In the three years since we met Eric Trine — who, at the time, was a grad student skipping his art-school graduation to show with Sight Unseen during New York Design Week — the Long Beach, California–furniture designer has emerged as a true talent. And though his powder-coated pieces — geometric, clean, bright, and fun — have wowed us from the start, over time he’s honed his approach and philosophy, shifting from a DIY mentality to a full-fledged operation with a driving vision behind it: to make great-looking, high-quality products that are actually affordable. “I went to a crafts-based graduate school, but I’ve kind of always felt like it’s easy to make an $8000 table,” Trine explains. “You get some brass, some marble, some live-edge walnut. I know how to do that, from a conceptual standpoint. I know how to make that big, expensive thing. But what I felt is really hard to do is: How do we do this thing for the middle class? That price point is really challenging. How do we get this good design stuff in our lives and make it more accessible? And can we do that domestically, production-wise?”
For Trine, the answer lies in working largely with metal. And, as he puts it: “I can’t design anything complex. People say, ‘Oh, you have such a refined sense of simplicity’ and it’s like, no, I just don’t know how to do something hard.” Self-deprecation aside, Trine’s focus on accessibility is not only about cost but part of a down-to-earth, gracious ethos. “Having great furniture in your house is so you can have people in your house. I love this dining table so let’s have food around it. Not ‘Let me tell you about this table, it’s from this guy…’ You should be having Spaghetti-os and Two Buck Chuck and laughing with your friends, not talking about your status piece.”
Still, his own story helped form his ideas about design. “I grew up going to the Long Beach flea market, and I was a thrift-store kid. I used to ride my Beach Cruiser four miles when I was 12 years old to check out the local Goodwill, and my fascination with objects came from me not knowing anything about an object and realizing I could make it up.” Trine eventually pursued fine arts as an undergrad before getting his MFA in 2013 in applied craft and design from Oregon College of Art and Craft in Portland. “I like that immediacy of design, that direct, pre-verbal response — I don’t know what this is but I love it.”
That’s just the kind of response his work tends to inspire, whether it’s the elegant woven leather and polished copper frame of a hexagonal Rod + Weave chair or a perfect cobalt blue perforated-steel side table — the likes of which he’ll be rolling out at next month’s Sight Unseen OFFSITE. There, he’ll unveil a whole family of products, including a set of nesting tables, a wall-mounted shelf, and a bath collection, inspired, in part, by his friend Ellen Van Dusen’s line of towels. We can hardly wait to show you. But in the meantime, we’ll tide you over with a closer look at Trine’s Long Beach studio and some insight into one of our favorite designer’s creative process.
“We light incense or sage every day in the studio. It’s part of my coming-into-the studio ritual. There are all sorts of smells going on, depending on what wood we’re cutting in the shop or if we’re using something that has bad fumes. But I think it’s more of this ritualistic thing: I come into this space, set the backpack down, open up my laptop, light a cone incense thing and let that burn and think “Okay, this is studio time.”
Trine keeps a lot of plants and “vibe stuff” around. “I’m a hyper Instagrammer, so I have a rule that anything coming through the studio, I just shoot it. There are so many people in this field who take photos in their workspace and make it look like it’s not staged or set up. But I’m like, ‘Your wood shavings didn’t expertly land that way.’ There’s a lot of staging. So I decided early on, if I’m gonna shoot my stuff, I’m gonna very visibly set it up. Things didn’t accidentally end up this way. Everybody knows that I set this up and I that I took some time to do that. That’s become an essential part of the visual culture of my brand.”
For those Instagram posts, Trine shoots against various backdrops in the studio. “I have tons of seamless paper in pink.” Trine credits social media for a lot of his success, and he appreciates the kind of interactive connections it allows. “Some of that feedback loop is what attracted me to design. I like the direct feedback of Instagram; it ties into the idea that this is supposed to be light and engaging. It doesn’t have to be a heavy thing that only people with MFAs can talk about. Status has a role, but when it keeps people on the outside, or creates a tribe or club you can’t participate in unless you’re in the know, I think that’s dangerous and kind of sad.”
Trine made this truncated tetrahedron structure out of brackets and closet dowels. “At a recent studio show I set it up and put a lounge in it. You can see what I’m using or interested in because it will populate a week’s worth of Instagram posts as a prop. Around Christmas, I was hanging my chairs from that and shooting them.” On Instagram, Trine has also become known for his #fridayfancydance, which started as a joke but “snowballed into this thing. It’s responsible for a large part of my following on Instagram.” Though he began to worry it was distracting, he now sees it as “studio momentum” and a reaction against self-seriousness. “Everybody’s so conscious about being really cool with the way they mediate themselves online. I’m just gonna do this and when it stops being fun I won’t.”
As Trine sees it, presenting his work is an integral part of the process. “It’s this combination of set designer, stylist, prop maker, and art director. I do all of that and the whole picture is what really engages me. I want to think of myself more as a director eventually. I realized early on that my hands were starting to hurt already — I realized I can’t be the sole one making all this stuff by myself. I joke that the evolution is one day I’ll be sitting in a lawn chair and creatively managing people. I would love that.”
