BARI J. DESIGNS
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA, USA
Bari J. Ackerman describes her style as “curated maximalism.” She loves color, contrast, decor, and design:
From the time I was a little kid, I’ve always loved home decor. I always wanted to rearrange my room. My mom would say, “No...!” and then she’d hear me up there, sitting on the floor, pushing with my feet to get the dresser across the room...So, everything, always, was really about decor.
While her daughters were growing up, Bari was a stay-at-home mom. In 2004, she explains, she began making fabric handbags after starting to sew curtains for her house. Bari’s bags proved popular, and she sold them via her website and in a dozen boutiques across the country.
By 2008, Etsy had grown in popularity. “There were a million fabric handbags on the market, and everybody was making them out of one particular designer’s fabric,” Bari says. She wanted to differentiate herself, so she decided to design her own fabric.
“I didn’t know how to draw, how to paint, how to do any of that,” Bari recalls. She bought an entry-level tablet and started drawing directly in Photoshop. “It took about a year [before] I was finally coming up with designs that I liked, that looked like what I was trying to draw.” Her friend, author and fabric designer Jennifer Paganelli, suggested that Bari produce her designs through the recently launched print-on-demand platform Spoonflower. Bari made her printed fabric into a quilt, aprons, and bags and took the designs to the International Quilt Market trade show, where she met representatives of several companies and was offered contracts.
Bari’s first collection was launched in 2009 and was followed by four more lines. Two years later, she moved to Pat and Walter Bravo’s company, Art Gallery Fabrics, as one of the company’s first outside designers. “I think it was kismet; it was exactly the place I needed to be. They are arty and eclectic and encourage out-of-the-box thinking,” she says. After several fabric collections with Art Gallery, all designed entirely on the computer, Bari began to paint. “That’s when it all changed. I felt like it was what I should be doing. Everything feels a little bit more organic.” The first line to include hand-painted designs was her 2014 collection, Emmy Grace, a tribute to her daughters.
“The coloring is what makes fabric modern. When you’re going with colors that are on trend, everything looks modern and fresh.”
Bari paints with watercolors, acrylics, and oils. She also incorporates colored pencil drawings. “I paint a lot! I tear out of magazines, I sketch a lot. I paint and draw and paint and draw and paint and draw.” When designing a collection, Bari starts with the focal, or “hero,” print. She often has a theme in mind but finds that it evolves throughout the design process.
Bari loves flowers and is inspired by nature as well as by various historical eras: “My favorite thing is a period drama movie. I want to watch them over and over and over, but I’m not really watching the movie. I’m looking at the costumes and the sets. I love to go to the theater if I can.” Two of Bari’s recent collections, Virtuosa and Bloomsbury, sprang from these inspirational elements. With Virtuosa, Bari conveys the drama of performance in patterns that feature bold blossoms center stage and geometrics and twining leaves in supporting roles. Bloomsbury evokes the London gatherings of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set with subtle references: “There’s the boutonniere and some elements that I felt were more high society and some that are more abstract.”
While Bari closely follows decor trends, her color sense is all her own; she describes her choices as “organic” and “instinctual.” In addition to color, Bari often uses different styles and mediums within a fabric line to create contrast and variations in scale:
If I have a really painty line, then I definitely need to have some digital geometric movements to balance the whole thing out...I always want something that will work as a stripe, then something geometric and digital, a ditsy floral and a large floral, an allover floral, and maybe something more linear...It’s usually color that ties it all together.
Bari’s artful designs are not restricted to fabric. They can be found on rugs from Loloi, on wallpaper from Wallternatives, and as murals from Murals Your Way. Bari’s original paintings and art prints are available, along with pillows and paper goods, on her website. Her blog and social-media posts offer styling techniques and tips for curating a welcoming, colorful, maximalist home. In 2020, Bari released her second book, Bloom Wild, which shares her infectious enthusiasm for home decor filled with floral opulence.
