Design Trend of the Month: Cranes

Plus: A personal update.

I’m Emily Grosvenor the Editor of Oregon Home magazine and the author of Find Yourself At Home, a home lifestyle and design book from Chronicle Books. This newsletter is about evolution of the self through home design.

Crane wallpaper — it’s all over the place. Ever since Gucci launched its home line in 2017 with its original cacophony of heron wallpaper, designers have been exploring just how fun it can be to plaster a ragtag flock of long-necked birds on the walls or sneak them into decor. Take the above — a needlepoint kit from Ehrman Tapestry, a reupholstered chair on Chairish, Gucci’s famous heron paper, and one half of a two-crane bookends at Anthropologie. Cranes are elegant, eye-catching, alluring, and a little wild. Who wouldn’t want some animal symbology bringing in the energies of:

• longevity

• happiness

• patience

• focus

• fidelity

• commitment

• joy

• hope

As a motif, cranes are lively in movement and serene when standing still. They’re a little goofy, but they have an awkward strength to them. Who knew a being could balance on spindly legs like that! All in all, a fun way to bring in a touch of Asian influence without going all in on Chinoiserie.

My favorite crane-y room I’ve written about was this profile of a couple who is in a situationship (I think they are on their third project with them) with Bright Designlab, one of my favorite Portland-based designers. For the most part, they chose relative serenity in the rest of their rooms. But for the dining room? Squawk!

A personal update

Well, it’s been chaos over here. School ended, we welcomed family guests, my youngest son broke his arm jumping off playground equipment, and we sent both sons off to Away Camp for the first time, all within the last six days.

I knew when we planned this end-of-year moment that it was going to be more than I could probably handle, but sometimes that’s just the way the calendar lines up.

Lots of the unexpected, but one thing really cracked the world open for me.

Yesterday, I visited my neuro-optometrist in Portland and discovered that after two years of bizarre neurological symptoms, binocular vision disorder (BVD), migraine, and other unmentionables brought on by a mystery trigger (was it Covid? Was it Hashimoto’s? Was it connective tissue stuff? Was it that time I ate a whole gluten pizza when I haven’t eaten gluten in 12 years? Was it Peri?) my doctor says I am ready to move out of prism lenses.

Prism lenses, for the unitiated, are life-saving tools for people who have double vision or, in my case, subtle eye misalignment that can cause anxiety, panic attacks, disassociation, depression, agoraphobia, balance issues, vertigo, short term memory loss, and all kinds of nasty stuff. I had it all).

This means that the 30 minutes of eye exercises I’ve been doing a day for the last year and a half has worked and my perception of the world is back to being somewhat normal.

I will write about this sometime.

I keep telling myself I will write about it.

Why go through this crap if you can’t make some sense of it?

Isn’t this the calling of all who have been through something big and deep and come out the other end even softer and somehow more powerful to help other people?

During my half-convolescence, I have learned a lot about how different people perceive their environments and how those environments can be shaped to support neurodiversity and vision differences.

I have paid attention to what has happened to me, and I am paying attention to what is happening to other human beings I encounter.

Usually, the feeling that reigns over here is curiousity. But sometimes disgust takes over — at poorly designed public spaces and hotels and other places that feel as if they are designed to reject a large part of the population (some say 25% of people have some form of BVD).

My heart has grown six sizes. My sense of self-compassion has expanded with each challenge along the way. My belief in the power of design — especially home design — has taken a new shape. My dream has changed. My ability to sit with discomfort is now the stuff of legend.

I don’t really know what’s coming next for me. I am moving out of a bit of a necessary creative fallow period (this Substack excluded) where I focused mostly on my health and family, and I can feel, as I always have before, the sense of something new emerging. I just don’t know what that is yet.

This isn’t a bad place to be.

In the design news…

The New York Times wrote this wide-ranging history of the peacock chair and its connection to the Black experience.

DWELL magazine investigated how fascist regimes use design to perpetuate their ideology.

My friend, the color expert Brandi Katherine Herrera, landed on Apartment Therapy with a piece on her colorful 1918 Omaha cottage.

In a stark contrast to the usual aesthetics first editorial of most house design magazine, House Beautiful ran a story on how 70% of Americans can’t afford to buy a home.

I’ve cleaned before vacation ever since I discovered my college friend Julie would do the same with her dorm room. The Spruce is out with a story on what exactly to clean before you leave.

The Substack newsletter Schmatta did a thing on how to hide your TV.

Questions no one has asked me

🏠What’s it like in your house with no kids there?

We unlocked a personal dream last week and sent our kids off to Summer camp for a couple of weeks — the camp where Adam and I met as counselors in 2001. We put them on a plane by themselves for the first time. I only burst into tears once as I saw them walking through the gate. My sister met them at the airport and drove them to Northern Minnesota. Both these kids are thrilled at the idea of being on their own, so I’m refraining from checking the photo gallery too much (although I was happy to see my one son eating breakfast the first morning!). I value my autonomy so much. As difficult as it is to have them so far away, I’m trying to preserve the experience of them being in tiny a world unto itself, one we don’t monitor. Wish me luck! Bizarrely, the wild animals in our laughably suburban neighborhood must have sensed their absence. Yesterday, a deer wandered into our backyard, and later that night, a skunk must have been set off and we got flooded in our bedroom at 10 p.m. (open window). Super weird.

🍽️ So are you eating all the things your kids won’t eat while they are gone?

There is precious little they don’t like, but we did make liver and onions the first night they were gone. I get a craving for this every five years, eat 2/3 of it, then all of a sudden: Ew!

✨But wasn’t there delight, even still?

Oh yes. I made this trifle with local everything and Trader’s Joe’s vegan whipping cream and we ate it with family. Win.

😦What have you been doing differently this week?

Bestie Sam and I took a Sashiko class at WildCraft Studio in Portland a few weeks ago. I adore visible mending on all the things, so I’m having fun patching up my clothes. I started with my son’s favorite hippie pants, which didn’t make it on the trip with him since they were ripped. I’m sending them with a note FROM THE PANTS. Fabric from my favorite Japanese lifestyle store in Portland, Kiriko. Fun!