Voila - Art for the modern eye, founded in 2006, provides design savvy customers with an extraordinary collection of wonderfully eccentric home furnishings, accessories, lighting, frames and many more.

Katrien Van Der Schueren, the founder and owner of Voila Gallery, has an eye for the modern and contemporary art. She finds her inventory from private collections, auctions, flea markets, or estate sales in Belgium, France and throughout the United States. Eventually, she brings them to Voila where artisans refashion them and give them a whole new and refreshing look; an airplane becomes a bar, vintage mannequin hands become a sconce, etc.. Creations at Voila can be found in some of the country's best places from Soho House in Miami and LA to The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas.

One of the kind creations at Voila makes them 'Seller of the week' on our blog. Catch Katrien's interview below and get to know the story behind Voila:



Katrien, please introduce yourself to E-junkies.

I was born in Belgium and spent most of my childhood there and in France. I studied art history at university and after various jobs in museums, reporting for a newspaper and telecommunications marketing, I returned to my first love, Art, and started selling vintage posters and other antique and vintage pieces here in Los Angeles that I had acquired in Belgium.


Tell us about 'voila!' When and how did it happen to you?

My wholesale business grew quite rapidly and I decided to expand. I opened a mini-boutique inside another shop in Los Angeles for about four years. In 2008, I decided to expand into our current location, voila! gallery, a 5,000 sq. ft. store and design studio on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles. In 2008, we also started introducing our own creations crafted from found objects. We had so many ideas that our own creations started to expand rapidly. We still have more ideas than what we can execute.Earlier this year, I partnered with UK-based designer, Jo Laurie, to develop a special upholstered furniture line called voici! That we sell exclusively at voila!



Do you remember the first creation at voila!? What was it?

One day we made all kind of things from old airplane parts. The first piece was a desk made from the noses of airplanes. We had eight in total and they all sold very quickly.

The products at voila! are simply awesome. Who is/are the creative designer(s) behind them?

Thank you! I am the creative designer behind most of the items in the store and I create them by working closely with the artisans and designers in our in-house studio. As I mentioned earlier, for the voici! upholstered furniture, I work with Jo Laurie.

I know it's difficult to pick but which is your favorite product from voila!?

Hard to choose, but we just finished a chair called LA Queen which I love.

Actually the most challenging part has been to create a team that can turn the ideas into a product. We needed an amazing group of woodworkers, finishers, metal workers, upholsterers, seamstresses and graphic designers that could execute our ideas with the sensibility and eye for detail that we need.

Share your fondest memory with voila!

I just love the continuous energy that ideas bring to our business. We always have too many ideas to execute and are grateful each day that people appreciate what we make. Walt Disney once said, “If you can dream, you can do it.” Well, when you can spend your life creating and people respond to your creations, it gives you a boost of energy each day. It is joyful not only for me, but for the whole team. I love the creative process for all of the emotions it evokes from start to finish.

What are your dreams and vision for voila! as a whole?

To continue to surprise and make people smile. To inspire and stimulate creativity in others. To reconfirm that there is no norm.You've a real as well as virtual shop. Would you like to explain how different they are from each other? When creating voila!, I definitely knew it was important to have both a physical and virtual store. The physical store allows customers a much more curated, tactile experience, where we try to put something unique and interesting in every corner for them to discover. With the virtual store, we wanted to evoke the same type of feeling you would have being in voila!, but in a more categorized, organized way reflective of the online medium.

Is there any dream project of yours?

Actually, I feel incredibly lucky to have just finished one of my dream projects. My book "The Art of Instruction," a collection of 19th and 20th century educational charts published by Chronicle Books, comes out this October. Antique educational charts were one of my first forays into dealing vintage pieces, so the book sort of brings the whole experience full circle.

What message do you have for our readers?

Albert Einstein said, 'If at first an idea isn't absurd, there is no hope for it.''

Katrien, thanks for taking out time and talk to us. The creations at Voila truly justifies its tagline. Keep up the great work. We wish you all the very best!

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