Sometimes when we’re hard at work creating the beautiful graphics that we use for our artisan products, we think about that combination of land and sea – the aesthetic and imaginative appeal of coastal areas, and why they occupy such a space in our hearts.
In fact, if you look at our product line, a lot of our maps are of particular coastal areas, from Currituck to Galveston Bay and out to places like La Jolla, which is so commonly known as a popular spot for surfers and other beach lovers. They are spectacular places!
Land and Sea Spaces
We have this intuitive understanding that beach photography has its own kind of artistic and visual appeal. The golden sand, the blue sea and the clear blue sky above it all combine to create something that's compelling to look at, as well as to remember.
People have strong associations with these coastal places, partly for that reason. And that reflects what we have in our catalog, and what people typically buy to hang on their walls.
Map-Making Aesthetic
Our pieces are beautiful, too, but in a slightly different way.
Where natural panoramic coastal views are beautiful as direct expressions of nature, cartographic views are beautiful in their human design.
This is where graphic designers can talk about fonts and spacing and layout and everything else. But when you see these maps on your wall, people like to look at them for their sort of calligraphy and neat-looking icons and other visual components. Of course, they’re functional, too – you can look and see how far it is from one spot to another, or point out your favorite haunts to visitors.
But in many ways, it's that visual piece that's important, because people enjoy just looking at these maps on their wall from day to day.
Think about sitting in the great room of a top-class beach house with one of these interesting and visual maps posted on the wall behind you. Does this artistic installation make a difference in how you experience this room?
Many people would say that it absolutely does. That's why the best interior decorators get things like this to add to a beach house or other top-tier real estate atmosphere. You can talk about it in terms of staging for new owners, but it's often done for the service of short-term renters in AirBnB situations and elsewhere. You could say in some senses that the return on investment is extremely high. A couch provides its own kind of comfort, and so do amenities like refrigerators and ping-pong tables, but excellent visual wall hangings bring a certain value that is very high in proportion to the cost that you pay for them, and that's another reason why we’re shipping so many of these out to property owners all over the country and beyond.
