Make UR APT your home!
I’d taken the meters of vintage wool fabric when we were cleaning out my childhood home under some pretense that I might eventually need to reupholster furniture and what a shame it would be to not have that fabric when I needed it. Sound logic. Except I was twenty-three at the time and didn’t have any furniture in need of refurbishment for the foreseeable future. But my dad had died six months earlier and insisted he bought that fabric for a reason besides being a hoarder, sorry I meant collector.
So I packed the fabric into a storage pod, shipped it to LA, and didn’t look at it again for three years. When I finally opened up the box, I was ready to accept the truth. I had no use for the sheets of wool and cotton, but a strong emotional tie to the fiber. That’s what nobody tells you about having materially obsessed parents, that shit is genetic. In an effort to stave off a mini meltdown - don’t judge me, not all of us can be minimalists with rational attachments to inanimate objects - my brother suggested gifting the wool to my friend Makena, aka UR GF. It felt poetic since her shop is exactly the type of place he would have loved. Always full of young creative people who love art and culture and have cool tattoos.
So. The fabric. I gave her the spiel on its background and she suggested we make something together with it like the good friend and honest collaborator she is. Months and one canvas sample later, we decided on the final design for our poufs. Or ottomans, depending on the level of whimsy in your vernacular. It took another couple of weeks before the perfect set of circumstances revealed themselves to us and we were actually able to sit down and make them with the wool. Those circumstances ended up being a completely sober Saturday night with randomly no plans and an amount of energy I have never felt in my life. Honestly. From about 8pm to 5:30am we cut and sewed and stuffed our poufs. My first ever true all-nighter.
I did try to quit around 3am when the sewing machine kept jamming and I couldn’t figure out the cause, but Makena took over troubleshooting. Her single-minded determination was infectious and I felt guilty leaving her there in the middle of the night.
As we beheld our finished poufs, we knew we had struck gold. They are cute as hell, functional to boot, and everyone who’s seend them wants one of their own. Thus, UR GF’s apartment line, UR APT was born. We made five more poufs with their own unique variations of fabric and named them the Heritage Pouf to honor the people in our lives who passed on their design obsessions to us. For me it's my Dad. Without him I would have never known what a Finn Juhl chair was or be able to be a snob at Mid-Century Modern furniture stores! For Makena it’s her grandma who was a pillow designer and the woman who taught her to crochet. Her grandma is still a prolific knitter at 90!! Talk about #girlbossing.
Today, UR APT launches its first line. Five poufs. And one throw blanket. (The blanket took us twenty hours of work knitting i-cords on the hand-powered knitting machine, so it simply had to be a throw.) Our goal with the line is to make things that make your apartment feel like your home, because good design doesn’t end with your lease cycle. And yes, that’s the same copy that’s on our website. Its a good sentence and I wrote it, so I’m allowed to reuse it. Let me know what you think of the poufs and blankie, and if there’s something you want to see us make, we’d love to hear about that too.
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10/10 poufs!!
Power pouf girls