A Modern Maker: TrueModern’s Edgar Blazona
Author:Shoshana BergerWe are extremely excited to introduce the newest member of the California Home +Design blogging team, former ReadyMade Editor-in-Chief, Shoshana Berger.
Shoshana got her magazine chops at Wired in the pre-Facebook era, then went on to write for The New York Times, Spin, Salon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Business 2.0, Travel and Leisure, and Sunset. In 1999, she became an editorial director for Young & Rubicam’s Brand Futures division. She cofounded ReadyMade magazine in 2001 and served as its Editor-in-Chief for nine years. She is the coauthor of ReadyMade: How to Make Almost Everything (Crown, 2005), which was featured in the 2007 Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial. She has lectured and taught workshops at Stanford, the Dallas Museum of Art, IDEO, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and in Clay Felker’s magazine program at UC Berkeley.
We are thrilled to have Shoshana blogging for us weekly on californiahomedesign.com. Check in on Wednesdays for her chronicles of the California luxury DIY movement. Last week, she profiled Berkeley-based custom furniture-maker, Thomas Wold and this week she’s taking a look at Edgar Blazona of TrueModern.
The most successful people I know are college dropouts. I even wrote an article about it once. Add Edgar Blazona to that list.
When Blazona realized that he couldn’t afford to furnish his first apartment with modern classics, he taught himself how to make what he wanted. He showed the pieces to a local gallery, they offered to sell them, and he’s been running his own show ever since.
Another project presented itself in 2000, when Blazona found himself living in a Victorian house with a bunch of ill-fitting midcentury furnishings. “I decided to build a secondary structure, so my stuff would have a place to live. ” That resulted in the MD100, a 100-square-foot modular dwelling that presaged the modern prefab craze.
No one designing prefabs could hit the magic number of $100 per square-foot, so Blazona drafted and sold DIY instructions for the MD100 to bring costs down. (See the incredible time-lapse video of construction here.) Those plans are no longer available, but Blazona is considering working up a new design to offer to enterprising do-it-yourselfers on the hunt for a modish addition.
Blazona now runs his TrueModern line (for kids and adults) out of Oakland. In addition to dressers, beds, storage, and seating, he’ll soon be releasing 8-10 new sofa collections that can be custom built to any size and shipped within 4-6 weeks, no assembly required. “Modernism is not just IKEA,” he says. “And it doesn’t necessarily have to come from Italy, either.” In this age of immediacy, who can wait?
Deal Alert: Blazona announces warehouse sales on his website, offering 30-75% discounts every 3-6 months.
