Author Douglas Coupland Designs Furniture Collection

If you’ve ever turned a page to one of his critically acclaimed novels you now have an entirely new medium to experience Douglas Coupland’s artistry. The Canadian author, whose first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the term “Generation X,” has designed his first furniture collection, which was launched during the Interior Design Show in Toronto this January.

All of the items in his five piece line, called “Douglas Coupland for SwitzCultCreative,” take their inspiration from the “writer’s nook.” Seemingly unassuming and simple in their design—a escritoire, a writer’s chair, a bookshelf, a table lamp, a standing lamp—all of the pieces foster the kind of environment where literary magic happens, a tribute to Coupland’s work as a novelist.

“The ‘Douglas Coupland for SwitzerCultCreative’ collection is a reflection of everything I use daily,” said Coupland. “These are pieces that will unleash creativity, dopamine, high style and timelessness into their user’s world.”

“Escritoires are elegant,” Coupland remarks about the piece that served as the starting point of his collection, “…with one flip of a lid I can conceal mountains of crap inside while everyone looking on thinks I’m this really together, stylish person.” Coupland tells Wallpaper* that, “My writing can be split into fiction and non-fiction, and the same can be said about my visual work. Design is simply the non-fiction version of art.” He prefers to gravitate towards the Japanese design approach when it comes to materials, saying that the combination of colors “puts my brain in a really happy place.”

Sharing a commitment with the Vancouver-based firm SwitzerCultCreative to make sustainable products, Coupland incorporates locally derived maple plywood from his home in British Columbia, locally sourced cowhide leather for the seats, linings, and finishing details, and 24 karat gold leaf in his designs principles.

Switching gears from the written word to decorative art was hardly a shot in the dark for the established novelist. Coupland trained as a designer at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design with a focus in sculpture before going on to study at the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan in the 1980s, where he became fond of the Asian aesthetic. In addition to thirteen novels, Coupland has published two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television.