Mind over Matter : Machinations of a Renaissance Recycler Give Artful Creations a Hard Edge
Stepping into designer Mike McAlexander’s Costa Mesa condo is to step into a shiny metallic, brightly colored, hard-edged world where nothing is what it first seems and everything started out as something else.
“Everything in this house, except for one painting, I did myself in the two years I’ve lived here--and that includes renovating it,” says McAlexander, a high-energy contract designer who works under the name Vanderbilt and says he manages on about eight hours of sleep every other day.
When McAlexander bought the 2,000-square-foot condo, he says, it had orange shag carpeting, dark kitchen cabinets, patterned wallpaper and a black, wrought-iron staircase and banister. He ripped up the carpeting, bleached and painted the floors and covered them with area rugs, painted the walls white and changed the wrought-iron banister to a high-tech-looking one made from window glass, patio doors, large PVC pipe and iron stanchions.
McAlexander, who has designed everything from clothing to aircraft interiors, from eyeglass frames to packaging, says he sees design possibilities everywhere.
A graduate of the Dayton (Ohio) Art Institute, he envisions lamps in junk metal, tables in used sawhorses, cabinet knobs in sprinkler heads. After spending time with McAlexander, it’s difficult to look at things in quite the same way again--much less toss out something.
“I’d love to instruct a class and show people how much is right in front of them that they can use instead of throw away. Forget what something is and look at it for its potential,” McAlexander says. “I’ve done everything here strictly for my own entertainment, but I like doing it so much that I just may turn it into a career.”
There is, of course, the danger of crossing over the sometimes-fine line that separates creative functional art made of recycled materials and a new piece of junk made from old pieces of junk.
McAlexander keeps the lines of his creations clean and simple. He engineers them to operate as smoothly as a piece of machinery.
Take, for example, the glass desk and wicker chair in one corner in the living room. The desk was made from sawhorses (covered with gold Mylar) topped by a slab of glass. A drawer was made from a picture frame; two aluminum extrusions on top of the sawhorses form the glides for the drawer. The inside of the drawer is covered with leather stripping; the drawer knobs are small candlesticks with plastic key-chain fobs glued in them. The wicker chair--what he calls a “$3 deal”--is painted black and has a tan patterned cushion.
“I like the campaign table look, a portable look,” he says.
“I love sawhorses; I always have. I have eight or nine pairs of sawhorses of different kinds. It all started when I was going to school. You had a bunch of guys living together, and they had big projects going on, so you used hollow-core doors on top of sawhorses for tables that could be put up and taken down quickly. It works great.”
McAlexander usually begins with a germ of an idea.
“I first draw in my mind, then sketch for a while and then, when a design kind of goes in a circle and then settles, I know I’m there. I’ll think, ‘Bam!’
“Sometimes there’ll be a single component that starts me off. I’ll walk around, look at it and wait for something to happen. Sometimes it does right away; sometimes it doesn’t for months.”
He credits his grandfather with nurturing his ideas and encouraging him to use his “Irish ingenuity. He led me to believe I could do anything.”
One shape McAlexander enjoys working with is the V--it is in his sawhorses, tripod lamps and clocks and in his design name, Vanderbilt.
His tripod series consists of old tripods, sometimes anchored by old gymnast rings, with clocks and lamps atop them on marbleized bases. He calls this a Teddy Roosevelt look, and the safari/army feeling is found throughout the house, with khaki background hues and bright chevron colors.
Humor and a sense of fun are among the strongest elements in McAlexander’s condo. He seems not to take himself seriously, and it might be his relaxed view that lets his creativity flow.
Among the humorous items in his house is a punk rooster painted in red, blue, green and yellow that sits atop the bar between the living room and the kitchen. The bar is made from old shutters banded together, marbleized green and topped with a glass slab a neighbor gave him.
But it isn’t just the obviously funny things that are humorous. It is the whimsy inherent in each piece he designs, even the serious ones. For example, it’s hard to look without smiling at the butcher’s block in the kitchen that’s made from a backgammon board atop legs from a headboard that someone left behind at a swap meet. He marbleized it by using a European water-based stain in layers and 409 cleanser. “Sometimes the color I get is pure luck,” he says, adding that he never does things quite the same way twice.
The kitchen floor is painted in a white-and-khaki checkerboard pattern; the cabinet doors are painted white, bordered with red tape and have green sprinkler heads as knobs. Using plain metal industrial shelf rods and glass shelves, McAlexander created a display area over the kitchen sink to hold his art-glass collection. The kitchen is separated from the rest of the house by an old window painted white.
The adjoining living room walls hold many of McAlexander’s primary-colored paintings, which are bold and dramatic. The juxtaposition between the bold paintings and the furnishings in glass and brass makes for a sharp environment. The brightness of the decor has been softened somewhat with sofas and floors in neutral colors.
Upstairs are a room for watching wide-screen television and his working studio. This is where he keeps his raw materials and projects in the beginning stages.
“You can turn anything into furniture by adding legs,” McAlexander says. “I took this old basket, put legs on it, painted it green and added a glass top, so now I have a table. I also have a place to store hundreds of glass frames that I’ve made.”
In the TV room, he made small glass shelves in each corner and filled them with inexpensive plastic florist vases he bought and painted bright colors.
“I like primary colors and fundamental elements--that part of something that makes your heart pound. Too many things today are just manufactured with no uniqueness. I like to make things that are both utilitarian and beautiful.”
