Designers Dish Up Some Whimsy
Back when architect Mark Rios designed Rock in Marina del Rey, the spinoff of chef Hans Rockenwagner’s eponymous restaurant in Santa Monica, Rios steeped the ceiling and walls in cobalt blue, then splashed on crayon-bright yellow and orange accents. But the plan to leave no salad plate or soup bowl uncolored hit a snag.
“We did the interiors, graphics, logo, menu, everything,” Rios says. “But when it came to picking the dinnerware, most of what was available was bland, plain, white and blah. The biggest design statement was maybe a little blue trim around the edge of a platter. So we designed all the tableware, too.”
Two years after serving up exuberant color and pattern on the dishes at Rock, Rios and his colleagues at Rios Associates have translated that experience into their own line of hip, distinctive and affordable housewares named, appropriately enough, NotNeutral. So far, the fledgling foray into home accessories includes five-piece table settings ($64), serving platters and bowls ($36 each), vases ($18) and coasters that double as condiment dishes ($18 for four), plus cotton table runners and Ultrasuede pillows.
“We’ve always been a soup-to-nuts operation, doing an entire project from the building to the interiors to the landscape,” says Julie Smith, an architect with the firm and president of NotNeutral. “Branching out like this, into a kind of one-stop home design source, was only natural.”
On top of introducing a new dinnerware collection every season, Rios foresees expanding the furniture offerings beyond the initial black-lacquered wood beds, end tables and coffee tables, as well as developing NotNeutral’s own selection of candles, soaps and bed and bath linens.
To showcase the growing line, Rios has opened a NotNeutral retail store in front of his design studio on 3rd Street, between Fairfax Avenue and Crescent Heights Boulevard. The glassed-in showroom, a space once occupied by his conference room, is painted in a crisp, contemporary black-white-and-lavender format, with merchandise arranged front and center on pristine white display shelves.
As for the NotNeutral designs themselves, there’s no mistaking them for your grandmother’s Blue Willow china. The first collection, dubbed Links, features bold circular motifs reminiscent of a bicycle chain. The abstract pattern appears variously as a single image or repeated images, sometimes centered and symmetrical, sometimes not. Links comes in high-contrast black and white or brown and white.
The second collection, Circuits, was inspired by the tracery found on circuit boards. The geometric pattern consists of overlapping rectangles and lines and is available in a striking purple-and-green palette; a lavender-and-blue version is due out this spring.
All of the dinnerware is restaurant-weight, microwave- and dishwasher-safe white porcelain manufactured in Poland. The NotNeutral designs--a creative collaboration between Rios, Smith, graphic designer Frank Clementi and others at Rios Associates--are reproduced on decals made in Japan. The decals are applied to the porcelain and fired by a company in Santa Maria.
Rios and Smith acknowledge that Circuits and Links might strike some as retro, much like the shapely vases of ceramist Jonathan Adler or the color-field pillows of textile designer Angela Adams. Yet they insist that resurrecting the past was never their plan. Says Smith: “We were definitely influenced by the British tableware called Midwinter pottery, particularly what Terence Conran designed during the late ‘50s, and its nontraditional use of pattern on ceramics. But NotNeutral is about now. The designs are drawn from our time.”
Rios believes NotNeutral fills an important gap in today’s housewares market. “The dishes at Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma are all very similar. You could walk in any of those stores blindfolded and not be able to tell one from the other,” he says. “We’re more about spirited fun, color and pattern, a sense of humor.”
High style needn’t mean high prices, he adds. “Calvin Klein and Armani are a different audience. We’re more like Martha Stewart at Kmart and Michael Graves at Target. Though our prices are on par with Crate & Barrel and Pottery Barn, we’re trying to have mass-market appeal.”
Toward that end, Rios has struck a deal to create a separate line of housewares that will be sold exclusively on HSN, formerly known as Home Shopping Network, starting this spring. That porcelain will be produced in Bangladesh and bear completely different NotNeutral designs, and prices will be somewhat lower.
Rios considers both lines opportunities to inject a little whimsy into consumers’ daily lives. “I want people to know that they don’t have to buy a set of dishes and feel like those are the only dishes they can ever have for the rest of their lives,” he says. “This is everyday stuff. It’s OK to change it out and buy something new for spring or fall. It’s the convergence of Eastern and Western tabletop ideas. With NotNeutral, you can mix and match pieces the way you see them in a great Japanese restaurant.”
So what’s next on NotNeutral’s plate? “I’d love to do a whole line of other products--umbrellas, beach ware like chairs, towels, blankets,” Rios says. “I’d also like to create paperware for the table. And we’re in discussions with Blenko about the possibility of designing a line of glassware.”
Today the tabletop; tomorrow the world.
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NotNeutral is at 8008 W. 3rd St., Los Angeles. For more information, call (800) 270-5612 or log on to www.notNeutral.com.