“This garden is made for my camera” says Marco Valdivia. Unlike the Wirtzes’ commissioned gardens, this former kitchen garden was never conceived as a formal composition: a complete work of art. Rather, it is a working nursery in active use, a laboratory for continuous experimentation, in which plants are moved, transferred to other plots or to gardens in progress elsewhere.

Few landscape designers are more admired than Belgium’s Jacques Wirtz, as seen with the huge success of The Wirtz Gardens, published in the fall of 2004. The Wirtz Gardens surveyed 57 private and public gardens designed by Wirtz, many in collaboration with his two sons, Martin and Peter, in locations spanning the globe. Like the veteran art dealer whose personal collection one imagines to be stupendous, the volume raised the question of what Wirtz’s own garden looked like.

The Wirtz Private Garden now answers that question. At the family home in Schoten (near Antwerp)–a former gardener’s cottage attached to an eighteenth-century estate–Wirtz and his family have created a laboratory for experimenting with plants, shrubbery, borders and pathways on an intimate scale. And the photographer Marco Valdivia, photographer for The Wirtz Gardens, has produced a unique meditation on the subtle effects of light, space and form in the garden through the seasons.

Valdivia shoots on film, not digital, and consequently his photographs show a depth and clarity of definition that is unsurpassable. His sensitivity to the Wirtz aesthetic and to the textures of nature make this book one of the finest photographic studies of an intimate garden ever published.

Jacques Wirtz(pictured left) was born in 1924 in Antwerp. He studied landscape architecture at a horticultural college in Vilvoorde before starting his own business, growing and selling flowers and maintaining local gardens. In 1950, Wirtz designed his first complete garden, inspired by the gardens of his childhood and those seen on visits to other European countries and Japan. He gained recognition in the early 90s when he won a contest to redesign France’s Carrousel Garden, which connects the Louvre with the Tuileries Gardens.

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Click here to visit Jacques Wirtzes’ website.

Click here to visit Marco Valdivia’s website.

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Interior Design Show West threw a stimulating event on our rooftop Tuesday, giving us a sampling of what we can expect at this years exposition in October.

Brent Comber’s Sphere.

Bloom table by MTH Woodworks.

The new Lotus chair by Niels Bendtsen and Bocci’s 22 series, flush electrical outlets.

Responsibly Designing Inside the Box – IDSwest is inviting six IDIBC member firms to create original installations with the challenge of creating the ‘box’ or structure to house the installation and adding a theme to the challenge; Responsible Design. The spaces will be 8′ x 8′ x 8′ and can be made of anything the design firms can dream up, within their comprehension of what encompasses Responsible Design.

CoRkEd DeSiGnS -  products made using wine corks.

Future Masters – In partnership with Artsy-Dartsy.com, Interior Design Show West 2010 will be showcasing young design talents and our local design institutions.

Acorn Barnicle, another piece from the Future Masters program.

IDSwest’s opening night party will feature “The Making Of_”, a multi-media exhibit produced by Cause+Affect.

Interior Design Show West creator and show director, Jason Heard with Nancy.

IDSwest 2010 will be held in the new Vancouver Convention Centre, October 14th to the 17th. Click the link below for details.

Click here to visit the official IDSwest website.

Charles Eames was born in 1907 in St. Louis, Missouri and by the time he was 14 years old was working part time at the Laclede Steel Company where he learned about engineering, drawing and architecture and first entertained the idea of one day becoming an architect.

In a brief stint at Washington University in St. Louis on an architecture scholarship Charles was dismissed from the university for reportedly being “too modern”.

Greatly influenced by the Finish architect Eliel Saarinen, Charles would go onto work with his son Eero Saarinen and together develop award-winning molded wood furniture for the MoMA in New York City. This molded wood furniture would later be developed into bedside chairs and splints for the US Navy during World War II.

In a time where design was booming and architecture was pushing new limits Charles & his wife Ray would grow to be responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20^th Century.

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As an Inform employee my first furniture purchase was the Eames Molded Plastic Rocker(above left) which I absolutely adore! Eames DCM(above right).

In this video, the Eames couple unveil their now infamous lounger for the first time. Click here for more info.
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Visit us in store to see first hand what makes Eames designs so incredible.

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- Post by Stephanie