APHROCHIC: DECORATING WITH SOULFUL STYLE

Policy Attorney and Ph. D. Candidate turned designers, Jeanine Hays and Bryan Mason, bring soulful style to the home. In this sit down interview with the creators of AphroChic, we discuss their inspiration and their modern soulful style.

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When we started in 2007, we were a blog and we were writing about what inspired us, um, and really trying to write about culture, uh, in the design world. Um, and then two years after we started writing about design, we actually started to get into developing our own products. And these did soft goods. We did wallpaper. Um, and then it was in 2013 that we really began doing here are your spaces. Yeah, I mean I think it's been atypical in a couple of ways. And then what makes us sort of interesting is that neither of us come from a strictly designed background. So when we started Afro Chic, Janine was a policy attorney working on a anti domestic violence law in California and I was just sort of wandering around collecting master's degrees. So I, I picked up into a master's degree in systematic philosophical theology and another, a African diaspora studies with a focus in hepatology. So from that we transitioned into becoming designers, um, and it's helped us create a style and aesthetic that is very narrative. So we always like to call our spaces, narrative spaces. There's a story that we're trying to tell. For us, it's always a matter of um, existing, right at that junction point of modern interior design and global culture. And for us specifically African diaspora culture, um, and finding ways to express that in a room is always interesting because everyone has a different story to tell. So we enjoy the fact that no two of our rooms ever look the same. I mean, yeah, for both of us. Um, you know, I think we like to be very theoretical about design and it does start with our heritage. It does start with culture for us. Like where I did African, they asked for studies, I went to Spellman, you know, it was a historically black college and university. Um, and so there, you know, really was learning about, you know, again, like how do we as African Americans tell our stories in many different ways if you're looking at literature or film. Um, and really I love the idea of being able to do that, you know, within the context of home. Um, a lot of times we really think about Afro Chic as a humanizing project, um, that we show the black home. That in that when you do that, people become more human to you. You can't, everyone has a home, everyone has a desire to have a beautiful space that they feel safe and comfortable in. And a lot of ways that's really this what we're trying to do with all of our projects. And definitely one of the things that we really love in this room are the baskets that are behind us. Um, and like Brian said, I used to do work in, uh, the, the domestic violence prevention field and work with women. Uh, and so we were really excited when we found this collective called Indigo Africa. They work with women in Rwanda and Ghana who are basically doing microfinance work. So the women in these small villages make these beautiful baskets. They're handmade, they use water-based dyes with them, and it helps them basically build their own small businesses in the community. They're able to support their children through it. And so we love the idea of not only is this a great piece, but the sale of pieces like this actually give back to a community.Um, you know, we also have some of our own pieces here. We have our new lighting collection, which has artist and lighting that we're actually working with artisans and Morocco on. And they, uh, they hand make it, they do the piercing by hand. Uh, and then we have our wallpaper collection. And this one was really special. This wallpaper is called Ailey. I had a cousin who was an Alvin Ailey dancer and our family was always so proud that, you know, she was part of that dance theater and we would watch, you know, her performances. And this paper really is an homage to that avenue. He turned 60 years, uh, old, uh, though it was actually perfect timing that we developed this paper where you see women dancing, uh, within the wallpaper design. Yeah. And for us it's always about how to bring these things together to create an aesthetic that's very modern and at the same time has a depth to it. That's more than just, you know, nice things arranged in the room. Um, there's a coherent thought behind it. There's a story behind it. And you know, we've noticed, or when we first started, we felt as though a lot of times people were having to choose between having a space that was very modern and maybe didn't tell as much as theirs of their story or having a space that was very cultural and felt dated.

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