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Furniture Designer Mark Grattan is featured on ELLE Decor April Cover

Furniture Designer Mark Grattan is featured on ELLE Decor April Cover

Its lights from his window in Mexico City that enchanted him the most about growing roots in Mexico, but Grattan's journey of soul searching led him to this place and with this story. ELLE Decor's April cover, Mark Grattan graced this photography with elegance. As the founder of a red-hot furniture design studio, VIDIVIXI, and a star on the rise. Solange Knowles recently nabbed him as a product development consultant for her design studio and creative agency, Saint Heron. 

As its website says.

"SAINT HERON IS A MULTIDISCIPLINARY CREATIVE GROUP THAT SEEKS TO EXPAND CULTURAL, ART, MUSIC, AND DESIGN CONVERSATIONS AND COMMUNITIES. ... SAINT HERON IS AN AGENCY AND DESIGN STUDIO DEVELOPING THOUGHTFUL COLLABORATIONS TO CREATE VISIONARY CONCEPTS THAT CULTIVATE COMPLETE EXPERIENCES. SAINT HERON IS A PRACTICE. SAINT HERON IS A PROCESS."

 

And this spring, the charismatic young talent makes his television debut as a participant in Ellen’s Next Great Designer, Ellen DeGeneres’s design competition on HBO Max.

 

Grattan founded VIDIVIXI—from Victor Hugo’s poem “Veni, Vidi, Vixi,” which translates from Latin as “I came, I saw, I lived”—in 2014 in Brooklyn. In 2016, he followed his heart and moved to Mexico City for a relationship. There, he teamed up with British designer Adam Caplowe, who became studio director at VIDIVIXI. But the love affair that had brought Grattan to the capital was rocky; when it ended he decided to stay and find a peaceful space that he could make entirely his own.

VIDIVIXI from The Future Perfect on Vimeo.

An apartment became available in the Barragán building. Grattan and his Himalayan cat, Amiga, moved into a two-bedroom apartment, which retained much of its midcentury detailing, from the original paned windows to the interior wooden doors with windows that filter in light. There is also an iron balcony where Grattan spends his mornings, a cigarette in one hand and a coffee in the other, peering through branches at the beautiful Jardín del Arte across the street.

 

 

It was the light that enchanted Grattan most when he viewed the apartment for the first time. And it was the light’s progress that he tracked for over a year as he lived in the virtually empty space before he felt ready to begin decorating. “I get rainbows on the walls around 5:30 p.m., and the sunsets are amazing,” he says. To enhance the effect, he installed a wall of mirrors at the far end of the living room, and another one above the sofa. The natural light from the windows interacts with the mirrors, which in turn reflect each other, creating waves and sparks of unexpected luminescence.

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