Thomas Auer: Meeting Design Challenges

Thomas Auer opened his first design house in Riga, Latvia, in 1997, after learning the trade in Austria and Bulgaria. In late October 2003 he opened Tician, his first showroom in Prague. Featuring thousands of samples of high-quality fabrics from suppliers around the world, Tician provides custom services for upscale clients.

Every design project offers unique challenges. Here's how Auer and his team solved three of them.

In late 2003 Tician was contacted to redesign a 12-room house that included a large master bathroom. Choosing the material was easy enough -- oak from the region of the client's estate -- but the other requirements posed a challenge. The client wanted as much sunlight as possible but for security reasons insisted that someone outside not be able to pinpoint the exact position of a person inside the bathroom. Auer and his team used a stainless-steel curtain wire system, metal-coated curtain clips made of Chinese porcelain, and hand-sewn sheer silk drapes imported from JAB International. The drapes needed to be strong enough for a humid bathroom environment, yet luxurious enough to match the design scheme of the master bedroom. It took less than three weeks to complete this portion of the house.

The difficulty of this room was to work with so many different materials -- for the wall covering, drapery,