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Natural Luxury for Your Home
Textile designer Aviva Stanhoff finds inspiration in nature
Aviva Stanhoff (Photo: avivastanoff.com)
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Velvet snowflakes, golden palm fronds, sensuous ocean stripes, and delicate glass ginkgo leaves. Textile designer Aviva Stanoff’s designs are a glorious assault on the senses, combining luxurious velvet and vividly colored dupioni silk fabrics with delicate etchings of leaves and flowers.
Her signature pieces are pillows and glassware, all handmade. Explains Aviva, “Our collection of textiles celebrates nature, exotic surface design, and deliberate luxury. We press real objects into fabric by hand. Each is done one at a time, and made to order in our design studio in Brooklyn.” Her special technique leaves a tactile imprint of the object in the fabric, and every piece is unique because each object can only be used once. After the fabric is dyed and painted, the pillows are hand-sewn, silk-lined, and then backed with more silk. For her glassware, Aviva uses an original multi-layered silk-screening process that takes three days to complete.
Aviva’s affinity for nature is rooted in her childhood, which she spent in a small coastal town in northern California. “We lived on a big plot of land covered in old redwoods,” she says, “The closest neighbor was about three miles away. Nature was all around us.” Her Foggy Morning pillow collection, which features an imprint of baby’s breath flowers, is inspired by memories of this childhood home. During the summers, she would visit her grandparents in Japan. There, she helped her grandmother arrange flowers, and attended services at her grandfather’s Buddhist temple. As an adult, she moved New York City—a combination of influences she calls “a potent cocktail of design.” She muses, “My heritage and the natural setting I grew up in compel me to view the city as organic, like the subway violinist who is compelled to play, not for small change, but to hear the strains of her music weave between the concrete forest and glass cliffs.” Maybe she should be a poet, too!
But really, her designs are her poetry. Aviva finds inspiration in her personal life as well as in the natural objects all around her. The Tranquil design is taken from the cobblestones of her grandfather’s temple, and the Ginkgo glassware uses leaves from Central Park. One of her best-selling pieces is the Love Letter Vase, which is etched with an actual letter she wrote to her husband before they were married. (The words can also be customized to a client’s own message.) Says Aviva, “I think beauty and inspiration are everywhere as long as you’re open to it. It could be an old lampshade or a flower that fell from a tree into a puddle below and the reflection that it creates. Things from nature have a quiet, undeclared beauty waiting to be discovered.”
Aviva also creates bedding, stationery, and gift items, and is available for custom design work. The Aviva Stanoff design studio showroom is located at 25 Jay Street in Brooklyn. For more information, visit avivastanoff.com.