My Palace in New York - Sophie Collé
“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences – wherever you happened to be”
How’s everyone holding up? Are you fighting the allergies one tissue at a time now that we’re fully in spring? I really do feel like those LiveJournal authors when writing intros like this but things have been good! I’m excited to show you what I have planned in store for this project, maybe more interesting pieces, maybe I’ll take a little summer break, you never know!
I started My Palace in Dallas during the height of the pandemic, and it was born from pure curiosity: I want to know, I want to see, and, most importantly, I want to document what the people around me have become after these unprecedented years. They can be artists or comedians, or they can also be the people you meet on the street. So, what is it that they do? This project and this spin-off to other cities delve into their stories and, as the name suggests, explore their palace across the nation.
Allow me to introduce you to Sophie Collé. As a long-time fan, I never thought one day I would be sitting in her colorful sun-lit apartment, laughing and talking over her signature tables and extensive collection of unique furniture pieces. Fun story, her pieces actually made a cameo in the article with Garett and Anna long before we started talking! We talked about her journey, growth from previous experiences, and how she made her space to reflect on who she is and make something beautiful amidst the chaos we call life and self-owned business.
Hello Sophie, apologies if I’m nervous but I’ve been a very long-time fan, and sitting in front of you feels very surreal right now! Before I bomb you with questions, would you like to tell people a bit about yourself? Who are you and what is it that you do?
I am Sophie Collé, a multidisciplinary designer best known for my furniture. However, my focus spans from objects to interiors and environments. I have renovated a lot in my own space and hope my efforts will soon translate into other people’s spaces.
From being in the spotlight in 2020, creating amazing tables, to now expanding, reevaluating your work, taking on custom works, and engaging in interesting collaborations like Afterpay, let alone revamping the kitchen and the entire place, could you tell me what that journey was like for you and how you got to where you are now?
I’m from Maryland and grew up coming to New York during school breaks. My mother is an artist so she made sure we had cultural trips and that solidified my idea of coming to New York. Six years ago, I moved to the city and have worked in art museums and luxury residential design up until the pandemic. During COVID-19, I felt this calling and desire to work for a different clientele - much different than those under the high-end design firm at the time. I wanted to make accessible furniture for this new clientele.
I launched my studio in 2020 and built everything by hand which is a rollercoaster of a storytime all on its own. Now I’ve moved on from handmade to working with fabricators, which is crazy because I never envisioned my endeavor getting to a level where scaling up and outgrowing my own woodshop would be a possibility. My work is constantly inspired by art, the 80s, the environment around me, and movies - I’m a huge cinephile.
Like most creative journeys I started my business as a hobby. While working at the art museum the majority of my time was spent standing and talking to visitors, as boring as that aspect might be, you do get to see into people’s minds and observe how they interpret contemporary art. The other side of that coin is how pretentious things can feel and how much of these experiences are meant for a certain class of the population. Experiences like this sort of informed me and helped shape where I’m at now. I wanted to create furniture not for the sake of building it but for a demographic that may have a hard time affording or finding nice pieces. The sweet spot of people who had outgrown their Ikea stage but couldn’t check out Design within reach without blinking an eye.
As I get older, my objectives become trickier. In order to survive and pay bills, my prices go up, and you slowly have to box in my original clientele a little bit. I always try to have my hand in every pot, which is extremely ambitious and labor-intensive, but the collaboration with AfterPay/Hypebeast allows me to continue working on accessible projects like I started out doing.
Like many self-owned brands, mine started out as a sidequest during the pandemic, I was on unemployment because of being laid off and most job sites were shut down during the lockdown. The business started snowballing and by 2021 it became a real business for me. I was on the mentality that as long as there’s a customer I’ll keep on creating, but navigating through that alone with ecomm, website, custom work, and brand deals can be a little chaotic but I think that’s just how I operate.
You went through a rough patch in terms of business inventory when dealing with backlog orders as a one-person wood workshop. What was that period of time like for you?
It was truly enlightening. People really want to support independent artists, but I don’t think we have the privilege of being art patrons anymore. We’re all broke and under the hands of the oligarchy, so I fully understand wanting the pieces by your doorstep after paying, and you want it quickly. At 22 years old, unmedicated, going with the flow running on adrenaline and dopamine, I don’t think I did a decent job at setting expectations for them.
