bedMATE du mois #28 : May Kaan
Every month we visit a creative and inspiring person. She or he is the
'bedMATE of the month'.
The bedMATE is the most iconic item in our collection. The extra long pillow serves as a
headboard, but also as a cuddle buddy, a friend who provides support.
We crawl into bed with the 'bedMATE of the month'. We take a look at their home and in
their colorful (bed)rooms. In conversation we discover how they experience the SUITE life. What
is going on in their minds? Where do they get their inspiration from? And in what color
are they dreaming?
This month we visited May Kaan and her beautiful home and workplace in the heart of Rotterdam together with all-round creative Nicole Huisman, Designer at FRANCON.
We visited May in Rotterdam where everything comes together under one roof and where she lives Kees Kaan, founder of KAAN Architecten. With a house that is over a hundred years old, an office for her fashion label FRANCON in the basement and a fully covered staircase with a custom graphic print, we could not help but visit May.
How would you describe your profession / what you do?
I work as a brand consultant and have an agency, Avenue Concordia ( www.avenueconcordia.com ). I regularly work on assignment for developers, for example helping to develop an identity or concept for a building, place or city, which can be translated into a strategy or a visual elaboration. I also have a fashion label, FRANCON, ( www.francon-editions.com ), a womenswear label inspired by architectural settings.
What did you do/study to get there?
I studied fashion design at the Willem de Kooning art academy (didn't finish), then Fashion & branding. Soon after that training I moved to London and did a Fashion forecasting & advertising training there. My biggest dream at that time was to work at Yves Saint Laurent. I had been able to find out who the contact person was at the London office, applied and was then hired in the Public Relations team. I had no idea what 'public relations' even meant and when I read the definition on Wikipedia the night before the interview I didn't get much wiser either. But I thought it was a special world to be involved in and I felt very much at home in terms of the type of industry and role. After a few years I went back to the Netherlands, had children at a young age and then started working for myself as a brand consultant, but also did assignments in the field of art direction, public relations and events. In 2021 I started FRANCON, because I missed fashion and was particularly attracted to the side of making and developing a product.
The idea to set up FRANCON came when Kees involved me in his way of working through a private project, building our 'lake house' in Zeeland. He took me along in his way of thinking and working, how to approach the design, to think about how we use the place, choices had to be made in material and color, how something works in that specific place.
If you translate that thinking to fashion, it is actually very strange that fashion is approached from seasons and not from place and setting; where and when you wear something, how a certain environment makes you feel. Is it formal or informal, for example, should you be able to cycle in the garment, should the garment be easy to maintain or is it OK if you take it to the dry cleaner every now and then, because it is a fragile textile. In this way, we have started to shape the development of garments around archetypes, and then specifically home archetypes. The Tower, The Lake House, The Cabin, The Chalet and The Palazzo are the types that influence our designs and thinking.
We produce counter-cyclically, which allows us to seize the usually quiet moments in the factory. This allows us to produce in small quantities at very high-end factories and workshops in Northern Italy.
The goal is ultimately to unburden women. Our customer is a woman who works, is busy, has no time or actually no desire to be very high maintenance with fashion, but still wants to look presentable, for work or private, wants to feel comfortable and actually more than that, who finds it important to wear beautiful materials. For this woman we make high-quality garments that stand the test of time, both in terms of quality and design.
Our fashion show in the atrium of the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen was very special during the Amsterdam Fashion Week. A very beautiful group of women (and a man) in our clothes, in the middle of all the top pieces from the Boijmans collection was a dream.
I am working on the development of a new product for FRANCON which I am very enthusiastic about, to be continued. I also work on very nice projects as a consultant. For example, in the past two years I made the book 'Hi!' about the creation of De Zalmhaven, the highest residential tower in the Netherlands. The book has just gone to the printer.
We sail back and forth between Rotterdam and Zeeland. The lake house we built is a very special place, with lots of water and peace: smooth sailing. Rotterdam, on the other hand, stands for hard work and fast living, which I also like. It is a totally privileged position to be able to combine those two worlds.
Everything happens under one roof for me. The house is a real family home with lots of coziness and a sweet home, a coming and going of friends of the children, or neighbors who drop in. I think it is important that it is a place where you feel welcome, where you can always join in. At the same time, it is also my workplace, because my studio is in the basement of our house. I find that very practical in combination with caring for the children. The house is more than a hundred years old and was well maintained. The changes we made are purely a matter of taste. For example, we had a custom kitchen made of dark red natural stone and the studio has become a bright white space with a dark green marble bar and a mini shop where I receive customers.
I have collected quite a collection of snowballs over the years that I like, by the way from places that I have not been to by far. I get a lot of them as gifts. Furthermore, I am fond of a certain painting in the living room with Swiss postcards on it and I think the USM cabinets of which we have several are simply perfect, both in design and use.
Color, especially a subject that causes a lot of discussion in our family, we regularly have discussions about whether something is black, very dark blue or very dark brown, and whether the Erasmus Bridge is blue, white or gray. I now know that there are many nuances in color and that is what makes it so beautiful. That is the same with textiles and yarn, if there are twenty colors of dark blue next to each other that are almost indistinguishable from each other, there is always one that is by far the most beautiful.
Colour does not necessarily have to mean striking or bright. There are thousands of variations of the colour black alone, Kees swears by RAL 8022 (very dark brown) as an alternative to black.
What are your favorite colors/color combinations at the moment and why?
Last year we had a popup retail experience in the center of Rotterdam; in a large shell space we had built a kind of decor piece in a special caramel color, this in combination with stainless steel bars and shelves, plus a very nice aluminum work by my sister-in-law Saskia Van Imhoff I think is a good combination, so caramel with aluminum. :)
In hindsight, we should not have put a white carpet in the entire stairwell and hallway. When we made that choice, we did not know that a few months later a puppy would move in who loves to roll over that carpet when he just came back from the woods. So a lot of deep cleaning.
From the SUITE702 collection I chose the colour 'blush', it is wonderful to be able to step into a pink cloud every evening.
I think we spend most of our time in the kitchen, that's where everything comes together. There's a table of one and a half by three meters, big enough you would think, but for some reason it's still completely covered with mountains of homework and craft projects every day. But every night it has to be empty, that's the policy.
