Who's behind this
Eras is a one-person project. I kept looking for home goods that referenced real design history instead of a vague gesture at a decade, and I couldn't find it, so I started building it myself. Niche design history belongs in actual homes, not locked in a museum placard or a design textbook.
Eras is proudly Canadian, run out of Montreal.
The collection isn't fixed. New pieces go up every week, and what gets added is shaped by what customers actually ask for, not by what's trending elsewhere. If there's an era or an object you want to see here, tell us.
Three movements, thirteen years
Eras started with a simple annoyance: most "retro-inspired" home goods aren't inspired by anything. They're a vague gesture at "the 80s" or "the 90s," pulled from a stock pattern library, with no idea what they're actually referencing.
We wanted to do the opposite. Every collection here traces one real design movement, in the order it actually happened.
It starts in 1981, in Milan, with a group of Italian designers led by Ettore Sottsass who got bored of minimalism and decided furniture should have a sense of humor. Memphis was loud, cheap-looking on purpose, and completely uninterested in good taste. It didn't last long as a movement, but it left behind some of the most recognizable patterns of the century.
By 1984, corporations wanted a piece of it, but the real thing was too chaotic to sell at scale. So it got softened: pastel instead of neon, brushstrokes instead of hard geometry, gradients instead of flat color. Design historians call this Memphis Lite, and it's the version that actually made it onto packaging, fashion, and game show sets throughout the late 80s and 90s.
Then, in the early 90s, the pendulum swung again. As the tech boom accelerated, a reaction set in: warmth, earth tones, and a hand-drawn, "handmade" feeling took over. Global Village Coffeehouse showed up on the walls of Starbucks, Panera, and Borders, in clip art libraries, on software boxes. It was optimistic, a little naive, and completely inescapable if you were alive in 1994.
Three movements, thirteen years, one continuous story about how a radical idea gets absorbed, softened, and replaced. We turned it into pillows, curtains, and throws. More eras are coming.