It just popped up, and the contents are striking.
A pop-up shop at 30 Carden Street will be in business over the weekend, with three vendors of rare, aesthetically dazzling items temporarily turning the space into a den of hip design. Local Design Pop-Up opened Friday, and continues throughout the weekend.
There’s handmade furniture, altered cityscape photographic paintings, and exotic rugs from around the world.
Alexa and Kip Perry are Era 66 furniture makers. Business is blossoming, Alexa said Friday as she put the finishing touches on the presentation of several furniture pieces in the shop. The couple’s business was featured in GuelphToday back in February. See the story here
The pop-up trend is a good way of trying out business collaborations, Alexa said. Kiam Collaborative Art by Kiel and Amanda Wilson-Ciocci, and Rug and Weave, the imported rug company of Sarah McBean and Svein Piene, are the business collaborators in this three-day enterprise.
“We’ve been talking about further business ventures as a group,” said Perry. “We talk about it all the time.” There might come a time when a permanent shop is opened, but that time is not quite yet.
McBean and Piene travelled the world, encountering extraordinary rugs in Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere – wishing at every stop they could bring some of them back to Canada.
“We came back, got our own home and had to find the rugs were really wanted,” McBean said. “So we started to import them for personal reasons. We were trying to get away from the throwaway culture, as were a lot of other people. We wanted handmade stuff with a story behind it.”
Soon they saw that exotic rugs with a bit of history behind them were suddenly in fashion, and part of cutting-edge design concepts. They began ordering rugs from around the world.
Demand for the rug-slingers wares is high, particularly in Guelph and Toronto, but also in Los Angeles, where they send a lot of their stuff.
“These are handmade vintage rugs that people will have for years,” McBean added.
The rugs, the paintings, and the furniture seem to belong together, Kiel Wilson-Ciocci indicated. All the items in the pop-up shop share a similar aesthetic.
“It turned out really well,” he said, surveying the spacious shop. “It’s a great location. This is going to give us traffic we might not otherwise get.”
The pop-up shop is open Saturday form 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
