I’ve been helping some friends hunt for a house for the past few weeks. We’ve tramped through plenty of houses, mostly newly developed condos. At this point, I could write a book about how NOT to design a condo. I could also write a book about how inflated the real estate pricing in this city is (although most financial institutions and real estate agencies swear up and down that they are not…). 

On one of our trips, we ended up in the Redpath Lofts, once a sugar factory, and now a curiously frigid condo-loft development (complete with private marina on the canal!). The structure had very little charm, and while I’m generally a huge fan of that hard industrial look, there was something deeply alienating about the building as a whole.

The one bright spot? This carpet, which would have had me shrinking in horror had I leafed past it in a sample book. Somehow, in the endless corridors with extremely tall white walls, the bright tv-test-pattern-ness of the carpet just… worked. It inspired me deeply to see a design that loud and obnoxious not only find an appropriate home, but also bring life and personality in an otherwise very sterile environment.

In the end, this carpet is a testament to design risk, both on the part of the person that made the pattern, and the person who chose to install it.