Northern Inspiration and Wide-Open Spaces

hf_regehr2A chat with Catherine Regehr

By Shelley M. Black

hf_regehrCatherine Regehr is an award-winning and world-renowned designer with a love for both the elegant and the outdoors. She’s equally comfortable creating luxury couture as she is canoeing down a river in Canada’s North. Raised in the Yukon, Regehr left Canada to study fashion design in Paris at L’Écoles de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. She worked as a designer in New York before returning to Vancouver, where she continues to design and export her collections to leading department and specialty stores around the world.

 

Q. You’ve been a successful fashion designer for almost 25 years. What prompted you to design a Home Collection?

Catherine: I felt the need to express further and in a bigger way my love of the texture and repetitive forms that I’ve seen so often in Canada’s North: Ripples in the early mornings on the lakes, lines of seaweed spread out on the coast, the miles of clay cliffs that rise above the Yukon River, the black lichen I see high up in the mountains and the layers of brilliant green moss folded into the bogs near my house.

It started with me wanting to create hand-beaded and caribou-tufted moose-hide cushions for my Northern home and was crafted in the style of the moccasins I grew up with. The collection grew from there into hand-knit throws and all of the other pieces that I have the most fun with—which are the textures.

I grew up in the Yukon. My dad was a lawyer with mining interests and he would take me out to some of the claims and some of my earliest memories are of being out on these properties. Now, although I live in Vancouver and sell my designs around the world, I never want to be too far from Canada’s North, which is why I’m not living in New York or Paris.

My Northern upbringing was very different to that of an urban child. I remember hearing lynx, bears and foxes in the backyard at night. Much of my childhood was spent outdoors. Mom would say, “Go outside and play.”

Q. Tell us about your design training.

Catherine: I did four years at the Emily Carr College in Vancouver, followed by a year in Paris at the Chambre Syndicale, where my school mates included Thomas Meyer. From there I worked on Seventh Avenue in New York for Bill Atkinson, who had just won a Coty Award. I was the design assistant. After that, I returned to Vancouver. I looked at moving back to Paris, but then I realized I can’t be away too long from the North.

hf_regehr3Q. When you started your own collection, how did you learn?

Catherine: I learned at the school of hard knocks. I had a strong will and determination and knew what I wanted to design. I’ve been in the major stores since the beginning…my designs were a commercial success in that I sold to Bloomingdale’s and Neiman’s, but I learned how important it was to maintain margins in this business.

When I had to wind up my first business, my partner did not share my vision and I went back into business on my own. In 1990, I learned everything including the cold calls and selling. It would have been easier to have worked for a small company and learned a bit of everything, but I managed really well.

Q. Who or what inspires you?

Catherine: The city and the wilderness—spending time both in very isolated, wild places in the North and making frequent trips to New York and Paris, where the energy and creativity are invigorating. I get inspiration from everywhere, from sculptures in front of buildings on the streets of New York to the jewellery at the Met; in Paris, I even find inspiration in the repetitive texture on the limestone walls at the Louvre. Repetitive forms really interest me…they restate themselves and always catch my attention.

Q. Your Home Collection is very distinctively Canadian. How does this play in the rest of the world?

Catherine: Northern Europeans love the First Nations pieces and the smell of the hides (it reminds them of the mountains), and they love the big black and white Harmon photo of teepees and mountains at the turn of the century that I use in my booth at the shows. The Russians like the fox-trimmed pashmina caftans. I’ve always been bigger abroad than in Canada. Saudi Arabians have bought many of my caftans.

In bed linens, I’ve created many different textures in white for a seven-bedroom châteaux in the south of France, including with crystals on white linen. Christian Dior has bought cushions in the iconic Dior grey in three textures—diamond, ripple and disk—for its stores opening in the Middle East.

My designs are all about the textures. There are no prints because, for me, it’s all about the surface of the fabric. I source my fabrics from around the world, from hometown moose-hide to linens from Poland and India, and techno linens from Japan that I can laser-cut. I work with First Nations artisans who bead and use caribou tuft and porcupine quills. These are old First Nations’ crafts and nobody uses them any more. Some of these pieces take five people a week to make. The wave blanket uses 70 metres of silk habitue.

So my pieces are more like art pieces; my clients collect them.

Keviat (hair that the musk-ox drops, and there is a First Nations co-op that sells it and knits it together) is more expensive, luxurious and durable than cashmere. I have a hand-knitted keviat travel blanket that is made in an old-fashioned pattern from a hundred years ago. It’s about luxe.

If you just change up the colours—in white or coral—while keeping the textures reminiscent of the North, that gives me selling power in Paris. For me, as soon as you change the colour, a piece becomes its own new entity.

Q. What does your personal style in décor look like?

Catherine: My spaces always have an aspect with a view and openness to the outdoors. I have two floors with 40 feet of windows that look to the lake, mountains and glacier to the south of Atlin Lake. My city house has glass doors and windows that open up to a grapevine- and rose-covered pergola and private gardens.

In décor, I like my colours to be tonal. One thing that drives me crazy is all different colours in the same space, unless you have white walls with great art, of course. For example, I have a kitchen in tones of sage green. In my Northern home, I have wood, animal heads, suede, leather, Martha Sturdy resins and First Nations artifacts all in shades of neutral amber, gold and bone, with light and expansive views of the lake. Unlike many ski chalets, I have lower ceilings for warmth and intimacy.

My city home is black leather, slate-wool carpets, wood floors, African sculptures, a big David Robinson sculpture and a white kitchen that is open to the outdoors.

Q. What is your prize possession in your own home?

Catherine: In my Atlin house, it’s a large bone of a pike that fits in a huge Martha Sturdy disk on my dining-room table. I also have a huge eight-foot D-9 Cat (a mining vehicle) that I had made into a fire pit. And I have a First Nations gopher-skin blanket, which is very traditional in  the North. It’s from the 1940s and is behind Plexiglas.

Q. You live in the North for three months of the year. Does that affect your designs?

Catherine: Being in the North gives me an empty space to create, where I’m surrounded by wild and vast beauty. Nature’s repetitions inspire me. I can look anywhere and see them. I’ve got five acres on the lake and I look out 50 miles, but I could walk you up my road and within five minutes show you a repetition of form. There are patterns in the rocks, clouds and glaciers. I can walk up to a viewpoint, and every morning on that walk I’ll see things that help me create.

Q. What are today’s customers looking for in home décor?

Catherine: My customers want quality and luxury, whether that’s dyed fur or hand-knitted travel blankets. These are all made by artisans. Although there are trends, I think that people today want comfort, practicality and uniqueness. For example, a custo-mer who buys a porcupine loop throw will find it practical because it lasts so long, but it’s also spectacular.

Q. What’s coming up for you that has you excited?

Catherine: There’s a new texture that I’m doing now called Logjam, and that’s going to be for January.

www.catherineregehr.com

Shelley Black’s career has spanned a unique range of editorial and corporate roles with Flare, Maclean’s and BMO Financial Group. She enjoys writing about all forms of design, travel and food.

 

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