Trine draws design inspiration from the usual sources but also from junkyards and material suppliers. “The octahedron side table I do, which is my bestselling product, came about because there was a 24-inch disc of sheet metal at the salvage yard and I bought it for four dollars. I had already been riffing on this octahedron shape back in grad school, and I went, ‘Oh, I wonder if I can just scale that up and make a side table.’ And that was it. I didn’t set out to design a side table.”
When Trine wanted to design a coat hook, the “Wall Willy” was the result. “We were overthinking it and it wasn’t working. I literally said ‘Let’s just make a little penis for the wall.’ When you put a coat or towel on it it’s completely covered, but I imagined the experience of someone going to the bathroom, pulling the towel off the hook, and giggling to themselves. We put it into production for that specific moment.” Trine says they sell like crazy, though a commercial client did request a modified version: “On the purchase order they were like, Wall Willy, minus the balls. That’s the funniest line item I’ve ever seen on a purchase order.”
The red tower is what started the whole octahedron thing. Trine originally made this six-foot tall design for a client’s retail display and then decided to play with the shape. “Let me scale it down and make a plant stand. Or scale it back up and make a side table. Scale it up even more and make a coffee table. I’m not a very collection-y designer. I have that shape stuck in my head and I keep using it and when I’m done using it I’ll be done with that kind of family of products.”
Trine ships all of his products directly out of his studio, like these octahedron pieces in mint, one of the many powder-coating colors he uses. “When I go to my powder coaters and look at all the available colors, I think: ‘If we don’t do it in a particular color, no one’s gonna be able to have it.’” He generally trusts his instinct on color. “If I’m responding to this, chances are other people will too.” He launched three new shades last year, including a deeper green sage, an alternative to ubiquitous mint.
In addition to his own online shop and providing products to a growing roster of commercial clients, Trine works with retailers like West Elm and Land of Nod, where he launched a kids’ collection earlier this year. The world of licensing was “completely new territory” for him, but “it’s great, because I have a toddler, so my world is thinking about all this cool, fun stuff.”
A piece of the vinyl plastic Trine sets up when welding to protect against the UV rays of the welding arc, which can cause blindness. Though he welds prototypes, he leaves production to local manufacturers. “The resource of being an LA designer is that I have such a robust network. I have worked with fabricators and welders who’ve been welding longer than I’ve been alive.”
A double octahedron plant stand made of brass and copper. Being in LA has allowed him to expand his use of metal. “It wasn’t until moving back down from Portland that I had the resources to do copper plating, brass plating, and chrome. If I stayed in Portland, there are all of these production constraints. I would’ve had to be a studio craft person and have a small shop. But being down here, I have all of these resources.” Case in point: Trine was able to launch the gorgeous copper version of his steel frame Rod + Weave chair in 2014.
At right is Trine’s main work table, which is essentially a giant green cutting board. He doesn’t manufacture products in the studio, but he does do all of the leather work in-house. “We cut it into strips, we weave the chairs ourselves, all of the product comes through here.” Wanting to keep his business local is a personal choice, he says. “Not so much from an ethics point of view, it’s more of a lifestyle thing. I don’t want to travel overseas all the time. And I don’t want to have to hire someone to do that for me overseas. I want to be able to have a beer with my vendors at end of a work day.”
In talking about functionality, Trine brings up a scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel shows various objects to Scuttle, who “just makes shit up” about them. “She has this fork and he’s like, ‘Oh it’s a dinglehopper!’ It’s total bullshit and it’s perfect. Who says you can’t use a fork to comb your hair? The information embedded in a fork could suggest ‘comb your hair.’ You can know or not know anything about it and if it’s a utilitarian object, it still works. With a chair, if you have to explain to someone that they can sit on it, that chair is betraying its chairness.”
At left is a Staycation lounge chair, from Trine’s 2013 collaboration with Austin designer Will Bryant. “We were both in grad school in Portland and became friends, and we decided to do this collaboration that was about shucking off the negativity of grad school and just having fun. For me, it changed my entire trajectory with design. I was thinking way too hard and was very averse to color at the time. And then I got together with Will and everything is wiggles and squiggles and joy. It was a huge turning point for me.”
The poster is by Portland-based designer Joey Roth. “He’s got this graph that shows the difference between talking and working. A Charlatan, a Martyr, and a Hustler. He wrote that out and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is it! Because I like to talk but it’s always been in tandem with an insanely high work ethic. I’ve been critiqued by friends that I talk too much. Yeah, but I also work. As much as I talk.” And the F Yes? “Most of this stuff is so arbitrary. I had some gold letters and these are the letters I had left. But maybe the F yes is like, doubling down on that poster.”
