sifr 2011 : voyeur home videos

A little different from the holistic design video we posted earlier but in a similar light. We're taking more video footage about our process, our day to day on trips, insights into spots we checked out while traveling, peaks into factories and offices we visit. On our HK trip we figured that we've been having such a great time these last 2 years it would be selfish to not share it with the people that make what we do everyday possible.

In this video we are kicking starting our second day in Hong Kong. The day preluding this one was an action packed 23hours of work, indulgent food and smooth drinks; unfortunately we don't have much documentation of that besides a couple of photographs. We're about to go upstairs and finish some tech packs and then check out what Sham Sui Po has to offer, hopefully we will find a worthy fabric to sample with and use for production. We have a few more videos from HK covering the sample room and our thoughts of Sham Sui Po, stay tuned!

We are planning to return late May, so if you guys have any suggestions on places to go please let us know. We're up for anything, private kitchens to local noodle joints to beautiful nature spots. Share your secrets with us!

We'd also like to thank Alessandro Schuelli and Fasil Alemante for their continued support and advice regarding our growth! Their words and actions have helped us shape the company into what it is today.



Sincerely,
sifr

Travel: Door Obsession

All pictures below are doors (except the shutters) I purchased on my travels to Lyon & Paris. The procurement of each door told a different story, some were hard to believe while others droned on with very much wind. I will say however that each story, although hard to hear at times in that terrible Franco-English accent did leave me fully entertained. My favorite story came from a young french couple, the husband came from an old parisian family while the wife had moved to Paris from Bordeaux in the early 80s to study at Sorbonne. The story left me rather unsatisfied and prompted further inquiry that could have lasted for hours if not days (Part of me very much enthralled by the movement of her lips and her poise, even the way she touched the stem of her glass to take in a stream of velvet (C. Haut Brion) got my seat tight). Much of the story fanned out into the building's history and how door came to be prior to the construction of the building in the mid 1850's during Haussmann's urban planning of the city. The family's struggle during the revolution and how his great great grandfather had hidden some of their assets with relatives in an estate just outside of Ghent... Now that I think of it perhaps it wasn't the story at all, but just the idea of her backdoor. With all that said, the cultural significance of a door had not sat with me till I had embarked on this recent trip to France. The doors that I find myself entering most of the time are either glass panes with no depth or consumer fabricated objects that only sit with the interior designer's vision of the space. Up until recently there have been very few doors that I've entered that could stand alone or carry a building's facade. As time continues I can only hope that the craft doors and their entryway facades that join them are not forgotten. Although one may say the result of such aesthetics is a society's opulence and fat, a result of human greed, the idea of looking good, the idea of Versaille, something that sits with vanity and not reality. I say, "If you can, let go of the current reality go on and craft your own."

Craft one with amazing doors!



































The post above is fictitious.

Travel: Urban Decay

Even before an object is completed or a building is built it has already slipped into a state of decay. Some of the photos below examine objects in different states of deterioration. I was quite fixated on certain air conditioning units in some of the older subway lines in Tokyo. The cream with a few drops of coffee color, the scratches and bumps, the consistency between the intake and output grates, the stainless steel skirting providing a great aesthetic accent as well as a protective design feature, and their names in the top right hand corner; "FCU-2-10".

Travel: A Glimmer of Tokyo

This last trip to Tokyo trip I brought two cameras, an Olympus EP-1 and a Horizon Perfekt. Despite having two cameras I did not take that many photographs. I keep arguing in my mind about the relevance of capturing all the details of my trip and what the significance of 1000 digital images will be after the trip is over. The whole argument of ,"being in the moment versus capturing the moment", has been bothering me. Regardless of what I am thinking in my head I will still bring a camera on every trip I embark on, however the usage and depth of thought in documenting will vary depending on which side of the argument is louder.

The basis of this last trip was to use an existing ticket that was purchased but had to be rescheduled due to unforeseen personal circumstances (injured my knee playing football). To sum up my trip: met two amazing fabric contacts, I partied with an UK artist doing a gig there, met some unexpected people from Tokyo and out of town, ran into 2 sets of friends from Singapore unplanned, one of the sets I travelled to visit some architectural sites with, discovered an amazing cul de sac of bars, and found my future residences in Tokyo. All in all a pretty damn good weekend +2.

A small set of photos that captured a nice tiny slice of my trip. (No party photos unfortunately, if anyone wants to donate a compact hotshoe flash, please leave info in the comments.)

If you get anything at all out of this post, the next time you are in Tokyo go to Nakameguro and check out Golden Gai in Shinjuku.


Probably my last time using the Narita Express due to the advent of the new Haneda airport which is closer to the city.


I hope that sooner rather than later I will be using their fabrics, I touched this 60s supima dungaree, the handfeel is out of this world.

Meeting with the bigboss since the whole team was at Premier Vision. It was an interesting, a lost in translation moment but we got along just fine in the end.


I couldn't believe that this is their fabric showroom in Tokyo, it looked more like an art gallery.





If you love football, this is a must go. (Weston Corp you guys are still my number one, but if there's any other city you can do something better than KAMO it's Singapore.)

Prayers



Mountain Research, Naval Research, Research Research!



Cowbooks is my favorite shop in the whole world and I don't know why.












I can't imagine how Nakameguro looks in the spring.


This is a beautiful, need to get one of these for home.




You are mine SS11

Spiral is amazing, a wide spectrum of products highly curated. Furniture to fragrances.







MON MON MON MON



Would just like to throw a heads up to all our readers that are still with us after the dearth of posts on this blog. We will be porting the blog over to a wordpress format! Nothing crazy, getting a few more guest bloggers on board and going to streamline the design of the blog into something simple and a little more organized.

Leave your name and email in the comments and we'll tell you how you can get a free sifr item if you live in Singapore.

Happy Holidays,
sifr

Travel: Mustang Pt.2

The photos below are from the second installment of my 14 day hike through Mustang, Nepal. Truth be told I did not hike for all 14 days of the journey. I was on foot for the first 7 days to Lo Manthang, during the return I split the time between horseback and foot. I did not commit to hiking powerfully for a full 14 days, if I did, maybe I would feel like a true outdoors man (Davy Crockett concept, a huge influence in my own life, I must have watched 'Davy Crocket, King of the Wild Frontier' over 100 times as a child). Riding Nepalese style on a horse through the mountains was the main reason for passing up foot travel, the feeling of being a real cowboy. Although I did not wrangle or herd any cattle, I was able to traverse terrains that were reminiscent from scenes in an Italo-Western. In another reality we could have starred in a neu-Nepalese Western...

I rode in the company of: a master South Asian outdoorsman whom was the leader of the trek, a restoration expert responsible for keeping a lot of the ancient monasteries intact throughout Mustang and the Himalayas, a high-Lama that ran a school in Pohkara, 3 children from Mustang that attended the Lama's school in Pokhara that were on their way back to visit their families, and last but not least a great support team of sherpas.

The diverse group made for a trip filled with a range of different experiences and interactions on a daily basis. On any given day we'd wake up as the sun rose eat a relatively light breakfast that was usually made up of oatmeal &/or eggs, sausages and toast. We'd discuss the path we'd take, rest stops, points of interest, lunch break and our next camp location. An average day encompassed close to 8 hours of hiking up and down the surrounding landscape. Some of my most treasured experiences on the trip was times spent in restoration sites of Buddhist temples. Looking at frescos that dated centuries if not millennia humbles your existence in time. Seeing the restoration work on some of these massive frescos some spanning several meters wide and tall was amazing, with each brush stroke life was being breathed back into the space.

An unforgettable experience, I will most definitely return in the near future.