Something stands out like a baby in a bar at this two-story, 92-year-old brick Craftsman house just south of downtown Denver occupied by a foursome of furniture-building quarter- lifers:
The plants.
These are not dying ferns or forgotten poinsettias in plastic planters from the grocery store. They are frond monsters nurtured from clippings, repotted and arranged in sunny corners among art and antiques. “You want to feel like you’re on vacation every day at your home,” says Scott McGowan, 25.
Last year he co-founded the custom furniture business Capsize Design in this house with his younger brother, Rob, 23, and longtime friends Ben Olson, 24, and Dave Miller, 25. But even when these guys were in college together at the University of Colorado, living among the couch- burning, kegger crowd on The Hill in Boulder, “we always tried to have a nice place,” McGowan says.
He sits in his Denver dining room, where the walls are the purple-brown color of kalamata olives. A chipped concrete bust — someone’s art school assignment gone awry, perhaps — looms on a sideboard behind him. The housemates plucked the piece from a trash pile in Capitol Hill, buffed it, mounted it and posed it there beneath an abstract painting.
Their place defies the stereotype of the 20-somethings’ crash pad, even if it is a craigslist rental. McGowan describes the homes of most peers as places where “the walls are all white and the TV is the centerpiece.”
A common thread among these design-minded housemates? They were all raised by artists and entrepreneurs. Family ties connect Capsize Design to about a half-dozen other small-business owners, all of whom lend ideas and inspiration to this endeavor.
All four friends also landed the usual service industry and entry-level office gigs right out of college.
“We’ve had those jobs,” McGowan says. “It’s just not for us.”
So when the pull to do something more meaningful surfaced, as it will when creative people find themselves in uninspiring jobs, the future heads of Capsize Design met at a neighborhood coffee shop last summer “for a very official meeting” to hatch their business plan, Ben Olson recalls.
They had settled in this house near the Santa Fe Arts District, where the garage is large enough for a wood shop, the basement houses instruments for their just-for-fun band (White Hot Heat Machine), and the backyard is ideal for outdoor movies on warm summer nights.
After another sit-down, the partners picked a nautical term, Capsize, for their business name because of a shared fascination with beachcombing. They take the surfing daydream a step further at the house by showcasing old guitars like art work, and wearing flip-flops even in the snow. “The name also speaks of our approach to life (and) design,” Scott McGowan says.
Metal yard art fashioned in the likeness of a wave was installed by a previous resident of their house. It seemed a fortuitous place for the friends with a shared love of surfing to launch their design business. Now one of their signature pieces is a buffed oak and walnut coffee table that looks like tiny stacked surfboards. “We want to give off that lifestyle,” Rob McGowan says, “of building furniture, helping friends and improving other people’s lives.”
With a place and name for their business, the guys scavenged the garages of family and friends for unused tools, built a website (capsizedesign.com), and set out to do what they had wanted to do all along: design and build furniture.
Some companies in their new field “have really enormous shops and they put out so much furniture,” Rob McGowan says. “What we do is go over to somebody’s house, sit down with them over a beer, and draw up some things. Even if it takes three or four meetings, that’s OK.”
Many of their pieces take weeks instead of months to build, and are priced at less than $2,000 — a bargain for custom work.
One of the latest on display at the house is a minimalist pine sectional adorned with thick brown pillows. It rests in a cornflower-blue sitting room near a geometric end table covered with maple slats, an 8-foot tall, backlit bookcase, and a lamp on a tripod stand that Olson “just threw together.”
The McGowans are California transplants who moved to Vail with their parents in grade school. Scott McGowan first met Ben Olson when the two were placed in the same sixth- grade “pod” at Minturn Middle School.
They describe growing up in Vail as a “pretty normal existence” where kids hiked, biked and hung out at the local pizza joint. Normal except for the part about skiing 50 days a year. “That was great,” Scott McGowan says.
There’s also that story about Ben and his family building their own mountain house from scratch in the hills outside of Leadville.
“It was a wild experience,” Olson says. “There were five of us living in a tepee with a wood burner in the center for the entire summer while we were building it.”
Led by his father, a fine-art painter and former cabinetmaker, the family finished the exterior that summer. By winter, they were wrapping up the interior and living in a house that was a mile from the main highway. On school days “my brother and sister and I had to cross-country ski to get to the car at the bottom of the road,” Olson says.
But now life is a Jack Johnson beach song for Olson, Miller and the McGowans. Together the friends work hard and play hard in a house with a surfboard over the fireplace, in a neighborhood that’s “not very cookie-cutter,” Miller says. “That’s the kind of people we cater to.”
Elana Ashanti Jefferson: 303-954-1957 or ejefferson@denverpost.com