Trine has about eight split leaf philodendrons around the studio that hang out with “random leftover” materials when not making their way into photo shoots. In terms of his design process, Trine typically doesn’t sketch or do dimensions. “I just kind of have a scrap and then I put it together. Now, because I know my manufacturer so well and I have an assistant who has an industrial design degree and can draw things on the computer, I can actually just have an idea and he can draw it. But my mind doesn’t work that way. And I’ll shut down an idea pretty quickly if I don’t think we can make it at an affordable price. The idea of the market and commercial viability comes in really early in the design process for me.”
Trine has become adept at creating a visual language through his products. Though he loves to talk, he also knows when to let the work speak for itself. “We’re very story-drunk in our culture. It’s cool to have a great story behind the products but I also think it’s cool to have no story. If I have to hear another ‘I grew up in my grandpa’s workshop…’ — that’s great, on your side, but when it crosses over to the end user, the power of objects is that your story doesn’t matter anymore because now it’s in that other person’s hands.”
Trine has a metal shop and a wood shop as part of his studio. The entire space, where he’s been for the past two years, is just under 4,000 sq. feet. He shares it with his studio mate, Sonny Marshall, a furniture and cabinet maker.
Trine had this neon sign made for booths at trade shows. So far, he’s been able to build his brand mostly through shows and social media; on average, he does 20 chairs a month and anywhere from 20 to 100 side tables and smaller products available on his site. “Every day we’re putting together some kind of order for some project. And the commercial interior design thing has been a growing part of my business.”
Trine found this surfboard in the trash, painted it cobalt blue and added gold leaf to the tip. “I’ve been a recovering hoarder for most of my life,” he jokes. Though he considers this kind of stuff only loosely related to his practice, it’s also part of “this weird visual data file in my brain” that he can draw on to create new products. “A lot of the development has been connected to some kind of client or customer request. I’m sitting on a shape or idea and waiting for it to slam against that request. That’s always been my approach. I need to have that tangible, practical request, to know that someone is desiring this thing. And then I have all this stuff in the back that’s like playtime.”
“The arts, in general, are supposed to be a resource for us to do the things that language can’t do, and I feel weird if people feel like they have to pass a certain test to participate or to benefit from that resource. I’m not diminishing difficult or complex art. There’s definitely a role for that. But I think there’s an attitude that happens sometimes and that’s not the thing I want to do. I’m already, like, a recovering asshole, I just want to do things that more people can be a part of and get on board with. That nurtures me and where I want to go.”
Visit Trine and check out his new collection at Sight Unseen OFFSITE, running May 13-16 at The Grace Building in New York City. Click here to pre-register!
Before the show Alley-Oop opens at L.A.'s Poketo store this coming Saturday, you should take a moment to thoroughly examine the portfolios of its two Portland-based collaborators, illustrator Will Bryant and furniture designer Eric Trine. Because think about it: How easy is it to picture the results of a collaboration spanning the two disciplines? Especially when Bryant's work is so crazy vibrant — full of squiggles and anthropomorphized hot dogs wearing neon sunglasses — and Trine's is so very understated, albeit with a lot of cool geometries in the mix. Alley-Oop is like one of those software programs that lets you crudely merge the faces of two people to find out what their child might look like at age 5, though perhaps a better metaphor would be that it's like what would happen if you pumped two designers full of methamphetamine and locked them in a room together for 48 hours with nothing but some spray paint and a welding gun. Actually, that's not too far off from how Bryant and Trine describe it themselves. See our interview with the pair after the jump, along with the first preview images of their collaborative work — which hopefully won't be the last.
It used to be that if you left your big-city corporate job, moved your family to a small town in New Hampshire, did some soul-searching behind the wheel of a camper van, and opted to spend your days doing what you really loved from the basement of your house, you were most likely a 55-year-old man having a mid-life crisis. Twenty-seven-year-old RISD grad Tim Liles — who followed that exact trajectory after quitting a footwear-design job at Converse last fall — understands this perfectly well: "My girlfriend is a couple years younger and her friends don’t get it, they all live in Chicago and think we're just confused," he says, speaking to me from week five of the couple's two-month cross-country vision quest. "But in traveling around the country, I’ve met a lot of people my age who have quit a salaried job in search of something simpler."
Two hundred years ago, when American pioneers were streaming across the country making homes for themselves in the uncharted wilderness, anyone who needed a corn grater or a mouse trap had to knuckle down and make one. “Everyone was a designer,” says Paul Loebach, who’s long been fascinated by such primitive, purpose-built objects, typically hand-carved in wood or crudely forged in metal. “Whereas Europe had a network of goods trading, for the settlers it was like, we’re limited to these five square acres. They had to be really clever to make the most out of what they had, and that kind of ingenuity is inspiring to me.” Already knowing this about the Brooklyn designer after interviewing him last November, Sight Unseen invited him to choose his favorite objects from the 1972 book American Primitives, which we found at an Ohio flea market for $2 and which contains several dozen annotated selections from Norris, Tennessee’s Museum of Appalachia.
