A Houston interior designer and furniture artist who has made waves on the home front and dipped his toe into commercial waters is the creator of one of the most unusual new furnishings of a Houston facility – a one-of-a-kind art bed.
The bed, with canvas upholstery painted by children whose lives have been touched by cancer, is a featured attraction of the ninth annual Making a Mark art exhibit in the Feigin Center at Texas Children’s Hospital. It is among more than 200 works of art by children from throughout the United States and around the world in the collection.
The exhibit, now on display at the hospital, will be at Dillard’s on Post Oak Sept. 27 to Nov. 1 and at the Children’s Museum in Austin Jan. 10 to March 6, 2000. The bed, donated to the hospital, may be auctioned off after the exhibit.
Coincidentally, a recently completed commercial decorating job by the bed’s designer, Kelly Gale Amen, ASID, of K.G.A., also includes a focus on children. A creatively decorated “children’s office” is part of the interior design in The Holman Law Firm, P.C., a boutique appellate firm in downtown Houston’s Lyric Center.
“Children are everyone’s dream and hope,” Amen says.
Amen was named 1998 Designer of the Year by Traditional Homes magazine and is featured in a new book “Traditional Home Signature Style” (Meredith Books, $39.95), put out by the magazine. The book was launched in Houston earlier this month at an American Society of Interior Designers event and will be available exclusively in Houston at Saks Fifth Avenue in the Galleria through the end of September.
BED WITH A HEART
The art bed evolved from a request from fund raisers for Texas Children’s Hospital for the donation of one of Amen’s bronze tables.
“The concept just grew and grew,” Amen says.
The interior designer is known for the bronze, aluminum and iron furniture, which he has made in Alabama. He designed the benches of Texas fossil stone on cast bronze bases at the Museum of Natural Science.
However, he’s a cancer survivor himself, and he immediately decided that metal or stone should not be the medium for his contribution to Texas Children’s Hospital.
“People who have had cancer have been poked and hurt. They don’t want to touch things that are hard,” he says. “I upped the ante and said I’d do a bed with a wood core and layers and layers of padding. It will have a soft texture and be a warm and comforting place for the children.”
In a tactile sense, the bed is probably more closely related to Amen’s luxurious pillows (carried by Nancy Little John’s Fine Art) than to his metal furniture.
The bed’s reversible mattress is upholstered in contrasting fabrics. One side is a velour. The other is canvas, on which the children painted their original designs in water-based paints.
Each child worked with a hospital volunteer in painting the canvas, which Amen divided into about 12-inch areas.
LAW OFFICE MAGIC
Among the volunteers who helped children paint the bed was David Holman, president of the Holman Law Firm, P.C., Amen’s first commercial client.
Earlier, Amen had been the interior designer for the home of one of the four associates in the firm, Helen Cassidy.
When the firm moved to the Lyric center last October, it was decided that the individuality of each associate could be reflected in its décor, and Cassidy enlisted Amen to help with her office.
Holman was so impressed with the interior designer and his work that he asked for Amen’s assistance with the lobby, the reception area, conference room and, eventually, the hallways and all the other offices. By the beginning of this year, Amen had completed work on the entire suite – including the “children’s office.”
“Once we started, we didn’t do it halfway,” Holman says. “We all spend so much time at work that we think it’s important to have a good environment. It’s one of the most important things for employee productivity. And everybody who comes in says, “This is the prettiest law office I’ve ever seen.”
Holman says his daughter Chelsea, 10, introduced the idea of having a special place for employees’ children and visiting youngsters when she asked, “Dad, where’s my office?”
“We all have kids, and sometimes they like to come to work on a Saturday or when they’re out of school, so we made a room for them,” Holman says. “Our neighbors on the floor have even brought their children over.”
The room includes a TV and VCR, big pillows and its most dramatic feature – walls covered by chalkboard on which Amen had an artist paint the outline of the Houston streetscape viewed from the building. The children can draw in details, as they like.
ECLECTIC AND MODERN
The basic look of the entire office is eclectic and modern. The lobby and reception areas, with black marble floors and wall, include one of Amen’s Texas fossil stone benches and a heavy aluminum tea table he designed, plus gray leather couches Holman had already purchased.
The conference room presented the biggest challenge, according to Holman.
“I wanted to have a rugged Western look but to be modern for the new millennium,” he says.
Amen’s solution was to have Texas five-pointed stars and gold braid included in a design painted on the firm’s previously purchased conference table, sealed by seven layers of polyethylene. The walls are sponge-painted gray, with a faux leather texture.
“The table is almost indestructible,” Holman says. “You can spill things on it, which is what I wanted.”
It was important to him, says Holman, to be able to collaborate with Amen in the interior design decisions, rather than just turn the job over to him.
“I would tell him what my ideas were, and he would come up with ideas. He was just a wonderful guy to work with,” Holman says.
At one point during the process, Holman decided to play a joke on Amen by hanging on a wall an old velvet Elvis painting he happened to have.
“He had been so meticulous about everything that I expected him to be horrified,” Holman recalls. “Instead, he said, ‘That’s fabulous!’ And we still have it up, in a hall, with some other Elvis mementos around it. We’re probably the only law office in town with an Elvis shrine.”
Before establishing his office in the Lyric Center, Holman previously had worked in the building, which numbers several law practices among its tenants.
“I liked the open-air garage and the piano in the lobby,” he says. “The building itself and the way we’ve done our own offices help make me look forward to coming to work.”
This article, by Thora Qaddumi, appeared in the Houston Business Journal on Sept. 24, 1999.
