Space Place House

I spent many years in NYC and Europe as a model, fashion designer and filmmaker.  Being exposed to very sophisticated palates awakened and added to my love of innovative style and expression.

Growing Up

Until age ten, I lived in Croatia, in many small apartments with my parents and brother, and later by myself in many rental apartments in New York City.  I used to spend time in my maternal grandmother’s apartment in Zagreb that she owned since the day she got married.  It was dark and small and did not impress me very much.  I did love the back yard, which was cement, steps, railings a patch of grass with a fence.  We often played there with my cousins, although the musty smell of old is with me to this day.  My paternal grandfather was a master carpenter and an amazing gardener.  He carved wood into swirls of twigs and leaves and flowers and chandeliers and banisters and anything he might think of.   I used to wander through his large woodshop where sawdust floated through the silence and reflected in the sun’s beams overhead.  It seemed a magical, wondrous and mysterious place to me.

As a very young girl I was really impressed by the modern interiors that my uncle had in his apartment in the center of town.  In the 1960’s much of Europe was old and grey and uncle Marko’s apartment was simply otherworldly.  Large open spaces with tall ceilings.  Modern furniture and pure class.  My mother’s influence on me once we moved to the United States was towards English Tudors and Old World style.

I was educated in New York City at NYU and F.I.T.  and I hold degrees in Film and TV Production as well as in Fashion Design.

victorian black linen from my collection

Good design takes a good eye, an eye for detail and with an art, photography and design background I have a definite feeling for color.  The “Our New Old House” book combines all of the esthetic elements I have learned through 20 years of intense but fun research and study of trends in almost all design fields.

In my women’s clothing collection called Modern Victorian, found on my website www.modernvictorian.com I combined the aesthetics of Victorian style with the fabrics and silhouettes of the modern era, much as we did in our old house in question, combine historical elements with modern day materials.

One day, about fifteen years ago, in Greenwich Village in NYC I saw a woman and two small children walking down the street, completely dressed in period clothing.  They actually all wore clothes from the Victorian era, down to the minutest detail.  The sight of them, never having left my memory, years later, inspired me to base my design collection Modern Victorian on that feeling, by bringing the past to the present.  In both my film production and fashion design experience I learned the art of telling a visual story through composition and photography as well as implementing ideas with sketches and creating real life objects out of that.