Well before Lululemon came into the picture, designers and woodworkers Jason and Lars Dressler already had an idea for conjuring a huge pixelated image out of scraps. When the yoga apparel brand’s interiors team approached them about creating an original facade for the retailer’s newest store, something that would evoke Ontario’s north, the brothers showed the executives a photo of an autumn leaf they had taken at their cottage years before. They only meant it as inspiration, but Lululemon loved it. Now all the Dresslers had to do was render it on a 7.6‑by‑7‑metre wall.
Renowned for building furniture and light fixtures out of salvaged lumber, they had a decade’s worth of offcuts at their Toronto studio, stockpiled from various projects. They sawed the remnants down into five‑centimetre squares, varying the thickness by up to 2.5 centimetres to give the mosaic a textured depth. The resulting 35,000 tiles were then divided into 27 leafy tones, from light browns to warm reds. To assemble the piece, they rigged up a projector and a mirror, scanned the image into Photoshop and CAD, and beamed sections of it onto the surface of a huge work table. For over two weeks, they
had up to 14 assistants working on a paint-by-numbers assembly line, arranging the tiles into 58 panels that make up the complete image. Finally installed at Toronto’s Yorkdale mall, the maple leaf conveys both the Zen vibe of Lululemon and the sustainable ethos of the Brothers Dressler.
VACATION CHEZ VUITTON
Louis Vuitton fanatics still scour auctions for a Bed Trunk from 1885, and the French brand hopes its latest limited edition furnishings will attain the same legendary status. The Objets Nomades collection, launched during Design Miami last December, includes the Maracatu, a travel cabinet layered in leather offcuts, by the Campana brothers; and Maarten Baas’s Beach Chair, which looks like an attaché case at first glance but opens up into a portable seat. For Swing Chair, Patricia Urquiola married two enduring design motifs: her own modern macramé and the handles on LV’s coveted leather bags.