When you are young and have visibility, you want to say yes to every order and are deadly afraid of disappointing anyone. The unrealistic drive and the Hercules mentality led to me burning myself completely dry, to the point where I lost tons of weight because every waking hour I was working in my woodshop. I was super grateful for the massive amount of support, but in hindsight, I wasn’t charging enough even though I aimed to have an accessible price point as my main mission. Like how many small design agencies, you take on too many orders, don’t quote yourself enough, you run out of materials and you have to take on another order just to be able to afford more materials or pay off the last batch. Maybe the industry needs to change and I started out looking at the wrong place since that’s how my old boss operates.
I did not know how to set expectations for my customers and now I feel like I’ve turned that around - I do not take on new commissions or work unless I am 100% sure I can handle it physically and mentally. I took down the ecomm section from my website because I needed to recalibrate and finish the back orders that were piling up.
A smart decision I made - as much as financially it was damaging - was paying my customers back. I also learned that people would rather have a refund versus wait for the work to be completed, which to me it felt like they didn’t want my work that badly, which is totally fine but I didn’t walk into my workshop for the sake of making things that will ultimately just end up in a landfill. I was happier refunding them versus the possibility of my furniture living on a train-cycle. There were people who decided to wait, telling me to take all the time in the world, coming back to the art patronage I mentioned earlier, allowing the artist to live and breathe. Obviously that doesn’t mean a table should take a whole year and a half to compete, there needs to be a middle ground so I was happy to issue the refund and just as grateful to work completing the pieces for those who were willing to extend their patience towards me.
Coming from an art and museum background, I studied artists who spent five years on a painting. The museum I worked in waited that long to acquire the painting, and that is a norm in art, but not furniture. Furniture is commercial, not always art-based and it’s hard to find the sweet spot between timely delivery and taking my time to create what I considered art, when for the population it will always be just a table. I didn’t find the middle ground between reality and my visions and got burned to a crisp, but now I feel like I’m slowly finding my groove and developing a business pace that works best for my customers and me.
As you re-calibrate your business model and enter a new stage - either through commission or new collab projects like revamping the kitchen with Home Depot - was there any growing pain during the process?
Once you’re known for something it can be really hard for people to get on board with letting you evolve and grow. The resistance at times can come from me as well, there will be times when I was hesitant to use fewer colors in my pieces because I wasn’t sure how the world would react to a different type of Sophie Collé.
People were viscerally upset when I got rid of the pink kitchen. But you’ve got to move on, because I did, and I’m the one that had to wake up and live in it every day. My house will never be finished, I’m actually fearful of the day when I actually own property because I will never be able to make final decisions. I love renting because you can’t do anything too set in stone, it is exactly because nothing is permanent, when you have your fun you have the autonomy to progress and move on to the next thing with your space. I think all designers and artists alike want to progress as humans, you're always aiming to do the next thing so the last thing I want is to be stagnant and stuck in the same stage for longer than I need to.
To your question, the growing pain and navigating through it will be a big focus for me this year. All of last year, I was doing more collaborations and highly specialized projects that will be difficult for me to replicate over direct-to-consumer works. In between projects, I had no time to put out a collection that was as timeless as my previous pieces.
As I concluded the life cycle of the last three years and was ready for something new, I had a huge feeling of serenity honestly. I outgrew my space, outgrew my workshop, and had to shut down my woodshop. Surprisingly I cried multiple times over shutting down the woodshop, but I was so over it at the end yet the affinity I had with the space and the work involved was so strong. The higher aspiration I have for myself will never come to life if I lock myself in a small room doing the same exact work over and over, even if that is what people want I have to give myself space to evolve. Everything I’ve ever made in my life happened in that tiny room, it was emotional to end it but I feel like I’m finally ready to outgrow it, despite all its good and bad.
I wouldn’t say there wasn’t any growing pain, to me, it almost felt like graduating college again as I closed the chapter on this four-year venture. Now, I’m starting on another whole new venture and whatever comes my way I know I am much better equipped to meet them head on than how I was 4 years ago.
