This article appears in print in the January 2019 issue. Click here to subscribe.

Michelle Dirkse wants to bring art into people’s homes. Having owned her residential and commercial interior design firm for the past five years, she’s accomplished that by outfitting spaces with beautiful things and fostering relationships with local artists. Now, she’s parlaying those relationships into her own line of textiles.

Dirkse has collaborated with eight Pacific Northwest artists on this new line, for which she transformed digital scans of the artists’ work into patterns for wallpapers, fabrics and area rugs. The trust these artists put into Dirkse’s translation of their work lends credibility to her creative eye and prowess as a designer, and her stunning patterns speak for themselves.

The new collection, available online and at Dirkse’s shop/studio space (Capitol Hill, 1321 E Pine St.; 206.538.0737; michelledirkse.com), offers a higher degree of flexibility for giving a space a hand-created artistic feel, as opposed to filling it with “stuff,” Dirkse says. “Maybe someone doesn’t want to commission an art piece, or they want to have a whole wall covered in art. This allows them to do that.”

Editor’s note (1/22/19): Since print publication of this article, Dirkse has worked with the following artists for her new collection: Jeff Gerber, Dana Mooney, Mya Kerner, Jennifer Gauthier, Joey Bates, Corrie LaVelle, Noël Fountain, Kevin Cox and Kitri Wood. Cox and Wood worked together on the pattern Dirkse uses in her collection.

Photo by Alex Hayden