Elora Cosper

I spent my early childhood in the woods and meadows of rural Oregon. There, we grew our own food, canned preserves and vegetables, cooked wildly extravagant meals in our outdoor kitchen and bathed in the cold river that ran behind our home. When I was a bit older and we tumbled out of the dusty back roads and into the city, I came to live in an old, large Victorian house in the foothills of Northwest Portland. As life was with my mother, we beget a larger, eclectic community of people. Everyone around us made their trade by stain glass, fishing flies, hand carved wood furniture, fruit farms and beekeeping… They were a new cultural movement rooted in old world traditions. (I remember perfectly the sound of the old screen door slamming with the comings and goings of that 4-story house, with the multitude of its varied and ravaged wallpapers. It was one of the miscellaneous venues I resided in over the next several years, but the one that resonates as my childhood home.)

Growing into my adolescence it was the large, quiet rooms of my grandparent’s 1930’s Spanish bungalow, in the median streets of Beverly Hills, that became my bellwether home.

My maternal grandmother, who was infamous in both her beauty and uncomplicated elegance was an interior decorator. She created high ceilinged, ivory spaces, blended warm polished wood with marble and heavy brass fixtures. Mixed modernist sculptures, worn leathers, and walls covered with Gauguin, Cezanne, and Marc Chagall’s blue lovers are what most innately shaped my visual and emotional aesthetic. This; and the scent of lemon blossoms from the yard, the eucalyptus in the ally, the warm late afternoon light, and the restless, persistent Santa Ana wind.

It is this which I carried with me to New York City, and that was which was melded and guided by the rich history of the East Coast design masters, both old and new (Fredrick Law Olmstead, William Van Alen, William Sofield, David Easton, Thomas O’Brien), which I tutelage under for close to a decade. At Kapell and Greenwood Architects, and Interior Design Collections, I cut my chops as a proper designer. It was here that I learned that exceptional design far exceeds a keen eye, and professionalism is more than just savior faire; It is listening to your client and coworkers, it is caring for each outcome as though it were your own, and it is always, unfailingly, being as good as your word. Working on projects ranging from executive commercial offices to high end hospitality and private homes became the foundation for starting my own firm, trig LLC, which carried me through my last five years in New York and which lately has been revived as trig Co. in Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

In the spaces in between I travelled. I visited Belgium and the Netherlands by waterways. I roamed the streets and outer villages of Tangiers. I slept in perfect Tuscan linens on a feather bed in a weeklong rainstorm. I occupied a private beach in Thailand for several months. And now I have returned to Portland, to claim a family legacy, an old Estate house, and to fulfill a childhood promise of starting a business with my oldest and dearest friend. Together we bring two vivid histories full of experience and a deep love of hospitality and aesthetic. It is our commitment to honor the artistry of craftsmanship, culinary mastery and the art of travel.

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