From my observation, your work has been popping up on the feeds once more and featured heavily in interior content creation. While sustainability is part of your core value, what do you think about your work being part of a trend or aesthetic that rotates so fast and has such a short life cycle?
All press is good press, but I believe it’s important that I continue to aim to create a collection that can transcend and be as timeless as possible. To this day I still don’t have a permanent collection on my website because I know I’m constantly growing and I want to challenge my clientele as much as I want to challenge myself.
However, many content creators and designers, myself included, document spaces and projects, just for the spaces to then be taken down and changed. It's a natural progression, as long as you are not being wasteful or overconsuming, I think it's normal.
The sweet spot with furniture, the splat tables as colorful and as statement pieces as they could be, they're tiny and could be tucked away. I think knowing my design style and what my house used to be some are shocked by how white my house actually is.
Everything I did to the house has always been an experiment, the pink kitchen and gallery wall were simply transformed into pink, and all I did was put it in pink drag and take the drag off. I knew there would be a moment in time when I got sick of the aesthetic and wanted to make sure I wouldn’t throw away everything I own when that moment came.
Maximalist trends are very consumer-heavy and can be very wasteful, but you don’t have to spend a lot of money or buy specific pieces to create that huge impact for the aesthetic you’re looking for whether the internet influences it or it’s your end goal.
For my own space and for my clients I encourage living with the decisions you made, there are always sustainable ways to get rid of the pieces that no longer serve you and I heavily encourage that as well. A lot of my previous dishware goes to my best friend who lives down the street. He never buys anything but he inherited everything that I’ve moved on from. You may be surprised by how different people’s tastes are and they just might be the right next destination for your old pieces.
With my furniture too, I don’t want to make something that people would one day wake up thinking “Oh my god what have I done”. I wouldn’t go back and work on old pieces but I often tell my clients if they refinish the tables or commissioned pieces to fit their new identity, go for it, as long as it helps stop them from ending up in a landfill, why not?
Like how you’d be curious about their letterbox account when you meet a film fanatic, can you tell me what your media outlet is and where you usually get your inspiration from?
I am still of the mindset that everything good that has ever been made happened thirty or a hundred years ago, hence, I don’t read as much as I like to but all of my books are my best inspiration and references. I discovered Memphis Milano through books instead of the internet, it had a big resurgence online in 2018, but as a college kid in deep Virginia, media consumption looks very different than what it is now. Being in a small town that wasn’t that in touch with mass media or kept up enough, the art and architecture library became my huge source of inspiration. The library was where I crossed paths with Michael Graves and Ettore Sottsass, all the greats. Working in an art museum, having to do research on artists, and getting in touch with the furniture world at the time led me to learn about the Venice Biennale in the 80s, which pointed me toward Aldo Rossi and many other great architects.
Movies are a big deal for me. Toys (1992) is one of my favorite movies. It’s also a great allegory of our current society, I highly recommend you watch it sometime. More than anything, the set design has informed a lot of my work. I saw the movie when I was six, rediscovered it at nineteen, and made it my blueprint.
It’s hard, how much do you consume before you start creating? I always try to wear my references and inspiration on my sleeves. Doing a disservice to my work and other’s work that inspired me by claiming it’s completely original soup to nuts is the last thing I want. Whenever I introduce a piece of work you’ll often hear “ This chair is specifically inspired by Peter Shire”, or “This totem that’s part of my table is inspired by what Sottsass saw from his time in India”. All of the best art is historical and I think all of my best works are referential and nostalgic, and at the end of the day, all the books and movies I absorb from my lifetime will continue to be my favorite source of inspiration.
I am always in awe at how many people made a pivotal decision and dived into their passion during and continued after the pandemic. What did you do to stay centered and sane? Have any of those new habits carried over now that things are back to normal?
I left and quarantined with my parents in Maryland when it broke out because she was so freaked out it was easier staying together. If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have started building furniture at all. People had this impression about me that I’ve been building since college because I went to a design school, the truth is, I started building furniture because I had a backyard to work in where I bought my first table saw.
If it wasn’t for me being locked down in the suburbs I would’ve never even started this endeavor. By the time I came back to New York, I was already fully immersed in the project and this was all I could focus on, which in its own chaotic way kept me sane.
