Designs in the space: Painting details

Hiring a painter in Kathmandu at the level we want would be too expensive. Luckily, I've worked on a few dozen theatrical sets in my time. We are trying to evoke nature, womanhood, raw materials, spiritualism, and yet not overwhelm the space with too much visual detail. We've settled on a illustrative style using light washes that let the natural brick, concrete and wood grain show through, and thin lines of sienna that echo the color of the brick in the space, and draw the eye but don't capture it.

It’s the last day of the Nepal Tihar festival and the apartment is silent. I finally get a chance to catch up on receipts, marketing, and a grant I’m writing for the Nepal program. There’s so much to do I am not sure where to start.

Tania Ayuby has a friend, Ashmita, who has worked with UN projects, and will be coming on board next week to help with the shop. I am leaving for Thailand in five days for the first real vacation I’ve had in over a year, and Ashmita will be taking what I produce to the printers. Now if I can just find a printer that does everything I want. Like almost every aspect of this project, we’ll need to find the printer, find the paper supplier we want, and get into every detail of how the final product will look.

And it’s not just brochures and tags. We need bags, business cards, receipt books, a sign for the door, a sign for the street, and endless little details that will make us look sharp or make us look unready. And being just down the street the premier hotel in the city, The Raddison, that difference can make or break our success.

No pressure.

And after much debate, here is the shop logo. The carving is from a door in the ancient city of Patan.

Designs in the space: the recycled glass bottle chandelier

Glass chandelier - how we're getting those suckers to stay firmly in place

Recycled glass bottle chandelier

Chandelier side and overviews

Getting Back On Track

Carpenter Llama looking over my drawi

Sorry for the lapse in reporting on the progress in Nepal. It’s been a crazy month, both because of Nepali holidays and for Solace as an organization. I had to travel back to the US for fundraising events after Solace’s Executive Director took ill. Three days travel each way really takes it out of you.

Meanwhile, progress in Kathmandu slowed to a crawl because of the holy holidays of Desai, which some Nepalese take up to three weeks to celebrate in their home villages. Kathmandu becomes a ghost town.

Now we are in the middle of the five-day Tihar holiday, but while folks stay in the city, almost all the shops close. Progress has been starting and stopping, starting and stopping.

We are close though. Most of the wood and glass displays have been built. These include the following:
•    A long glass coffee table
•    A long mobile checkout counter that will double as a wet bar for evening events
•    Three cupboards with removable doors
•    Four upright wood partitions
•    The armature for a 7 foot diameter recycled wine bottle chandelier that will hold around 200 bottles when mounted on the ceiling
•    A recycled tire end table display
•    Two glass and wrought iron island display cases from a special fabricator (which are almost done)
•    Four Japanese style floor lamps
•    A workbench for the office upstairs

I’ve also finished a mural for the ceiling of what will be the workshop area which will be mounted by the second set of carpenters we’re working with. The first group are now on holiday as their manager had to return to India to get married this week. He was in quite a rush, and rightly so.

Now we are wrestling with electricians in the upstairs office. They keep doing just one thing on a long list and then leaving for two days until we harasses them to keep their promises. I don’t know why they haven’t just wired the six outlets and three ceiling fixtures and have done with it, but we have been at them for two weeks now.

More later, but I have to run and meet with our second set of carpenters led by Mr. Llama, (I call him the Carpenter Llama). We’re hoping to get the Japanese lamps delivered to day so I can cover them and paint patterns on their fabric to match the ceiling mural.

Getting Things Built

There’s a long list of things we will be building for the shop. We are trying

The lumber wholesale yard

for a modern look that emphasizes recycled materials. Some of the pieces we will be using will be borrowed from our landlord, Sudesh. He has been very generous in promising us two of his hand-made wooden tables, several ottomans

The metal fabricator

and easy chairs, and a long bench. There are some items that we will buy from the market like baskets and wooden crates.

The rest of the items we are having made in the craftshops of Kathmandu. There have been many challenges getting this production started. First among them is lack of a savvy translator. Just this week we have had the luck to get a local guy who goes by Jack to help with the language. He is a young man who is full of jokes and knows people in every neighborhood. Another problem is that the holy holiday of Desai is about to start. The entire city will become a ghost town and many craftsmen will head back to their villages for up to 20 days. Yet another challenge is that the designs I’ve been making are unorthodox. We are trying to use recycled and raw materials and to arrange them in ways that emphasize new ideas in the design. I have to explain each hinge, measurement, angle, and choice of wood several times with lots of drawings to get across the point. Finally, everyone we’ve met, Nepali or expat, who has opened shops here has said over and over that we must observe every detail of manufacture or the final result will be a mess.

So, Jack and I have run all over Kathmandu the last week, visiting shops and craftsmen to find people who will make things outside their comfort zone, and will do it during the high holy holiday. Glasscutters, carpenters, metal fabricators, wrought iron fabricators, upholsterers, and shop after shop looking for parts that will fit all these things together. There is no such

The recycler

thing as a Home Depot here. There is the shop you buy your nuts and bolts. There is the shop you buy just your light fixtures, but not the electrical conduit. The guy who sells lumber does not carry plywood. The shop that has paint only sells one kind of brush so you need to go somewhere else. I have become very good at flagging down taxis and I believe I have been to almost every neighborhood. All of it is an adventure.

Designing the Space

The last twelve days have marked a long process of discussion, research, traveling all over town seeing other spaces and visiting craftsmen, and sitting for hours with pencil and paper designing the Solace shop space. We are sharing just under 1000 sq. ft. with Sudesh, the owner of the building. He has made some very generous concessions on both the price and the use of space. However, he does need seating for spillover from his coffee shop. As long as there’s 20 seats for people to enjoy their mocha, he’s happy. He’s even letting us use a lot of his furniture – which he has custom made here in Kathmandu, and is top quality. As part of the deal, he also wants to have events at night in the space like wine tasting and art openings. This only adds to the people who will be exposed our work. However, it does present some design issues.

·      The furnishings in that are away from the wall need to be mobile

·      All displays need to be secure in the evening.

We’re also trying to work in various concepts

·      Raw materials

·      Recycling

·      Hand-made

·      Unique design

·      Fashion

It’s a tall order.

Earthquake in Kathmandu

Had an earthquake last night as well. I was cooking southern baked beans from scratch after we discovered a smoked ham hoc for sale by a Russian couple at an organic Sunday market up the way. The pressure cooker had just started to hiss when the room started rockin'. We live on the 4th, 5th, and 6th floors of a concrete apartment building with another family below. We could hear them yelling to get out. My friend Michelle in one swift motion, swiped up her 3-year old, Alice, and started bolting down the stairs – which were shaking noticeably. Tania Azizi from Afghanistan, was running like a cat. Amy, our Oklahoma 25 year-old volunteer paused and ran back to turn off the gas under the beans. She's got more nerve that I do because I was right behind Michelle. We all spilled into the street with everyone else and watched the lamp posts dance for about another 30 seconds. Took about five minutes for everyone in the street to calm down and start back up the stairs. Reports this morning were that a much larger earthquake in India at around 6.9 sent waves down a shared fault line. Rough estimates are that by the time it hit the city it was at about 4.5.  An already crumbling wall at the British embassy collapsed, and reports are that it killed 4. Very sad.


We are all safe though and nothing here is broken.