Ask Alex Proba how she ends up making things she has never made before, swimming pools, refrigerator collaborations, and now a line of dog beds, and she gives you a sentence that doubles as a design philosophy: “I pick projects that I don’t know how to do, because challenges lead me to new ideas.” That instinct explains the murals for Dropbox, the tables with Nortstudio, the dream pools she rendered until a client finally said yes. It also explains why her German Shepherd mix, Sam, is not a charming footnote to her career but a genuine part of how she works. ProbaPaws, her new collection of pet beds and accessories, is what happens when a designer who refuses flat planes turns her attention to the animal asleep in her studio.
A style you can recognize across a room
An Alex Proba creation is almost impossible to mistake for anyone else’s. Her signature mix of sensuously twisting petal forms, squiggles, and splotches turns up on rugs, furniture, posters, candles, pillows, and blankets, bringing a welcoming jolt to even the dullest room. The throughline in her work is a refusal of the expected. “There’s never a perfectly flat plane in my work,” she says. “It’s always slightly off, which gives it character. I like creating unexpected moments, like when you touch something that looks hard, but it’s soft.”
Like most ventures, hers began modestly. In 2013 she launched her namesake brands, StudioProba and ProbaHome, with a self-imposed challenge called “A Poster A Day,” each design made in 30 minutes or less. That passion project became a springboard to mural commissions from Dropbox, Rag and Bone, and Sweetgreen, and from there to collaborations with Bower and Samsung. The multidisciplinary sprawl is the point, not an accident. “Everything for me is a big puddle that contains everything,” she says. People reach for the Memphis Group when they describe her palette, but she points elsewhere: “I’d probably compare my aesthetic more to that of Matisse than Memphis, in that I’m drawn to organic forms rather than geometric, rigid shapes.”
Where the work actually comes from
Proba is clear that her references are not other designers. They are the outdoors and her own childhood. Her grandmother, a florist who left Poland for Germany during the political turmoil of the 1980s, had to close her flower shop at 40 but kept her love of plants, and Proba spent her free time in the garden with her. “A lot of my patterns and even pairings of colors, like bright pops of color set off by muted ones, come from memories of that time,” she says.
That habit of abstracting the everyday is where Sam enters the creative process. “Now, if I notice a cool texture on a walk with my pup Sam, I take a photo for reference,” she says. “It’s a constant process of abstracting the everyday.” Sam, whose litter was found in a box in Houston, is a water dog who also loves the snow, which suits the studio’s home base of Forest Park in Portland, a state park threaded with hiking routes. He is a studio dog, too, and apparently a natural performer. While she was shooting the Samsung video, “he came up behind me and pantomimed as if he knew he needed to act ‘involved’ for the camera.”
The dog line as a design problem
ProbaPaws is the designer-pet-product trend done from the inside: rather than slapping a print on a generic dog bed, Proba is applying her actual design language, the akimbo forms, the off-kilter planes, to objects pets use. And true to form, she is using it to pick a fight with a convention nobody else questions. Her additional line of bandanas, she says, will not be triangular. “I think always having them triangular is a missed opportunity.” It is a small thing, a dog kerchief, and it is exactly the kind of accepted norm she has spent a decade refusing to accept, the same impulse that made her ask what a table has to look like, or a pool.
What ties it all together is her comfort with not knowing the answer in advance. She talks about the dream pools the way she might talk about a new pet accessory: she wanted to make them before she knew how, discovered pool paint only came in a few colors, and had to improvise her way to something that changed with the light and the water. “I’m able to take risks precisely because it’s not lives I’m playing with, it’s just paint,” she says. “I can always go back and change it.” For a designer, that is the freedom the whole practice runs on, and Sam, photographed on a walk, cheesing for the camera in the studio, is woven right through it.
References
- Proba, Alex. StudioProba, studioproba.com.
- “Alex Proba Brings Nature Inside the Home in the Latest Samsung Bespoke Refrigerator Collaboration.” Samsung Newsroom, news.samsung.com.
- ProbaPaws. ProbaHome, probahome.com.
