Carole Charlin
Since moving from Southern California to New England in 2001, I have brought my own personal touch of elegant, rustic, alpine design by refreshing and renovating a 50 year-old Austrian style chalet. I've also consulted on a variety of design and decorating projects with neighboring chalet owners and other residential clients.
My extensive travels in Europe, Asia, and South America have honed my design eye. Part of that design process for me is searching for new ways to incorporate well-crafted foreign cultural designs that follow the concept of elegance and simplicity. My love of purity in design – the clean line, a love of natural light, open space, a connection with nature - has led to collaborations with extraordinary artisans. Call it "mixed media kept pure and real" - a meld of glass, metal, paper, textiles and other manmade elements with nature’s media of wood, stone, sand and clay.
You see, I’m passionate about design, involved in it since I was a child living with my grandparents. It must be a gift inherited; I grew up in a house they built by hand with the help of talented local crafts people. I was immersed in lessons about design, textiles and color when I modeled for my grandmother and great-grandmother who made all my clothes, a family tradition that goes back to my great, great grandmother who was a seamstress.
At the age of seven I moved with my parents to Tampa, Florida where my step-father, a noted architect, was sent to help create “planned community living” for the giant East Coast firm of Levitt & Sons. He delighted in spending weekends searching out new home construction sites, and I spent countless hours exploring these sites, absorbing architecture and design styles. For me, watching the project come full circle from start to finish with the model homes complete with landscaping and furnished interiors instilled an understanding of the full arc of the design process.
Our family moved to California. At age twelve, I was already an avid seamstress; by the time I was in high-school, I was making most of my own clothes and redesigning vintage clothes, setting a personal fashion style that stood apart from the crowd – amazing my school friends. As a young adult I created for my first apartment and the others too follow slipcovers, pillows and curtains made of fine linens, and refinished tired-out furniture from family, thrift shop finds, flea markets and even humble roadside castoffs making them useful and unique. It informed and forged a style I incorporate in my overall design approach today: a combination of recycling and the use of distressed objects, an old-new and old-made-new design ethos the Japanese term "Wabi-Sabi." For me, the best payoff is friends have become loyal clients and clients have become dear friends.