Interviews
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The Conscious Builder Podcast
Thanks Casey for this opportunity to talk about furniture waste from the bottom up, normalizing reuse, the types of systems change we need, place-based solutions, and why it’s time not for a new sofa, but a new narrative. Listen below.
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Old Chair, New Heartbreak
TBT to that time in late December when we drove past this scene: a lovely chair strangely parked in a gas station bay. We pulled over around the corner. I grabbed my phone and walked over. As I move around taking photos, I hear a voice in the background. He says, you like the chair? I respond, breezily, I really do, but I’m just there to take its photo. I realize he’s talking to me from inside the passenger seat in the next stall. The door is open, and they’re watching my spontaneous, weird photo shoot. He says, it’s antique, you should take it; I’ll help you put it in…
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Furniturecycle Featured on Sew Much More Podcast
I want to offer my deepest thanks to Ceil DiGuglielmo, host of the “Sew Much More Podcast,” for having me on her show last week. She was so gracious to include me as a guest among her cadre of home furnishings industry peeps. I appreciated her genuine interest in exploring furnishings from the bottom-up, which, she admitted, is a pretty different approach than she’s used to. We totally go for it and cover old lady furniture, IKEA, imperfect produce, Pinterest, big box stores and more. Take a listen here:
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A Chest Curbed by COVID Closures
As I knelt to capture this picture, I heard a voice over my left shoulder. A woman, dressed in full scrubs, hair net and face mask, which was pulled down, stood on the far side of her car that was parked at the curb directly behind me. She asked, “You like it?” I say that I do, as I turned around to face her. “It’s a brand new chest from Wayfair. We got it for my mom, but we had to lower her bed because the mattress was too high. It didn’t fit.“ She went on to explain how they took a load of things to Salvation Army but that…
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Comfort for the Unsheltered
I met D as he was pushing this cart of furniture down the street. He found them at the DMV. “They were just left there,” he said. D was in transit to his tent in Mosswood park, a large homeless encampment just two blocks away. An abandoned stroller by the car wash caused him to stop. The cart wasn’t working well. We spoke as we unloaded and reloaded the entertainment center and chair from the cart to the stroller. D told me that he’s lost 5 tents to rats at Mosswood park. It’s inundated with rats, he said. Oakland’s unsheltered population recently earned national attention by @nytimes in a powerful…
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Will Wins!
Will drove past this bookshelf on his way home from the laundromat. Instantly recognizing its good condition, he pulled over to take a closer look. His partner was in need of one, he told me, and he liked its look and heft. We shared our amazement of how much freely available, good quality furniture peppered our streets. I told him I saw a skinny black bookshelf earlier that morning just up the hill, if he needed another. Moments later we had it loaded into the bed of his truck, and a used bookshelf was on its way to a new home. Local sharing for the win. #savedfromthelandfill #climatevictory
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Rico’s Chair
The people behind the chairs on the curb can be hard to track down, but I got lucky yesterday. As I stopped to photograph this piece, Rico, as in Puerto Rico, he told me, asked if I was looking for a chair. He stopped sweeping the sidewalk and came to show me how it popped out into a twin bed. He said he was letting this one go because he had too many chairs. I complimented the green and yellow art on the inside arm. “It’s Russian,” he said, eyes twinkling. Though he seemed to be offering the chair to anyone who stopped to look, he said a woman who…
