Apart from being much more organised with the necessary paperwork and being the best researcher we know, she also creates these delightful little things called ‘amigurumi’ made in crochet. Crochet is a very interesting technique for doing clothes, hand bags and accessories and even jewellery (it’s actually possible to crochet not just yarn but even silver wire!), but it’s those roughly hand-size figures that really brighten one’s day and make us smile. We have to admit it, we can’t resist ‘cute’.

What sets Ana’s amigurumis apart is that they are different from the majority of crochet work. She’s doing yellow submarines, dogs on motorbikes, x-wings, cats travelling in balloons, pink elephants and foxy racing cars. We bet you haven’t seen anything like that!

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Now obviously we don’t know how many visitors of the coquine![design] website know how to crochet, but for those who do, please follow the link below if you like to know more about Ana’s amigurumis. You can buy patterns there if you’re looking for a challenge (although we’ve heard her patterns aren’t really that difficult, but then again, for some of us crochet is a mystery..) Or you can ask Ana to crochet it for you…

So, here’s something you might not have seen before, but we thought it should be equally interesting and therefore valid: Exterior designers look at interior designers. Well, it actually should be pretty obvious, because quite often, they work close to each other on the same projects! But fact is, all we are (supposedly) know is lacquered steel, lacquered aluminium, lacquered fibreglass and visible carbon fibre. And even when you add teak and some stainless steel to the equation, it’s still a rather boring and uninspired mix!

So, since we at coquine![design] love textures and ‘real’ material character we often take a peek what our colleagues from the other side of the fence do. And because that’s still not enough, we also look what interior designers for residential projects do. And then, suddenly, a whole new world opens: There’s wood, stone, glass, ceramics, exciting veneers, bamboo, coconut, even banana leaf! There’s metal-coated travertine, real stone veneer, 3-dimensional digital printing and translucent concrete. We have smooth surfaces, rough surfaces, soft surfaces, edging, sand-blasting, polishing, water-cutting, mosaic making…

Last month, we went to the London Surface Design Show to learn more. It wasn’t one of those fancy events where the yacht designers like to go, in fact it was a rather odd mix of students, first-time suppliers and the odd demi-god coming from some fancy name architectural practices. In other words, the ideal hunting ground for things you haven’t seen inside (or outside) any yacht. Yet.

It almost seems like it’s the stuff legends are made of. Especially those legends that tell you that it’s something really nice but also really, really difficult. So, after admittedly not being too happy about recent bread making results (the last one turned out to be more like a giant cookie), wasn’t it not a little over-ambitious to chase the holy grail?

It probably would be, but we needed magic to regain self confidence. And, we figured that it’s really not that difficult compared to for example macaroons. Sourdough is very easy to do, all you need is some discipline to feed it regularly. We started with 100ml of warm water and added 50 grams of rye and 50 grams of barley flour. And then we just left it in a dark, warm corner. Next morning, we added 100ml of water and 100 grams of rye. And so on..

Now, obviously, if you just keep feeding, you’d end up with a very big pile of sourdough. So, third time we were feeding we removed 100grams of the mixture before, and we decided to use it.

We also learned that most likely we would need a very wet dough to create a light, airy structure. So, since our starter dough wasn’t yet fully developed, we also did the yeast mix with 200ml of warm water, some sugar and some yeast.

We then used 100 grams of rye and 150 grams of spelt together with oil and salt. Mix everything except for the sourdough, let it stand for 2 hours. Add the magic stuff, kneed well (inside the bowl) and let rest again for 1 hour. After that we simply poured the dough into a deep pan (the sound it makes when detaching from the bowl, sucking air in, always gets us excited) and put it in the cold oven. Turn the oven on to about 180 degree and 45 – 50 minutes later you’re ready.

And yes, the trick worked. The bread turned out absolutely amazing! We’re happy again!

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“I was just reading last year’s post about vampires, respectively vampire movies. While in general my theory about what the vampire stands for is still valid, I guess I owe you an apology. I moved on. I realised that the world is over saturated with films featuring the fanged folks. So, no more vampires.”

That’s of course just partly true. It is true that the term ‘vampire’ has become a little bit anaemic. It became an excuse for some a few CGI effects applied to anything from teenage romance to soap opera. It is also true that we are horrified by the fashionable vampire versus werewolf mix’n'match and the Swiss army knife sound effects of fangs being deployed.

We are, nevertheless, still compelled by the deeper layers of Bram Stoker’s story and we are still intrigued to explore its various aspects further.

