Chloë Greene: A Few Of My Favourite Things

My love for design was born from very touchable things: letterpress printing, writing letters, calligraphy, collecting shells, playing games, and pouring over magazines. 

I have an obsession with the tactile. As a kid I touched everything. I ran my hands along the walls and carved my name into the furniture, which had less to do with leaving a mark and more to do with the sensation of mark-making. 

Today, I have more control over my impulses, but my home is still a little museum of very touchable things.

Each of these items are an ode to my past, they represent inflection points on my creative path. They light me up, keep me curious, and ground me.

The Office Supplies

I grew up right next to an office supply store in San Francisco: The Brown Bag on Fillmore Street. 

I would get lost there for hours and burned all my allowance on cute little colourful pencils, erasers, stickers, notebooks. 

The Ray Gun Magazines

At 15, I went away to an all-girls boarding school. 

To comfort myself in a strange place, I plastered the walls from top to bottom with pages of Ray Gun magazine. 

I was like “what is this??!” 

It was there in that strange dorm room, in that strange state, far away from home, that I fell in love with design and the radical, expressive capacity of typography... which saved me from maddening homesickness.  

The Brutalist Concrete Squares

These were made by Love & Quarry, in Los Angeles. 

I am obsessed with how crude and raw and beautiful they are. 

These perfect brutalist objects remind me to look towards nature for colour, material, beauty, and innovation. 

The Composition Books

I write. 

I write my face off. 

I have stacks and stacks of composition books. 

You can buy them almost anywhere, they’re the perfect size and I love how utilitarian they are. 

I’ve moved around a lot and I’ve found consistency in these books. 

Being able to grab one in any drugstore has been a ritual and a comfort.

The Painted Creatures

My dad used to collect painted fish from his trips to Mexico. 

In that same spirit, I started bringing back these little painted creatures. 

They’re small but they bind me to memories of my trips, and I love how colourful and fun and un-precious they are. 

The Collaged Recipe Box

My grandfather was eclectic. 

He was a Broadway producer, a landscape architect, and he built an underground grotto completely out of shells in a secret room in his basement apartment in NYC. 

He made this box, fully collaged, filled with recipes from his friends and cut from magazines and newspapers. 

I love that he made this box and I love the old, beautiful newspapers and magazines he filled it with. 

He is a reminder to make things for myself and for no other reason at all. 

Creativity is an act, not an outcome. 

The Book And The Shell

These are two of the most satisfying patterns to me. 

I love them side by side. 

The book represents my daily life, my writing, my creative self; the shell represents the external world, nature, wonder. 

They both carry secrets, vessels for things unknown.