History 101: Where it all began ...

The Turner and Martin collaboration began in 1980 when we teamed up and launched our own custom floral design business, offering that service for our weekly residential and corporate customers as well as special events, weddings and parties. In future blog posts we will share more history with images of special designs and events from that part of our lives.

This week is the 2017 exhibition called 'Bouquets to Art' at the De Young Museum of San Francisco, of which we first participated in 1988 and have just shared a few images of our floral designs on our Facebook page at Turner Martin Design. It lets us take a moment to reflect back and remember those times.

In the early 1980 'lean' days we furnished our townhouse by designing and creating our own furniture. The home was a laboratory for trying out new things. We started gathering natural "found objects" and featured them throughout. It marked the beginning of our design aesthetic and the monochromatic color palette that we have favored ever since. The look was very spare and clean-lined: a simple, fresh space which changed often.

In 1984 John and I entered the Metropolitan Home Magazine 'Home of the Year Contest' by submitting the photos we had taken of our home. We won their "Grand Winner" category which came with the publication of our entry photos and story plus the Grand Prize of a trip to Paris via Pan American Airways! What a surprise that was! (They did not put us on the cover of issue of the magazine for February 1985 announcing all the various winners because we were a male couple, instead they chose another winner from San Francisco for that placement. That was then and this is now - luckily things have come a long, long way since those days in that regard.)

For the headline for our winning story they used "Big Sur Style", which was penned by one of their writers. We were not sure of that label but went along with it and it followed us for quite some time afterwards. Have a look at the pages of that issue - a nostalgic look-back for us - and come back for more history stories, images and other features for our new blog. Just click on the images at the top of this page and it will take you to the Met Home article pages.