| interiors |
EAST MEETS NORTHWEST
The basement family room is decorated with art from the homeowners’ personal collection. The coffee table is from Designhouse and the rug is from Restoration Hardware.
Written by NESSA PULLMAN : Photographed by JANIS NICOLAY
“I REMEMBER SO CLEARLY THE DAY SHE WALKED INTO THE CROSS,” says designer Erin Chow, then a designer at wellknown Vancouver furniture store The Cross Decor & Design. The woman who would soon become her client and friend “was just looking for a chair, but it turned into so much more than that.” “We hit it off instantly,” says the client, who ended up hiring Chow to renovate her family’s home in Vancouver’s West Side (Chow has since branched off to open her own fullservice design firm, The Haven Collective.) “Erin understood my taste and could see what I was trying to achieve. I also think she liked that I wasn’t afraid to take design risks.”
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The renovation required some heavy lifting by Chow and the builders at Kennedy Construction. “The kitchen was a disaster, the master bath was overwhelmed by a gigantic jet tub, and we needed to create a family room out of a crawl space,” recalls the homeowner. The mandate for the interiors was a challenge, too. The client spent her formative years in Jordan and had co-founded that country’s largest bookstore, so she sought a space that would marry Middle Eastern motifs with a West Coast palette. In response, Chow broke with the pervasive PNW minimalist trend in favor of layered arabesque decorations, oversized vintage rugs, and vibrant, colorful »