Less is More
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Less is More

We've always taken the less is more approach to design and this extends to our own home as well. As we start to prepare for the holiday season, we find it is easy to get distracted and lose sight of the simple pleasure of time spent at the table with friends and family.

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Product Focus: Pool Rug
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Product Focus: Pool Rug

Several years ago, we began a conversation with a family-owned mill in New England making traditional braided rugs. This historic fabrication technique was made popular by early American colonists as it could be executed by hand without a loom using textile scraps.

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Product Focus: Totem Candles
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Product Focus: Totem Candles

About six years ago, James cut the first candle that would eventually become our Totem Candle series on a lathe in our garage shop. The original prototypes received nice feedback at a local pop-up, so we decided to produce a small batch run for our friends and family. The wax cut like butter on the lathe and quickly became the favorite job to do in the shop.

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At Home on the Salish Sea
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

At Home on the Salish Sea

We've been thinking a lot about time and place this summer. Back in 2007, when we decided to return home after nearly ten years on the East Coast, we were nostalgic for the Northwest but didn't really know if we could build a design business here.

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This Land is Your Land
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

This Land is Your Land

We live in awe of the natural world. Summer in the Northwest is the time when we feel this most. The day extends into the night and the draw to be outdoors pulls us like no other season.

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Product Focus: Dish Table Series
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Product Focus: Dish Table Series

One of the rewards of running a small design business for over a decade is seeing where our work ends up - how people live with and care for the products we've made.

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Grain Collection 2019/20
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Grain Collection 2019/20

Above and below are images of our new collection made in conversation with artist Shiela Laufer in response to Pas de Deux, a duet between art and design, at Colony as part of NYCxDESIGN.

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Doing and Being: Ten Years of Creative Collaboration at Grain
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Doing and Being: Ten Years of Creative Collaboration at Grain

This month marks our tenth year in business and we celebrated with our first solo show, Doing and Being: Ten Years of Creative Collaboration at Grain. The show welcomed visitors into the understated Grain aesthetic with select works from our current collection as well as a few pieces made specifically to shape the Colony space.

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Balance / Unblanced
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Balance / Unblanced

Our new Walling Rug made its debut in the Balance / Unblanced show at Colony last week. Colony is a community of independent furniture, lighting, textile and objects designers coming together on a New York City stage to celebrate American design with an international audience.

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Grain Collection 2017/18
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Grain Collection 2017/18

Our 2017/18 collection of furniture and lighting was inspired by a recent residency experience in Northeastern Oregon — think alpine mountains meet prairie. We were so energized by this new, but also familiar landscape. We endeavored to capture some of the quiet drama of that wilderness in our new work.

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The American Design Hot-List
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

The American Design Hot-List

We made the list! We have so much respect for the editors at Sight Unseen and for all of the designers that have made The American Design Hot-List this year and since its start in 2013.

What an honor to be an American artist and entrepreneur in the strange and wonderful time that we live

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The Jennings Hotel Residency
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

The Jennings Hotel Residency

Last month we had the incredible experience of traveling to Joseph, Oregon to attend an artist residency at The Jennings Hotel. We hiked through mountains, along rivers, and through prairies and later used the inspiration from our outings on a series of watercolors

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Design for Progress
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Design for Progress

To anyone feeling powerless, marginalized, scared, or angry today, our friends at Sight Unseen have created a fundraiser to benefit some organizations doing important work to protect groups and issues in need of the most support after this election: Planned Parenthood, Everytown for Gun Safety, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Human Rights Campaign, EarthJustice, and the National Immigration Law Center

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2016/17 Collection
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

2016/17 Collection

We're thrilled to finally share these new photos of our recent collection shot by our friend Charlie Schuck in his new Seattle studio. The collection includes our Drift table and lighting series made in collaboration with local glass artist John Hogan.

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Totem Candles for Areaware
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Totem Candles for Areaware

We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Areaware, the Brooklyn-based producer of everyday objects, who will be producing our Totem Candles from here on out.

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Summer Intern: Soren Ferguson
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Summer Intern: Soren Ferguson

Summer is almost over, but we've had some great help in the studio with Bainbridge Island-native and Rhode Island School of Design student, Soren Ferguson, as our intern. He is back to Providence at the end of the month, but before he goes, below is a quick interview to get to know him better.

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Grain Studio Bainbridge Island
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Grain Studio Bainbridge Island

It's been almost a year since we moved out of our home-based shop into our new studio space off Day Road on Bainbridge Island. We're so happy to have made the move to an industrial space better suited to our needs: design studio, fabrication shop and packing and shipping.

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Hot Shop with John Hogan
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Hot Shop with John Hogan

Above and below is a look into the glass fabrication process of our new Drift lighting and furniture series recently launched at ICFF. For this series, we worked with Seattle glass artist John Hogan.

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Spring 2016 Launch
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

Spring 2016 Launch

Efficient LED lighting components are neatly hidden behind a thick cast glass diffuser to illuminate without a visible bulb. Precision cut aluminum frame can be custom plated or powder coated, and custom colored glass is also possible.

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REFLECT
Chelsea Minola Chelsea Minola

REFLECT

During NYCxDESIGN we also had the chance to show at Sight Unseen's OFFSITE with 15 other studios from across the United States in REFLECT curated by JOIN Design. The designs centered around the common theme of reflection and were restricted by size and a single material.

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