Another shortcoming of our approach so far has been that while breaking and bending a few rules of Hollywood script writing we still applied what we thought would be the necessary format: pages upon pages of written words in Courier typeface. That of course isn’t really wrong, but it neglects two major issues: First of all, the for us, as designers, pictures are by the far the most powerful tools. And secondly, that since we are new to the scene, any trick will do to sell or product.

“As a matter of fact, times are changing for everybody. An experienced Hollywood producer told me a short while ago that nowadays, even A-listers do demo reels…”

So, it’s time for a new approach. We are currently preparing a parallel website (the dark side!) where we can start developing the new script in a completely new way. We are thinking of opening the project and want to invite contributors soon. Furthermore, we are looking into new ways of taking the script to the next level rather than just bugging producers and sending out printed copies. There’s a great array of tools out there, from social media to crown sourcing, and we are keen on making the best use of it. So, it’s all brand new territory and there might be exciting times ahead of us… we will keep you posted!

So, instead of advertising our new 10m runabout design in the portfolio section we simply recommend getting the DVD of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic ‘To Catch A Thief’ with Cary Grant and the unforgettable Grace Kelly. We hope that you will enjoy the film as much as we do you, because that means we will understand each other when it comes to important matters. Like the boat we want to design for you.

“Thinking of fashion, I never really understood the purpose of this exercise. Why designing something that nobody can wear?” muses Christian Leyk. “When we design on a speculative base, we still keep in mind that somebody might want to build it.”

Apart from the fact that proposing something impossible might end in disappointment (the wrong side of ‘famous’), we also make sure that our designs are believable. There is, at least from the designer’s point of view, nothing worse than all those fancy renderings in the ‘new design’ section of Yacht Design that make you think ‘oh no, not another student of architecture’.

But, as mentioned above, it’s all about getting attention and trying things an actual client might not ask for. It’s a showcase of what’s possible, so while we might not always do the whole calculations, we certainly keep the limits of physics in mind.

“Designers like to joke about Unoptanium’ being their favourite material, and we all love transparent aluminium! But jokes aside, some things that look impossible at first glance are actually not too difficult to achieve. Still, designs like the 144 metre concept ‘Ghost’ and the 145m ‘Fortissimo’ which I designed with Ken Freivokh in collaboration with the Fincantieri shipyard in Italy might be a little bit too outlandish to make their splash in the next few years. That is not to say that they won’t, but it certainly takes a client with vision to make them reality.”

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3D renderings by: Rob Armstrong

All this actually happened after crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard the MS Augustus and posing proudly with his parents atop the Corcovado in front of the statue of Cristo Redentor. We believe it is safe to say that the career as a yacht designer was pretty much inevitable…

Christian Leyk: “Obviously, I was too young to realise the magic of that place… I have memories of our house in Sao Paulo, the beach of Guaruja and the amazing waterfalls of Iguaçu. But to be honest, it took me many years to acknowledge the fact that once you’ve been to Brazil, it will be in your heart forever.

When I’m looking at the old pictures my father took it becomes obvious to me that I grew up in a really cool era and in some wonderful places (I must not forget to mention Munich either). Sometimes I feel a little bit sad that I wasn’t old enough to truly understand it, but there was a certain atmosphere… it’s difficult to express, but it seems as in that time, people were still believing in a brighter future.

It’s a shame that most people nowadays seem to have lost that feeling, so for me as a designer it is incredibly motivating and inspiring to every now and again look into the past. This way I believe I can contribute to a better future with my design…”

One more thing: Luckily, he did overcome his his love for Lederhos’n!

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There must be a connection between the Schweinehund and the fact that the days are so short at this time of the year and that January in north-western Europe is therefore dark, cold, windy and often pretty wet. The truth is that January feels much longer than any other month and that the temptation of hiding under a blanket and dreaming of tropical places while waiting for the spring to come is quite strong.
There is also a very strong temptation to ignore all those great resolutions we make in the first 5 minutes of the year, leading to what experts called ‘Blue Monday’ (the third Monday of the year). Statistically it’s supposed to be the gloomiest day of the year.

However, not all is bad! A quick survey within the team of coquine![design] has shown that so far no team member has given up a) any hopes that the winter will end one day and that spring will come, and b) any New Year’s resolutions made. We heard that especially the issue of ‘health and fitness’ is taken very seriously…
We believe that this must be down to the fact that the people behind coquine![design] are hopelessly optimistic, unbelievably persistent, constantly driven by their creativity, self-motivated and stubborn like old donkeys! Or maybe there’s even some sense of discipline!

Whatever the reason, it just proves that the Schweinehund can be beaten and that January Blues will not stop us from achieving our goals!