As you can see it obviously carried over and now is what I do full time.
Having spent some time living here finding your own identity and growing along with it, what do you think of this city?
Comparison is the thief of joy, here, you often feel like you’re not doing enough in your own industry. There’s always someone doing a pop-up, getting a grant, putting together an exhibition. It’s hard but I would not want to be anywhere else.
I probably would be happy living somewhere else with a backyard and much cheaper rent, but deep down, slow living is not meant for me, as much as I joke about wanting to retire and be on a yacht somewhere.
New York makes you aspirational. Everyone that lives here isn’t paying so much rent because you have to, but because you want to be here, and I am one of them. I just paid to get a New York license plate and made my custom kitchen, I am not leaving anytime soon. * laughs
First of all, I can’t imagine actually sitting in this room, and as I look around, I can see a lot of your taste in a tangible form! I can’t even begin picking out a favorite one so now the hard part is, what would you say is your favorite possession?
Honestly, everything I own is a prized possession, as I am really careful and considerate about how I “curate” my space. Everything has a story or meaning. One of my all-time favorite pieces is my Maria Sanchez limited edition ashtrays, from the Memphis Milano group. That is one of the most expensive things I’ve bought, as I normally wait for super bargains whether that be via discount sales or Facebook marketplace etc. But that ashtray is a huge piece of history and I couldn’t pass it up.
My other top favorite piece is my 7-foot tall column that stands in my living room and is from a random guy in Jersey. When I went to pick it up, I drove an hour in the wrong direction so he took pity on me and drove it to me the very next day, Good thing because it definitely would not have fit in my car.
And we are almost at the bottom of my list of Qs for today! I have one more before wrapping it up! For those who are interested in getting into this business or starting something of their own like you did. What suggestions or advice would you like to give them or is there anything you wish you’d known sooner?
Have money. I brought this up during my recent lecture on entrepreneurship at FIT, and talking to the students helped me put it into context. Do not start a venture unless you have savings. If that means you will be working a full-time or part-time job and placing your project as a side hustle, so be it. There is nothing more stifling to your creativity than being broke.
I’ve had many people tell me that working full time on my passion project is so inspiring, but there is genuinely nothing worse than feeling like you have zero backup plan. Running a business is so isolating, having a part-time job and having a co-worker have been the most empowering and fun times of my career. Knowing you have a way to pay your phone bill today and allowing yourself to go home and have creative thoughts popping up because you’re not stressed out about making that $50 for paint.
That’s the sad part, unless you have generational wealth, you have to make money, that’s the only way you can survive alongside your business. Looking back I would’ve stayed at my luxury interior design job a little bit longer, had I known my passion project would blow up and have a steady clientele. I could’ve easily juggled both jobs at the same time, but I was twenty-two and immature. It’s fine to admit there were things I would love to change, everything else comes after money, you can always network and go viral sometime in the future but without money, your hands are forever tied.
To wrap this interview up, I am also curious personally: What’s on the horizon for you? Are there any “Big things coming” in the works for y’all? What would you like the world (whichever random soul stumbled upon this article) to know about?
I just released a wallpaper line! The whole project felt surreal now that I’m talking about it again because I completed the design months ago, but for those who enjoyed my playful and nostalgic approach, they’ll be very happy. This is my first wallpaper line, and I’m excited to ride the momentum and do more wall element designs this year.
Currently, I am planning on relaunching my Ecom site with just a handful of pieces, hopefully near April. A few sister pieces that will take on a whole new look are in the works, and I am pushing myself to launch them in early summer. As I mentioned with all the projects, I’m giving myself grace; if it happens, it happens, but I work best with aggressive deadlines, so we shall see!
An exhibition I’m a part of is now on view at Lyle Gallery! I will be putting out a one-of-one piece that I will never produce ever again. I felt really aligned with the prompt they gave us, so I’m pretty excited for you guys to see it!
James Kung : https://www.instagram.com/j_kung/
Sophie Collé: https://www.instagram.com/_sophiecolle/
In frame: Sophie Collé
Photographer: James Kung
Interviewed by: James Kung
Location: Brooklyn, New York
