Vicki Simon's custom-designed rugs will floor you

Among the moneyed, the idea of buying original art to adorn a wall is relatively common. But how about the idea of commissioning plush, colorful, sometimes soothing, sometimes startling, call-to-me art for a floor?

Call it a rug and you may be talking to Vicki Simon. She's a recent transplant to Seattle and one of only a handful of custom rug artists in the country.

This native Californian's journey to Seattle is the latest chapter in a multi-plot story of how a person with a vision, both of the world and herself, can morph into a designer whose work adorns stylish businesses, such as Seattle's NBBJ architecture firm, and private homes alike.

Would you believe she once studied pre-med — and says the same skills she would have used as a physician she relies upon in her custom rug business?

Sitting in her Seattle Design Center showroom, Simon explains the colorful, geometric 2-foot squares that adorn her white walls and look for all the world like expensive wall art. They're actually "mockettes" — the initial renderings of finished rugs she shows clients. Framed color photos above them illustrate the finished product installed.

On two adjacent walls, there are even a mockette, a photo, and a large oil painting, by Simon — all of the same design — illustrating that the same sensibilities that make floor art are equally at home on the wall. Her designs also been translated into stained glass and tapestries.

Made in the U.S. (she won't say exactly where) of wool or silk, Simon's one-of-a-kind rugs are hand tufted, and she admits, expensive: up to $150 a square foot. Most designs she describes as "hard-line forms with curvilinear shapes juxtaposed on top."

A less pricey line offers her designs as machine-made rugs for $30 a square foot and up.

Generally Simon works through interior designers, who are helping a client pull a room together and understand the role a custom rug will play.

"As a designer, I'd look for her rugs for clients who want something contemporary, but warm for their house," says San Francisco interior designer Gale Melton. "If you want an interesting custom rug designed, she's the one to go to. Her sensibilities for color are what people are looking for today."

Pointing to one mockette on her showroom wall, Simon describes its colors as tobacco, olive, persimmon, chartreuse, forest green and sunflower. Among her inspirations are the modernist artists Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Mangold and sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

And certainly she was influenced by the work of her family; both her mother and sister are artists.

Yet Simon says she had no idea she was interested in design until she began pre-med studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Medicine was a career she chose because she'd always excelled at math and science — two right brain subjects that appear to be miles from art, a left-brain discipline.

But math and science, she points out, "are all about how things become something out of something else." Which is exactly what happens both in medical diagnosis and in design development.

Thus her take on it: "Art plus science plus math equals design." She explains further. "Designers like to figure out how things are made and come together, and I've always been good at zeroing in on details."

Indeed her mother told her that as a small child she was very interested in the tiniest details of the family's carpet. That analytical focus has continued throughout her life. Going into a theater, for example, she'll ponder if the aisles are wide enough, the lighting is appropriate, the colors well chosen, even if the temperature is right.

"I notice all these things. I feel I'm touched by design all the time, 24/7."

When she learned that UC Santa Barbara would not let pre-med majors take art courses — something she decided was important to her — she rethought her career path and searched out a school that better suited her interests.

That turned out to be California State University at Long Beach, where she graduated, class of 1980, with a bachelor of arts degree that combined interior design, architecture and art history. It lead to an interior design career, working for others in San Francisco.

Then in 1989 Simon struck out on her own as a custom rug designer. Her mother had predicted that her intensely self-directed, strongly individualistic daughter would one day have her own business. Until Simon actually did it, she hadn't believed Mom.

But it wasn't easy. Although she'd gotten the custom rug bug when she designed one for a corporate client as part of a complete interior design job, she didn't have much business experience or financial capital.

Then again, she also didn't have much competition.

So she got herself an interior-design consultant gig to have some money coming in while she began building her business. "My first rugs I couldn't afford to have made so I had to put them on a credit card," she confides.

But soon other interior designers were turning to her to create what they couldn't otherwise find in the marketplace: rugs in unusual shapes or dimensions that juxtapose color, texture and pattern to create a unique statement. They brought her corporate clients and private individuals.

With the latter, she prefers to work through an interior designer. That's because "it's a little bit overwhelming for someone to get a custom design without having someone to help edit choices for them." And it can be up to a five-month process.

That may include her visit to the home or other site, lengthy conversations about what the client wants and needs, followed by several sketched designs to choose from. She doesn't design on a computer.

Colors are chosen and a mockette ordered, which gives the client an exact look at what a section of the rug will look like. Then after final tweaks, the rug is manufactured.

After more than a decade in San Francisco, Simon recently relocated to Seattle when her husband, Tim Cohrs, was hired as Nordstrom's creative director. They have a 5-year-old son and a geriatric cat.

Even though she's new in town, she already has local clients, ones who sought her out in San Francisco. Indeed, her work has been shipped worldwide.

Mercer Island resident Karen Henken and her husband have several custom-designed Simon rugs.

"We have very contemporary tastes and were looking for something striking and different as well as a work of art — and we wanted it on the floor," Henken explains.

The results, she says, really pull her rooms together, providing "a powerful statement, but not so much that it overwhelms a room."

And the experience itself was good. Simon is "a good mix of a good artist with a wonderful creative eye, and also a good business person who knows how to get things done on time and in budget, and she knows how to drive the process," says Henken.

Now all Simon has to do is find time to custom design a hand-tufted rug or two for her new Seattle home, a vintage one in an older neighborhood near Lake Washington.

That's right. Much like the shoemaker's daughter who had no shoes, Vicki Simon has yet to custom-design a rug for herself.

But someday she will, she says.

Elizabeth Rhodes: erhodes@seattletimes.com