Christian Leyk: “The beauty of Brazil is that it’s so multi-faceted. That makes it difficult to describe, because you will never really run out of things to say. Brazil is green, yellow and blue like it’s flag. It’s also red, pink, black, white, purple and everything in between! And every time you think you know it, it’s changing. It’s vibrant and alive.

And this is even more true when visiting the country’s biggest cities, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The first impression is usually quite overwhelming, some might even say it’s a big mess!
First of all, there is the traffic, which is pretty mad. Traffic jams and suicidal folks on motor bikes. Then there is graffiti pretty much everywhere, including the fact that everybody running a business has its marketing painted on the front wall. And when you look up, the sky is criss-crossed by a mind-boggling network of cables and wires… Sao Paulo is even worse, because it doesn’t have Rio’s landmark mountains, so there is hardly anything that helps you navigating. It has, however, thousands of hills, therefore streets are either going incredibly steep uphill or downhill (and I haven’t even mentioned the complexity of one way streets!) If you’re looking for a challenge, enjoy!”

Brazil is colourful and extremely diverse. It is poor, it is rich. It is said that God must be Brazilian, and indeed he has a lot of churches in Brazil (even though some look like bingo halls are are often established by preachers who since then have moved to Florida).

Brazil is certainly blessed by the richness of its soil and the climate and an amazing eco-diversity. It doesn’t suffer from many natural disasters (with the exception of flooding after strong rainfall, but then again the effect is often magnified because of human error, i.e. building dwellings in unsuitable places, etc.) What Brazil mostly suffers from are human disasters, such as crime and corruption.

“If I’d be living in San Francisco, I might be making sure that when I move into a place, it’s designed to withstand earthquakes. And until the day the earth might shake I won’t be thinking about earthquakes. In Brazil, you have to be alert every day. When you go out, you have to think whether or not to wear your watch. When you drive (especially at night), you might consider whether or not it is save to stop at a red traffic light. Which means you have to be aware when crossing a green one that somebody else considers not stopping at his red… Needless to say, you should always lock the doors in your car, and driving a convertible is practically out of question.

Somebody might ‘copy’ your car’s license plate. In that case you have to be prepared for many months of bureaucratic struggle to prove that yours is actually the legitimate one. And when you think that you need to protect your home by high walls and electric wire, you might just start thinking that something is wrong: You’re behind bars and the criminals are running free?”

This should of course not stop you from visiting Brazil. Use common sense and you won’t get into trouble. People do wear watches and jewellery. People carry a camera and take photos. Visiting Brazil is an amazing experience and you will come back richer in many ways.

But for the team of coquine![design] the question remains: Could we imagine (in the long run) settling in Brazil? And, if so, where? Truth is, there is no perfect place in the world. There are places that come close to perfection, and Brazil is certainly on the short list. Until then, we keep on dreaming…

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But that’s another story.

With the smell of fireworks in the air and an empty glass of champagne in the hand we sometimes have a tendency to reflect and become a little bit philosophical. Also, the start of the new year marks the end of the winter / Christmas holidays for most of us. We return to ‘normal life’ with new inspiration and motivation, just to find that this inspiration doesn’t have anything to do with what’s ahead of us.

“Ana and I went to Brazil. Which for us translates into: 3 weeks of family, food and fun. Catching up with our folks. New impressions, too, of course. Some beer, some chachaça. And even more food… I’m sure you get the picture!

One of the places we visited again we call ‘sitio’, which basically means ‘place’. Actually, it’s a farm near a little city called ‘Promissaõ’, which is roughly 500km inland from Saõ Paulo. There are relatives living there, so we have a good reason going there.

But also, to me, this place is magic. It’s simple and it’s beautiful. I don’t think life there is easy (it’s easier than it has been in the past) and of course it’s far from carefree, even though you can pick mangoes and papaya straight from the trees. The main street is a dusty path that turns into thick mud when it rains. And rain is needed for the crops..

Being a farmer in Brazil is a very different world from Barbour jacket and Range Rover. Of course, there are similarities, too. Making economic decisions whether to buy more land. More cows. Or chicken. Whether to grow corn or cane or coffee. And how one’s life is affected by the bigger farms and corporations around. It would be naive to believe global economy doesn’t affect small farms…

To the vistor like me, however, it’s mostly paradise. Apart from the mangoes it also means sunshine, barbecue, watching the thunderstorms on the horizon. Horse riding. And in the back of my mind the question: Can’t we just stay? Simple life is so good…”

But we can’t, because we are part of a complex and sophisticated world. We can design yachts, but we forgot how to milk a cow…

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