Most design brands would tuck the dogs into a cute aside. At Cold Picnic, the dogs are the thesis. The studio behind those cult hand-tufted rugs and abstract textiles is run by two people who refused to draw a line between their life and their work, and once you understand that, the two rescue dogs asleep on the sample rugs stop being a charming detail and start looking like the whole point.
Phillip and Daisy, in-house
Cold Picnic’s co-founders and life partners, Phoebe Sung and Peter Buer, design everything, quilts, rugs, pillows, cloth napkins, wallpaper, out of a home studio that also contains their two young kids and two dogs, Phillip and Daisy. The two dogs could not be more different. “Phillip is sort of old and grumpy, but very good and gentle and well-behaved,” Sung says. “Daisy is our bad girl, very sweet and charming, but bad. She’s just crazy. We’ve been through three trainers! Still, she’s so loving. I love her.”
Phillip came first. When Sung and Buer got together, Sung already had two cats from a previous relationship, and the couple adopted a third together before bringing home three-year-old Phillip. One cat, Johnny, was not thrilled. “He’d never do anything, he was always very gentle, but you could tell he was upset just by the way he’d stare at us,” Sung recalls.
Those early Phillip years rearranged the couple’s whole life, in a way Sung now sees clearly. “In a way, Phillip really primed us for parenthood,” she says. “When we first got him, we didn’t leave him, ever. And if we did, we’d come back early because we were worried about him being lonely. We’d go to restaurants and sit outside into November, just so we could have him with us.”
The best kind of foster is a failed one
Daisy arrived a few years later as an attempt to “scratch the puppy itch,” and became what rescue people affectionately call a failed foster, the dog you meant to hand back and could not. “We wanted to foster a puppy just to get it out of our system, and then we decided to keep her,” Sung says. Daisy’s start was rough: her mother came from a feral colony and was so overwhelmed by life indoors, “always trying to climb up the curtains and escape,” that she never really taught the litter anything. Which may account for Daisy’s wildness, and also for something sweeter. Sung credits Daisy with keeping Phillip, now 14, far younger than his years. “He’s a lot younger than other 14-year-old dogs, and I think she’s why.”
Both dogs took to the couple’s children better than expected. Daisy, rough in her enthusiasm, visibly dials it down around babies. And Phillip, grumpy as he is, was into it from the start, “especially in the beginning when there was so much just sitting around, when I was nursing. I’d just sit in the same spot pretty much round the clock and he loved that.”
The values you can’t see in the photos
Here is where the dogs-as-philosophy idea pays off. The same refusal to cut corners that keeps this family under one roof shows up in how the products are made, and it goes well beyond “eco-friendly” as a marketing word.
The blankets come from a small, family-run factory in New Jersey, woven from domestically sourced, recycled cotton yarn. Almost everything else (except the wallpaper) is made in India exclusively through GoodWeave-certified manufacturers, and that certification is worth understanding rather than skimming past. GoodWeave was founded in 1994 by Kailash Satyarthi, the children’s-rights activist who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, specifically to root out child, forced, and bonded labor in the rug trade, an industry where the abuse hides in home-based outsourced weaving that ordinary audits never reach. GoodWeave’s answer is unannounced inspections that follow production all the way down to those home workshops, plus a traceable numbered label on every rug. Sales of certified products have funded schooling for more than 44,000 children. So when Cold Picnic says “GoodWeave-certified,” it is not a vibe; it is a supply chain someone actually walked. The rugs are also made using 100 percent solar energy, the wallpaper printed with water-based latex inks, and the raw materials colored with eco-friendly dyes.
Living with beautiful things and shedding dogs
If you have ever hesitated to buy a nice rug because you own a dog, Cold Picnic is instructive, because they live the exact contradiction, gorgeous textiles plus two very furry animals, and they are honest that it is work. “It’s a never-ending battle,” Sung says of the dog hair. Back when they fulfilled orders from home, “we were just constantly lint-rolling everything, because the dogs would walk by and you could see the hair just flying off of them.”
The practical lesson embedded in that: with dogs, texture is your friend. Hand-tufted wool and flatweave rugs in busy, multi-color abstract patterns, exactly Cold Picnic’s signature, hide hair, dust, and the occasional muddy paw far better than a flat, pale, solid field would. A dog-proof home is not one without nice things. It is one where the nice things were chosen with a dog in mind.
They’d rather be home
The six of them, two adults, two kids, two dogs, now share an apartment in Ridgewood, where years of working from home meant they rode out the pandemic without the dramatic upheaval so many others faced. Before all that, the couple actually leased a separate studio and showroom and started renovating it, then walked away. “We realized that wasn’t what we wanted, even without the pandemic,” Sung says. They’d rather be home with the kids and the dogs, making the rugs and pillows and blankets. Which, given everything above, is not a lifestyle choice so much as the brand itself. And really, who could blame them?
References
- GoodWeave International. “The GoodWeave Label.” https://goodweave.org/about/goodweave-label/
- GoodWeave International. “Standard.” https://goodweave.org/proven-approach/standard/
- U.S. Department of Labor. “Example in Action: GoodWeave Certification Program.” https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/sourcingstrong/steps-to-a-social-compliance-system/step-7-independent-review/example-in-action-goodweave-certification-program
