Western Living Magazine
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Recipe: Traditional Taiwanese Chow Mein (Gu Zao Wei Chao Mian)
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Black Creek’s Sauna Retreat Is the Ultimate Rural Escape
Local Getaway Idea: Kingfisher’s Healing Caves Redefine Wellness and Escape
The Secret Ingredient to Creating the Perfect Kitchen: Bosch
Everything You Need to Know About the New Livingspace Outdoor Store
New and Noteworthy: 11 Homeware Picks to Refresh Your Space in 2025
Designers of the Year Frequently Asked Questions
Enter Western Living’s 2025 Designers of the Year Awards
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Our judges agreed that the small batch of home designs we received from Calgary-based Ryan Scarff showed an immense amount of promise. “He’s embracing the outside as a room,” noticed judge Jeremy Sturgess. “It’s early on in his career, but this is encouraging.” His work is elegant and clearly conceived, and we loved his plans for harmonious modernist homes. And, as judge Neil Minuk said, we’re confident we’ll be hearing more from him. “The number of projects awaiting completion and the variation of those projects,” said Minuk, “is quite amazing.”
It’s been just four years since Ines Hanl launched her Victoria-based design business, The Sky Is the Limit, yet her work shows a maturity that belies the youth of her practice. From a jewel-toned traditional downtown home to a cool concrete-and-wood waterfront retreat, Hanl’s designs demonstrate just how broad a range of styles she can successfully execute—consistent only in what judge Kelly Deck calls an “adventurous use of materials and colour, resulting in a playful series of interiors.”
Vancouver native Christian Woo’s elegant new line of furniture, Covert, has that deceptively clean aesthetic that belies a rigorous attention to detail—so coveted by local designers. Woo launched his line at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York in 2010. “To achieve simplicity, as Christian has,” notes Martha Sturdy, “requires perfect design. You cannot hide mistakes.”
Nathan Lee and Trevor Coghill take a magpie approach to industrial design, incorporating reclaimed materials into products as diverse as iPod cases moulded from old cassettes and maps refashioned as hanging mobiles. Their latest project: a think piece called Home Phone, which retools the payphone cabinet as a micro-shelter for the homeless, folding the marginal—at least theoretically—back into larger society.
Ontario-born, Vancouver-based jewellery designer Justine Brooks uses flora and fauna as the base for her organic, arresting pieces. Twigs, pine cones, barnacle-laden mussel shells and anchovy fish are cast in silver and gold, giving them a gothic quality. Brooks was praised by judge Catherine Regehr for using West Coast natural elements in her work. “I love this idea!” she said.
Along with Mat Turner of Lanefab Design/Build, Bryn Davidson created Vancouver’s first laneway house—a compact, smartly designed 710-square-foot residence that’s built with sustainability at the forefront. It represents the kind of thinking that led judge Thomas Mueller to comment, “I expect we’ll hear a lot more from Davidson in the future.”
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