Boucherie

This week at the butcher shop:

The kitchen floor is being installed. It isn’t has bad as I thought. I maintain that laying it down my way (in a diamond pattern) would have been cooler. Still it is nice in it’s straight up grid. I’m very happy with the black grout we chose for the walls. It is striking. I have never done this dark a grout and I love it so much.

We then met with Mr Sign. He started painting the sign and it looks so great. Totally made it real. THIS IS HAPPENING! It says so on the sign.

I love Dave’s work. He is thorough and has great taste. He is super accommodating but still has opinions which is basically exactly what you want from someone you work with. At least that is what I want. I want you to take pride in your work, listen to me the customer, tell me if I am totally wrong (in a nice way), and ultimately agree with me. We let him work for an hour or two and came back and this is what we found:

I am super happy. He starts by painting the black and then a couple of days later adds the silver contour. After that he will paint over the whole thing so that it looks just as good on the inside of the shop. It is simple and solid and weirdly, you can read the sign perfectly half way down the block- I guess the angles of the Gil Sans font make it so that you can read it from various angles quite clearly. So many signs out there require a practically head-on view which is illogical if you are walking up the sidewalk or especially driving by. This really makes it really really real. Really.

While at the space, we started talking wall colour. Now as anyone who knows me knows, I am cream, white, pale grey girl. I have never been coloured walls girl, accent wall girl, wacky colour girl. And I always thought that I’d go cream or pale grey with the butcher shop. And then we went with white tile. And that changed something. Standing in the space this morning waiting for Sefi to come back with coffee, my mind drifted looking at that orange-y brick. One of the bricks was dirty and darker than the others, almost blue. I looked at my colour chips and saw these grey blues and greens in my Farrow and Ball fan deck. They do these blues and greens better than anybody in my opinion. Like their Dix blue or Breakfast Room green. Their paint is way out of anyones budget really but you can get Benjamin Moore paint matched to it. Not always a perfect match but almost a third of the price. Or, you can just find some Benjamin Moore paints that have the same tone or feeling to them. And that is what we did. We picked 3 samples up at City Paints:

We are looking at either Whythe Blue, Buxton Blue, or Covington Blue. The ceiling white will be Oxford White – it is soft, bright but not cold. I’m pretty excited by the idea of colour on the walls. The big white tile wall is perfect for the kitchen: it needs to be almost stark and it needs to look clean. In the rest of the space though, given that we are putting a giant stainless table smack dab in the middle, I think that having some colour will warm it all up. Even though there is something industrial about these colour choices (they kind of remind me of old metal machinery), I still feel like they will help break the space, have it feel less fancy/loft-like. And now that we are going to do a colour, I think I want to try painting the mouldings really dark and glossy. Really really dark. There is a terrible accordion style closet door that the landlord installed that I was thinking of painting in the glossy Onyx colour that all the Lawrence furniture was painted in. Now with a greenish/blue wall and that black stripe going through the back of the space, I think I’ll paint the mouldings the same colour and it will look amazing. After putting our 3 samples up on the wall, I chose the Covington Blue. It was the warmer, least grey of the three. It is a gamble but the more I picture the finished space, the more I think the colour is a winner. Hard to tell from this lousy picture, but I am feeling quite confident:

And then at the park, my friend Catherine, who’s personal style I’ve always admired, was wearing pants that exact colour and it felt even more right. Sometimes a colour, a pattern, a aesthetic will really scream at me from all corners of the universe. That’s what’s happening now:

I also had a meeting with Jason Cantoro. He is the hyper talented screen printer responsible for co-designing our Lawrence wallpaper. He is working on two projects for the shop. He is making us a large Quebec map that will live on the first wall coming in to the space. It will show all the regions of Quebec and we’ll be able to put push pins in the spots where the farms we work with are located. It will, I think, really show customers the fact that there is a relationship established with these farmers and show them how very local the meat they are buying is. The map project is evolving from wallpaper to a mural to screen prints on wood to who knows what by next week. For Jason’s second project with us, I had the idea of having him make us a sign for the exterior. A hanging, perpendicular to the building, sign of a pig that will have the address on it. Because the front door is recessed, the address is not immediately visible. This kind of signage will not only draw passers by’s attention but also solve the practical problem of a non-visible from the street address. This is Jason at work with piggy:

He does these screen prints on wood and cuts them out to make 3D works and that’s what he’ll do with mr.pig. I can’t wait to see it done.

And then the Lawrence butcher shop got a visit from the real boss, the queen bee, Miss Lou. It is crazy for me to see her at a renovation site that I am working on. Her brother was about her age or a little younger while I was working on the Lawrence design. And here she is stomping around the work site, pointing at everyone. She wasn’t into the tilers (or rather, the noise they were making with the tile saw) but she liked Mr. Sign. Like mother, like daughter.

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