The Pacific Northwest Vibe

A feature story for Herman Miller's SEE magazine. It is about space design and how that reinforces and celebrates our local culture of the Pacific Northwest.

A bicycle commuter squats beside a storm-water drain. He’s on a highway bridge that spans a ravine. It is rush hour. A flash storm is drenching the roadway. The man’s arm is fully extended in the drain as he works to unclog it, presumably so others can travel safely across the flooding roadway. There is no shoulder, no room between him and the speeding cars, and I worry about his safety as my husband and I drive by.
This was 5:30 p.m. or thereabouts on May 2 on Southwest Barbur Boulevard in Portland, Oregon.

And this is the Pacific Northwest vibe.

Days later, I call my husband to tell him I just lost my pocketbook and need to cancel all our credit cards. He answers his phone as he walks briskly down Portland’s Southwest Second Avenue to meet the anonymous woman who grabbed my bag off the sidewalk and immediately set out to return it with all my money and credit cards, everything, intact.

This, too, is quintessentially Pacific Northwest, a place where thoughtfulness is pervasive. What recently deceased Aeron chair designer, Bill Stumpf, called civility in: "The Ice Palace That Melted Away."

“Civility is comfort, hidden goodness, social lubricant, personal worth, helping others, play – civility is the joy we take in human achievements and the compassion we show toward our all-to-human faults.”

This pervasive good will of the Pacific Northwest is especially evident in its independent bookstores. Here are two I explored for SEE.

Portland, Oregon, is a righteous, thoughtful place that even Jane Jacobs, one of the most ardent critics of urban planning, admires. In a 2001 Metropolis interview at age 84, the author of The Death & Life of Great American Cities singles out Portland when asked for an example of what’s right with American cities: “There are a lot of constructive things happening in Portland.”

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One of them is Office PDX (http://www.officepdx.com/). Office is located in a Bohemian neighborhood Jacobs would have loved. Portland’s Alberta community is part early-days SoHo and old-style main street dominated by locally owned and operated businesses. The blocks are short, making a trip to the store an easy stroll from neighboring bungalows. Businesses on Alberta are diverse – the hardware store, food market, specialty boutiques, art galleries and restaurants. And then there is Office.

A boutique and a networking space for creatives, Office sells design and architecture books and magazines, desk accessories, portfolio, presentation and writing tools. Office is 21st-century salon for graphic designers, architects, industrial designers, writers, actors, musicians, artists and other creatives, who come to shop and mix with like-minded people.

John Breen, a celebrated Portland actor who stars in James Westby’s “The Auteur,” a film slated for a Sundance Film Festival debut, likes the personal interaction with the owners, husband and wife Tony Secolo and Kelly Coller. “The experience is important to me,” Breen says. “If you walk into a Borders Books, for example, you will not find people who love books and reading but you will in an independent book store like this one.”

At three years old, Office sits in a 1956 corner store that evokes a mid-century office environment. Its façade is a two-tone brick facade with original metal-framed windows. Garage doors added later allow light into this open-plan store of 1,100 square feet. Even with additions and alterations, we wanted to “respect this history of the building,” Coller says.

Inside, old fashion office furniture and antiques act as props and point-of-purchase displays. The stage is set with Tanker desks and SteelAge filing cabinets, a collection of Kodak home movie cameras, and even Coller’s grandpa’s “Cocktail Culture,” a mixed drink recipe book -- complete with one for Grandpa Nelson’s punch written in pencil on the back of the title page. “Design without pretense – no entitlement, no pedigree; we are not that way,” says Secolo. “We want to get design moving forward.”

Office puts a shoulder to this mission by hosting free events geared toward the enrichment of the creative community. Its June 21 portfolio panel discussion was packed with roughly 75 people who came to hear what some of the city’s top creative directors have to say about how to enter their worlds. Adidas, Nike, Sandstrom Design and Wieden + Kennedy were among the companies represented on the panel. Some of the advice that night: Check the ego at the door. Show us you can listen, collaborate and empathize. Be honest. Be clear about your role. Show you can do more than make something pretty. Show us you can think. Show us you can solve problems. Tell a story visually.

Paul Issac Thomas, a 19-year-old recent graduate of The Art Institute of Portland, a “Design Sorcerer,” according to his card, attended with a handful of students. Afterward outside Office, the Sorcerer said: “This is one of the more Portland places in Portland; it’s by people of design for people of design; it has a genuine feel to it.”

Panelist Luis Rueda, Design Director in Nike Brand Design, says Office fills a void by providing the city’s “very healthy” creative community with unique things especially appealing to them. The owners show “ingenuity and that they care by contributing to the community” through their events, which deepens Rueda’s admiration for this young company. “They fulfill a function and a need.”

Rueda learned of Office through word of mouth and stopped in with his wife, Cindy Sato. “Office is representative of a whole feeling spreading from city to city in Oregon around environmental issues,” Sato said. Sato, an Event Planner at the Tiger Woods Conference Center, purchases from Office regularly and recommends them to others because Office meets and exceeds the competition in service and the quality of its offerings.

Sato recently needed 100 Moleskine notebooks for an event and was told by a national chain she could only buy bulk quantities starting at 500 per. Secolo ordered the 100 books for her. “If you need it, he gets it,” she said.

Office is more intellectual and cultural habitat than store. People in the Pacific Northwest rally behind it for very personal reasons: the experience, the service, the genuine atmosphere, the unique poignant offerings, community involvement, the environmental impact of doing business locally. It seems to me Office devotees are looking for heroes and soulmates, they want to do business with people like them.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, my husband and I were walking our dog and noticed a homemade bench on a neighbor’s corner property. The bench was at street level, down a slope on this half-acre property on SW Ridgeview Lane. I wondered aloud why they put it there so far from the house they’ll never use it? My husband walked over and sat down. “It’s for us,” he said.


