5 Questions with CASTE Projects
To say that Caleb Beyers and Hanahlie Beise, the founders of CASTE Projects, are designers isn’t entirely accurate. It's definitely true, but it fails to capture the full breadth of their work: they’ve shot films and photographs, created identities, curated and bound books, built objects and built spaces. Simply put, they're creators, and in that capacity they’ve shaped many of Victoria’s most beloved landmarks: Citizen Boutique, both the Chinatown and Atrium Habit locations, and the new Victory Barber and Brand.
Their latest project is a combined open studio workspace and design shop, running until August 31 at 196 Kingsway at 10th Ave in Vancouver and offering custom handmade homewares alongside a selection of products from other designers. Caleb and Hanahlie spoke to us about the wide breadth of their work and the methods and motivations behind it.
Tell us a little about the people behind CASTE and how the company came to be.
Caleb Beyers: I started out as a freelancer. I never went to design school, I didn’t study business or graphics or anything, But I always really liked album covers and music videos and music and film.
After university I took up a job as a film teacher at Shawnigan Lake. While I was there I started freelancing, and it was a rough go at first. But I stuck with it, did random graphic design jobs for friends and people who’d found out about what I was doing, and then I met Hannah.
Hanahlie Beise: Just before I met Caleb, I had finished art school and moved to Victoria. A couple of months after we met we moved to New York together, and I was working as a photo assistant for a fashion blogger, the Sartorialist. I also worked for an architectural photographer doing lighting and other things. It wasn’t until we came back to Vancouver that we decided to work together and combine our skills.
It seems you can do just about anything: branding, film, photography, art shows, art books, graphic design, interior design. How the hell do you do it all?
H: Fake it 'til you make it. Just being really interested in learning and in new projects and in how something works.
C: Being interested is the biggest thing. If you’re interested in something, you want to know how it works, how it came into being, and you do your research and you talk to people. It’s also about not being afraid to put it out there that you can do anything, and to try. A lot of the stuff that we’ve made, especially the stuff that I made early on, is terrible.
[Aside] It’s true. [To me] Hannah just laughed at me, but it’s true. You learn, and you get better, and you figure things out. And hopefully, if you do a good job, it leads to more exciting, interesting and challenging projects. It’s about learning from your mistakes, and trying to make it work.
There are several fundamental skills that translate into everything: an understanding of form, and how form relates to graphics or photography or space, knowing how to put something together. Also concept and story: trying to find a balance between the form of something and the story it’s trying to tell. If you can do that, then you can find your way through pretty much anything.
H: Also the clients that we have, they let us. They let us give them ideas that we weren’t specifically hired to do, and they just hand it over. They trust us. So another thing is establishing relationships with people where they trust that you know what looks good, and what other people will like, and that you know how to get things done.
You’re responsible for the aesthetic of some of Victoria’s most beloved spots, from Citizen to both Habit locations and Victory Barber and Brand. With places like the Atrium Habit and Victory, what’s the process in taking your vision from an idea to a reality?
C: It’s always a collaboration. Matty Conrad, the owner of Victory, had a really good idea of what he wanted to do. He knew the energy and atmosphere that he wanted to create. We went to junkyards together, looked through magazines together, just hung out and tried to get on the same page, get to know each other. I’m convinced that the more cooperation and understanding there is in a project, the better it turns out. The more in depth it can be, the more the whole team can understand what’s going on and what’s supposed to happen, the more confident you feel within that framework.
H: The starting point is knowing what atmosphere you want to create in a space. That was the case with Habit: how you want somebody to feel when they enter, how long you want them to stay, what you want their interaction with the space to be. People want to stay in Habit because of the warmth of the room, the wood, the openness. And both Habit and Victory had great architecture.
C: One of the most important things in designing a space is organization, figuring out where things go and how that relates to what you want to happen in the space. So with the Atrium Habit, we wanted a space that forces people to interact with one another through a kind of organization.
We felt it was really important for customers to walk into the space and see the faces of the other people there, and for people to enjoy the view out onto the street, and putting the chairs sideways against the window allowed people to look inside and out. It seems like a really simple thing, but we agonized over it. Once you make that decision, it makes a big difference for the feel of the space. That’s just one of many decisions in putting the whole space together.
What’s the motivation behind your pop up shop, and what can people expect to find there?
H: We’re trying to change gears with CASTE. We want to keep the branding but also move into product design, mainly homeware-based. So that’s the motivation, to start something else that we can work towards on our own. We both love the branding stuff, but when the project is done it’s not ours anymore, it’s someone else’s. So with the products, we can continue working on these things, come out with new things, and it’s all ours. So we have a sofa and a floorlamp, a perpetual calendar, some rugs and needle-felted animals. Everything in the shop is wood, textiles or ceramics, and all handmade.
C: A friend of ours from Japan will have some of her family ceramics, and we’ll have some products from Red Flag Design, who started out making totes and duffel bags from recycled sail canvas. They still use reclaimed stuff, military fabrics, really hyper-functional and detail-focused.
H: And also Henderson Dry Goods, a one-woman shop who makes really beautiful clocks and other products, all laser cut wood.
C: We’ve also talked to Ryan Willms at Inventory, and they’ll have some magazines in the shop.
Any projects in the works you can tell us about?
C: We’re working on a restaurant with the team from Zambris and Pig, an unlikely combination. It’s going to be a burger joint in Cook Street Village, a diner-style place, no table service. The quality is going to be really great, they’re going to grind their beef every morning, do a really good job of it. So we’ve done their branding, and we’re doing the interior now. It’s going to be called Big Wheel Burger.
H: We’re also in the hunt for a house renovation project, our first residential project. And we’ve always got our own personal projects on the go, too. We’ve got a big store of ideas and things that are unrealized, just waiting for a few spare moments.
