Best Of Houzz 2014 Award

Erika Winters® Design of Los Angeles, CA Receives

Best Of Houzz 2014 Award

Annual Survey and Analysis of 16 Million Monthly Users

Reveals Top-Rated Building, Remodeling and Design Professionals

LOS ANGELES, CA, February 4, 2014 – Erika Winters® Design of Los Angeles, CA has been awarded “Best Of Houzz” by Houzz, the leading platform for home remodeling and design. The L.A. based design firm with over two decades of projects was chosen by the more than 16 million monthly users that comprise the Houzz community. 

The Best Of Houzz award is given in two categories: Customer Satisfaction and Design. Customer Satisfaction honors are determined by a variety of factors, including the number and quality of client reviews a professional received in 2013. Design award winners’ work was the most popular among the more than 16 million monthly users on Houzz, known as “Houzzers,” who saved more than 230 million professional images of home interiors and exteriors to their personal ideabooks via the Houzz site, iPad/iPhone app and Android app. Winners will receive a “Best Of Houzz 2014” badge on their profiles, showing the Houzz community their commitment to excellence. These badges help homeowners identify popular and top-rated home professionals in every metro area on Houzz.  

“Our home is the fingerprint of our heritage and consciousness”, Erika Winters®

“Houzz provides homeowners with the most comprehensive view of a home improvement professional on the Web, empowering them to find and hire the right professional to execute their vision,” said Liza Hausman, vice president of community for Houzz. “We’re delighted to recognize Erika Winters® Design among our “Best Of” professionals for design as judged by our community of homeowners and design enthusiasts who are actively remodeling and decorating their homes.”

With Houzz, homeowners can identify not only the top-rated professionals like Erika Winters® Design, but also those whose work matches their own aspirations for their home. Homeowners can also evaluate professionals by contacting them directly on the Houzz platform, asking questions about their work and reviewing their responses to questions from others in the Houzz community.

Follow Erika Winters® Design on Houzz http://www.houzz.com/pro/erika-winters/__public

About Erika Winters® Design

Design runs through Erika Winters´ veins. Her passion is to enrich everyday life with sophisticated, chic and timeless design. Her goal in interior and furnishings design is to create a calm and comfortable urbane feeling and environment. 

Erika's focus is on end-user comfort in her integral interior design. Attention to detail is crucial for Erika throughout the design and manufacturing process. 

Erika Winters´ path and work of two decades has drawn great media attention. She has been published in Architectural Digest Mexico, Habitat, Casa Viva, Mexico Design, Real Estate, Entre Muros of Reforma newspaper and Vogue Mexico. 

Erika Winters is extending her influence beyond Mexico City and is already beginning to make her mark in Los Angeles, California.

About House

Houzz is the leading platform for home remodeling and design, providing people with everything they need to improve their homes from start to finish - online or from a mobile device. From decorating a room to building a custom home, Houzz connects millions of homeowners, home design enthusiasts and home improvement professionals across the country and around the world. With the largest residential design database in the world and a vibrant community powered by social tools, Houzz is the easiest way for people to get the design inspiration, project advice, product information and professional reviews they need to help turn ideas into reality. For more information, visit www.houzz.com

                               This are some of images of our projects, more can be found in Houzz

Contadero Decor by Erika Winters® Design

 Rosaleda Decor by Erika Winters® Design

 Christmas Decor by Erika Winters® Design

Rejuvenation Project by Erika Winters® Design

Sunnynook Project by Erika Winters® Design

Rosaleda Decor by Erika Winters® Design

Tine Decor by Erika Winters® Design

Del Sol Decor by Erika Winters® Design

M-8442 Project by Erika Winters® Design

Enjoy,

Erika Winters

THE NON-TENDENCY IN INTERIOR DESIGN

M-8442 Project, Hollywood Hills Ca. by Erika Winters Design

For an interior design process to work well, you must properly appreciate the space, free it from all preconceived ideas, and start from zero in order to imagine the possible worlds that will inhabit it. That is why I like to remove every object from the space, leaving me alone with the floors, walls, windows, heights and light. In other words, I like to work from the ground up. In the same way, I think we must go back to square one in regards what we commonly call a tendency.

Escarlata Chair, Circa 1940 Resored by Erika Winters Design

Let’s go back to basics and remind ourselves that the term tendency, just like other powerful concepts in the world today, has become oversaturated by the desire for all kinds of products and exploited for commercial aims.

The Spanish language dictionary published by the Real Academia Española defines the term “tendencia” (tendency) to imagine other possible worlds: from the verb to tend, lean toward, it describes a propensity or inclination among men and things toward particular ends.

It is also the force by which a body inclines toward another or something else.

Another definition describes it as a religious, economic, political, artistic idea of a certain inclination. 

Thus we can see it as a state of a subject or object, an action that can be carried out, as well as a condition of the substance, of the circumstances, and even of ideas.

And finally it is understood as a concept that can clarify extremely complex thoughts.

