The Dot Pattern

There are two main inspirations for the dot print. The first one is strawberry seeds. For anyone familiar with my background, you’ll know that most of the art and design work I did for Berried Alive was fruit themed. And that’s why the first collection for House of Caswell is fruit themed as well, because I think it’s important to keep who we’ve been in mind as we discover who we’ll be next.

But although the artwork is still fruit themed, it’s also elegant and grown-up, which is the House of Caswell era. There are no cartoonish fruits battling each other in ridiculous scenarios and pun titles, instead there is a still life of fresh fruit in a carnival glass bowl in front of monogram wallpaper. It’s still colorful as hell, it’s just more stylish and refined now. There won’t always be fruit involved in House of Caswell, but for this first collection, which is a segue between phases of life, there’s still fruit. It’s just being served in a new way.

So the small green and yellow dots on a red background represent strawberry seeds. They also represent familiarity. I think everybody alive today had a parent or grandparent with a chair or sofa pattern like this one at their house. For me, my parents had this pattern on their living room couches. It was light pink and white on dark green, but I know the pattern came in a variety of colors to suit every living room color scheme.

I remember laying on that couch, playing on it, doing homework or relaxing and that pattern was always there, in the background. It became so familiar it was burned in my brain. And I know that was an extremely common furniture pattern a few decades ago, so it’s burned into a lot of brains other than mine. You hardly notice the pattern, it’s so familiar. But it is there, just adding a tiny bit of non-intrusive interest to an otherwise solid background.