The Design District

Posted By Rachel DeSchepper on 01/29/2008

I’m a blog junkie. I read way too many—DesignSponge, ecofabulous, Apartment Therapy and Treehugger to name just a few. In reality, there are about 35 blogs on my Google Reader that I cull through. (Perhaps there are more productive ways to spend my mornings?) In my defense, some of these are only updated once a week and others are from my friends. A few others (um, Overheard in New York) are purely guilty pleasures.

So, when I moved to Portland, I set out to find some great Portland-area design bloggers. I’ve found a few, and I wanted to introduce two of my favorites:

Pam Zsori blogs at housemartin (named after a bird—“a sweet little bird that flits around the nest making everything just so.”) She’s a floral designer, blogger and soon-to-be shop owner; her home and floral shop Ink&Peat is slated to open early summer. She blogs about local Portland design, plus national shops and design trends.

Pam started as a textile designer and did that for 15 years. She started floral design on her own about two years ago. Ink&Peat, she says, “is about living with nature as an inspiration. The overall aesthetic of the shop will be organic-modern. There will be modern home decor pieces mixed with vintage garden and re-use pieces and floral designs.”

I use her blog religiously to find great shops and products that some other blogs I read can’t quite dig out, and she includes local Portland finds as well. Plus, I adore looking at her incredible floral creations. Stay tuned here to find out when Ink&Peat opens, and hopefully we can get some floral arranging tips from Pam somewhere down the road.

My second favorite is Susan Lutjen O’Connor’s blog. She’s a jewelry designer who blogs at sulu-design. I first stumbled on her site when she was doing her Original Intent posts—meant to go back to her original intent of using the blog to market her earrings. She has such a great eye; she observes everything around her, snaps some great photographs, then uses those images to make earrings.

Susan just recently moved here from New York with her husband Barry. Her apartment is full of great found objects—and by “found” I mean literally found on the side of the road in the middle of Ohio or at the bottom of the junk pile at a rummage sale. Then, she and Barry put them all together into an incredibly well-designed place.

Although her blog doesn’t delve into the product and shop realm too much, I love looking at her photographs and I try to figure out where in Portland she was. And it’s so creatively inspiring to see what jewelry she makes based off photographs of her surroundings.

Find Sulu-Design earrings at Susan’s etsy shop, Tumbleweed, Moxie and Olio United here in Portland.

Please check out both these fabulous Portland ladies!