That sets us off on a journey to somewhere, though not on our own. We are accompanied by numerous other people traveling toward a specific purpose.
For many, something that is “out there” holds the tension of the promise.

How is that tension structured? In my view, by an enormously powerful need that someone has found and that is seeking a solution.

I believe that the underlying basis of the tendency involves creating the illusory effect of arriving, but one never really reaches that endpoint because the power of the illusion is built on the idea of creating a promise of security, of approaching stability and harmony.

Nightingale Decor, Beverly Hills Ca. by Erika Winters Design

The opportunity of illusion benefits the professional orchestrators of tendency. They know how to perceive the path, the development, the key moments, the pitfalls, the recoveries and the imminent destruction. Their profits lie in knowing which way the wind will blow, which seeds will fall on fertile soil to sprout a new tendency.

That fertile soil is curious, unique to say the least, because although it’s a large group that is searching for safety, stability, harmony and even cultural integration;  

 Ultimately each member is looking for individuality, that instant of experience in which we are capable of feeling unique, unrepeatable, eternal.            

NeoPal Armchair, Circa 1760. Resored by Erika Winters Design

Experience thus becomes the instant of eternity rooted in the matter that exists and which is put into action because it can be perceived, reflected upon and, of course, felt.

NeoPal Armchair Process

Experimentation is essential to access the tendency, because among other things it is not an individual act but one that can be shared. In short, it’s a creative act of connectivity.

Taine Decor, Mexico City by Erika Winters Design

If we want to create meaning we must recognize the comparisons and contrasts in all our actions, even though that may take us down winding paths which we sometimes confuse with mere frivolity.

The issue is interesting especially because it’s a game. There is not “NON-TENDENCY” precisely because that is a tendency.

Rejuvenation Project, Los Angeles Ca. by Erika Winters Design

For example, “vintage” is in fashion for various reasons, including the reconstruction of a series of tendencies that we left behind and that now, under the patina of distance, allow us to have a calmer understanding of materials, techniques, and tools that were discarded in favor of the “new.”

This is obviously until we exhaust the topic (only at a sensory level) of innovation, which is none other than finding a new application, a new solution to the process, materials, and techniques. Something that will continue happening as long as society exists.

Rejuvenation Project, Los Angeles Ca. by Erika Winters Design

So… I believe that there are no “non-tendencies” and that precisely what “there is” is the tendency to continue experimenting with a more handcrafted and interior design-oriented approach, perhaps applying elements that revive the workshop methods, the former techniques of working with materials and shapes which were abandoned due to  the overwhelming sense of mass production in the design world, not only integrating the function and quality of the assembly process, but the aesthetic factor too. 

Nowadays, this is all integrated as part of the mass production of the interior design style.

Rosaleda Decor, Mexico City by Erika Winters Design

This test has now been passed and was achieved during the interesting aesthetic development of the 20^th century. This is because there was a demand for housing and therefore furniture in the post-war period.

For example, in the way Charles Eames introduces glass fiber. The workshop was in Santa Monica, CA, giving him opportunity to watch the surfers from time to time.

Charles Eames

White Eames Chair

Charles conceived a chair model based on the manufacturing process used for of surfboards. 

Contadero Decor, Mexico City by Erika Winters Design

New windows of opportunity are opened, in the world of the very highest-quality design and elegance that can only be achieved as a whole within a complete space based on mass-produced and their counterparts;that it is design that reformulates (from a potentially ecologist perspective) a more handcrafted design more in demand to work as a tailor who creates a unique article for he/her client, possibly unrepeatable due to the quality and type of objects, materials, restoration techniques and the aesthetic vision of the designer who assembles each space with a unique approach. 

Rosaleda Decor, Mexico City by Erika Winters Design

It could be proposed that the designer is working on the level of the contemporary artist, but also the future artisan, with the proposal of the cultured workshop. 

Rejuvenation Project, Los Angeles Ca. by Erika Winters Design

However I believe there is a tendency that both approaches are being applied and it is the integration of objects within the larger picture. 
It is no longer the eclectic entirety, where each object shone on its own merit in a combination that could be harmonious, but which defined itself by the combination of forms and various styles that also demanded its own attention to be paid by the user-spectator.

Nightingale Decor, Beverly Hills Ca. by Erika Winters Design

Today everything is integrated based on a complex combination of colors, forms and textures in which objects can be exaggerated or taken to unusual dimensions and volumes, but which conserve the harmony with the chaos, as two diametrically opposed styles.

In this same way I think that this means the “definitive” conquest and supremacy of materials and shapes, making the settings entirely moldable in their elegant exuberance.

Rejuvenation Project, Los Angeles Ca. by Erika Winters Design

Perhaps we are saying farewell to excesses in the most elegant way possible. Or perhaps the excesses are what refuse to die, in the knowledge that their days are numbered, but there is a point of equilibrium between ferocious consumerism and the planet’s capacity to offer so much exuberance to millions of people.
-Erika Winters- 

^{Fischler Cahir, circa 1890. Restored by Erika Winters Design.}

Enjoy
^{Erika Winters}