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The chalkboard wall serves as a canvas for spontaneous inspirations in Electric Coffin’s first residential kitchen project, created for a young family in Seattle’s Mount Baker neighborhood.
“ALL TOGETHER NOW,” the name of the catchy song featured at the end of the Beatles’ 1968 classic Yellow Submarine, is carefully hand-lettered onto a painted-chalkboard wall in a Seattle family’s kitchen. Next month, they’ll likely wipe it off and replace it with a different saying. But for the moment, Mike and Erin’s three-year-old son, Miles, loves the psychedelic cartoon, and, according to Mike, the phrase just suits: “We teach Miles that, as a family, we are a team.” A Microsoft art director who’s also a cartoonist with a background in video game design, Mike and his wife, Erin, a former elementary school teacher, both love transforming words and imagery into visible themes that surround them. The family moved into their 1910 Craftsman-style house in Mount Baker in 2014, intending to overhaul its dated kitchen. The 1980s remodel wasn’t wearing well—the painted-over floor tiles were scratched, the cabinets were peeling, and low soffits made the modest space closed-off and dark. They could have taken down the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room, as almost every contractor they interviewed longed to do, but the couple wanted to preserve the room’s original footprint as well as keep the remodel affordable. One afternoon, amid their search for a builder, they reached out to Seattle artist Justin Kane Elder, asking to purchase one of his colorful, eye-catching paintings. They’d admired his artwork at Revel, one of their favorite restaurants, and, unbeknownst to them at the time, they’d also spotted his design handiwork at Joule, the Seattle Korean-fusion restaurant distinctively revamped in 2012 by Electric Coffin—the design collective founded by Elder, Duffy De Armas, and Stefan Hofmann. Joule had been one of the trio’s first large-scale projects; bigger restaurant projects and installations followed, including Westward and Trove. When Elder arrived at the couple’s house to install his painting, he told them about Electric Coffin. Instantly they showed him their kitchen, and it became clear that theirs could be a design match made in heaven. “It was a new challenge to draw our aesthetic into someone’s living space,” De Armas says. “It meant exploring subtleties and reducing crazy visuals into a core format.” »
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