she uses herself:
"Anais Nin once said, `Life expands and contracts according to one's courage.' "
That was just one of many morsels Clodagh ("Clo-duh") shared with the standing-room-only crowd of fellow designers who heard her speak at the Northwest Designers Expo, a trade show held annually at the Seattle Design Center.
The topic of her presentation: "Total Design," which is both the title of her new $45 book (to be published April 17 by Clarkson Potter) and the overall philosophy she uses to attract such corporate clients as Elizabeth Arden Salons and Elektra Entertainment.
"Total Design is not about design, it's about the experience of design," she told them.
So what's the difference? In her book she explains that "often, when we contemplate a space and how it can be improved we begin with the material. What kind of floor do we want? Should I buy a new sofa or re-cover the old one?"
Wrong initial questions, she says. The salient ones are:
How can this room help me live better? What am I not getting from my home that I could be getting?
"Inverting this kind of thinking is the starting point for embarking on Total Design," Clodagh explained.
Flowing from it are what she calls her four C's, which must be thought out before any physical work starts. They are:
- "Contemplate your current space. How does it make you feel and how do you function in it?"
- "Cleanse your life of unwanted and unused things. It's harder to unload possessions than it is to acquire them, but emptiness lets a room grow and allows you to grow in it."
- "Clarify your goals, needs and desires. This is the mental counterpart to clearing away physical clutter. What kinds of rooms and objects will really enhance your life?"
- "Create. Once you've worked through these stages, you'll have a far better sense of what you want from your home - and how to get it."
"I'm a travel guide, a translator," she said. "I like to make people extraordinarily happy."
In person, Clodagh presents a halo of curly hair, the buttery remnants of an Irish accent and a fashion sensibility that had those in her audience daring themselves to have her courage.
The 3-inch platforms were perhaps a bit unexpected of a woman who's a grandmother, but it was the skirt that really got everyone's attention.
It appeared to be a simple piece of black fabric wrapped slightly on the bias around her body, the printed selvage edge proudly displayed in front. No hem, just a basic shearing, which left wispy threads hanging.
"Challenging convention is a large part of what we do," she once told Architectural Digest magazine.
"Listening to her talk, she seems to approach it (interior design) from a holistic way," said Seattle interior designer Karen Ellentuck, who after years of reading about Clodagh in design magazines eagerly turned out to hear her speak.
"She's a trendsetter, cutting edge. "
Indeed, when Steve Stein, the local representative for Lees Carpets, escorted her on a Design Center tour, "it was like `N Sync was in concert. Women were just going nuts."
Stein's favorite was a perhaps 70-year-old who bluntly told the designer, "I really enjoyed your talk, and I didn't expect to. When I grow up, I want to be Clodagh."
And Stein is certainly happy his firm teamed with her to design a line of commercial carpeting (some of which is installed in Seattle's Experience Music Project).
"Since our partnership with Clodagh, we've won more design awards than we've ever won," he said of his 155-year-old firm. "It gave us the design swagger."
Clodagh was born in the west of Ireland, in a house where playwright Oscar Wilde once lived. At 16 she dropped her last name. At 17 she started her fashion business "without knowing anything."
Rather than being a hindrance, she considers her lack of formal training a plus. "It makes me more of a maverick; I challenge everything."
The 1970s found her married, becoming a mother (three sons) and designing clothing in Spain. (The boys, she says, learned lifelong flexibility hopping on and off planes as she whisked them around the world on business jaunts.)
The 1980s found her in New York, with a new husband, French photographer Daniel Aubry whose nuanced images comprise many pages of her book. And a new career was born: interior design and merchandising.
The 1990s brought acclaim. She was named one of the world's top 100 interior designers by Architectural Digest magazine, which has published her work, and she was inducted into Interior Design magazine's Hall of Fame in 1997.
Using sort of a big-tent approach to design, she's assembled a team of 20 that includes architects and other designers. Not only do they create residential and commercial interiors, they work with her to design many of the items within, including textiles and lighting.
Her assistant, Alison Stewart, says inspiration is no problem. "She's totally creative; there's a new idea every minute. She'll be walking down the street and see a shape and it will totally inspire her to design a new light fixture."
Although sometimes it gets more personal. Clodagh confesses to appropriating a lock of hair from a redhead and the faded olive-green trousers worn by a rich client when she realized they were the right shades for a project. Both were color matched and are now carpet hues.
That segues into the present decade and Clodagh's current push, which is licensing. By the end of this year she expects to have 15 products licensed. Two already on the market and available in Seattle are Lees Carpets and furniture under the Dennis Miller label.
Both are evidence of her love of texture (she confides she closes her eyes when choosing fabrics) and ingenuity. One sofa, for example, consists solely of a steel frame and fully removable upholstered cushions, so all the sitting support comes from the individual cushions.
"Clodagh's collection is very contemporary and uniquely designed," said Thomas Hunter, managing partner of the Seattle Design Center's Trammell-Gagne showroom, which carries her furniture.
"A lot of furniture on the market today is just reinterpreted from a designer who did it 30, 40, 50 years ago. But hers is not furniture that's been reinterpreted. It's unique."
Eventually, Clodagh wants to design and license "every single component that goes into the making of a residence or apartment, she said, adding with a laugh, "We're really modest." And then with sincerity, "It's really our company mission, to enhance people's lives."
So if her stuff ends up like Martha Stewart's in Kmart, or like Michael Graves' in Target, she'll be thrilled.
"I don't see why the public shouldn't have access to everything that's designed that's special.
"The implication is that if you can't afford to pay (a lot) you can't have good taste. That's rude, don't you think?"
Elizabeth Rhodes can be reached at 206-464-2306 or erhodes@seattletimes.com