Take a drive to Seattle?

Seattle seduces you with its great cosmopolitan energy and heavy sustainable undertow. Coming upon it, you see the blown-out tires and other garbage on bumpy roadways separated by misaligned Jersey barriers. Seattle is an abrupt vertical city topped by the landmark Space Needle tower. It has the dog-treat bakery, the fashionable shops, world-class art museums and galleries, a public library designed by starchitect Rem Koolhaas. Seattle is also home to a little bookstore that commands an inordinate amount of affinity.

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Imagine Oscar Wilde as the proprietor of a bookstore that caters to subjects that interest you most. He alone picks the books he allows into his store and is generally there, matching requests for new knowledge with new works that push the future forward.

If you can visualize this, you are close to understanding Peter Miller, the namesake and owner of Peter Miller Architecture & Design Books & Supplies (http://www.petermiller.com/).

The single-location store on the 1900 block of Seattle’s First Avenue comprises roughly 7,500 titles. “They come here for optimism; that the world isn’t just down to Boeing and Safeco,” says Peter Miller, the namesake and owner of this 30-year-old, single-location bookstore on the 1900 block of First Avenue in urbane downtown Seattle, Washington.

The store of roughly 7,500 titles –such things as Luis Barragan’s “The Eye Embodied,” from the Netherlands, “New Cityscapes,” by Jan Gehl, of Copenhagen, and “Wood Design Awards, 2007,” a book from Toronto.

“They come here for confirmation that design matters and courage matters and color and history matter,” Miller says. “We are a store based on this is apparently so…Architecture is the great labor of trying to get it better. Our job is to be open and well designed, that the selection be correct.”


And the patrons at Peter Miller Books? The group below would make quite the dinner party, especially if you tossed in Peter, but they were random shoppers at Miller’s 1,500-sq. ft. store on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June.

An architect from Mithun and her architect husband from NBBJ.

A creative director for Tommy Bahama.

A history professor and author from Washington State University.

The CEO of a software company and his girlfriend -- a product manager for a neuroscience company developing a brain stimulator that promises to repair the neurons from such things as Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

Lynn McBride, an architect with Mithun, and her husband, Damien McBride, of NBBJ were at Peter Miller Books looking for inspiration for a new home, a forward-reaching home, a sustainable home, they will design and build together and for the latest resources on Spanish architecture. They will lead a class of Montana State University architecture students through Spanish cities this summer and, while they have done it in years past, they came to Miller’s store to refresh their curriculum.

Asked why here when there are so many bookstores in Seattle vying for this architecture town’s architecture community, Damien McBride says, “Just any architect automatically knows what it is and where it is. You mention Peter Miller, you know that’s all you need to say. He caters to forward-thinking architects.”

Lynn, who designs skyscrapers for a living, adds that people in architecture, firms, principals included, will send people to “go see Peter” as a project resource. They say Miller is a resource for the leading edge of architecture and that while the momentum around sustainability is growing stronger – even within the last 18 months, that there isn’t even a name for this movement yet.

Fritz Levy is a retired professor and author taught history at Washington State University for 45 years. He has been a store patron for as long as Peter’s been in business. “Peter knows his books,” Levy says. Miller placed a book in his hands that day: “Who Are You; the history of the surveillance state,” by Mark Kyburz. “You would think Seattle isn’t big enough to support a place like this but I’m sure Peter’s not just doing this for love.”

“At the moment it seems that they can have a Peter Miller Books but this is not a country at a great moment for its education or its retail,” Peter opines. “The Internet is a powerful, suburbanizing force yet the downtowns are increasingly finding people to go into them. The humans want something.”

Later, Peter is fielding customer requests. It is apparent how very special it is to buy a book from Peter Miller. He came to Seattle in the 1970s from Connecticut with a master’s in English from Harvard University.

Chris Wood is the CEO of Clario, a software company with a technology that translates two-dimensional, microscopic images of things that can kill you into 3-D so radiologists can identify them at a stage when there’s still time to save you. He bought a tres expensive Italian leather bag, a Nava. As he waited for his credit-card purchase, Miller approached to say the Italians are not known to be workaholics, and they didn’t intend the bag to hold a laptop and “a ton of bricks” so ‘don’t fill the bag with too much; you’ll break my bag.”

Wood loves this store. “It has what’s hot now. If you ask people in Seattle, who have lived here, for an interesting Seattle story, Peter Miller will come up. It is iconic. The design is right. The location is super.”

Wood was with his girlfriend, Sara Larsen, a product manager for Northstar Neuroscience. “I don’t walk around and look,” she says. “I come in and ask the people here for a good book.”

Greg Quist, a creative director with Tommy Bahama, has been coming to Peter Miller Books for decades. He especially likes the size of the store. “It’s small enough; sometimes too much is too much and there’s always something new.” He says he might find some good books at other bookstores but compared to Miller’s store, it is more or less a rummage through a lot of so-so books to find a good one.

Don’t call his books eye candy. “It should be good food. Very fresh salad. It should be clean. It should be well cooked and have wine that goes with it –not fusty and stupid and bored.
“Seattle’s a company town; it exports an astonishing array of franchises: Nordstroms, Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, but it is also a remarkable town for its humans,” Miller says. “I have the most remarkable customers I could have; they should have the best bookshop possible, that’s what they should have.”

As for the analogy to Oscar Wilde, Peter says: “but not Oscar Wilde, too many cats and sofas and literature asides and such!”