NEW RAVENNA - Key Persons
Joni Vanderslice, ASID, president and owner of J. Banks Design, founded her design firm thirty years ago. Since then, she has nurtured the Hilton Head Island-based operation into an internationally recognized force in residential and resort design. With more than 50 associates and a credo of luxury without pretense, J. Banks Design takes on a global portfolio of projects that translate resort living to home-and home to resort living.
Over the years, J. Banks Design has received numerous awards under Joni's design direction. She has been honored as ASID's Southeast Designer of the Year for both the Residential and Commercial sectors, and has also been named the ASID Dora Gray Designer of the Year. The firm's exceptional work at Castello di Casole in Tuscany, Italy garnered a Gold Key Award for Outstanding Resort Design, the pinnacle of hospitality design honors. J. Banks Design remains a fixture on Interior Design magazine's lists of "Top 200 Interior Design Giants" and "Top 75 Hospitality Design Giants."
As a painter, Kevin's goals are to add beauty to the world and meaning to his own life. Kevin believes that "with beauty and meaning, inspiration comes naturally, often, and from everywhere," so it was a natural transition when he made the switch from traditional painting to textiles.
Getting his start in the luxury fashion world selling hand-painted scarves 20 years ago, Kevin's line today includes handmade decorative pillows, bedding, curtains, scarves, throws, and more. He employs a studio of artists who help create some of the most elegantly unique, plush, and beautiful textiles in the industry, most recently designing mosaics for New Ravenna. Everyone from New York City art lovers to interior designers are gaga over his beautiful artistry, and his following continues to grow among those that appreciate the finest fibers, handmade craftsmanship, and dynamic design sense.
New Ravenna's history with Kevin dates back to our origins! Kevin was a schoolmate of our company's founder Sara Baldwin, and, when asked about ideas for what to call her new mosaic studio, Kevin offered "New Ravenna," an homage to the American way of honoring the old world by adding "new" to the name. His idea was the perfect way to connect our American born and made mosaics to the the ancient craft from the "City of Mosaics," Ravenna, Italy.
A trained artist, O'Brien feels, "glass allows me to think like a painter, and shade my image more freely because of the limitless array of colors available at New Ravenna." In working with the opposing characteristics of mosaics and textiles, O'Brien found beneficial and timely similarities. "Even though textiles and mosaics are obviously opposite in their physical manifestation, hard and timeless versus soft and ephemeral, they both exist to do the same thing. They endure to create beautiful environments that help people moderate their reactions to the uncertainty and disorder of the world around them. Order, cohesion, and a sense of completeness calms the mind and helps to decompress after all the other inputs that we need to process each day."
Job Titles:
- Award - Winning Interior Designer
- Designer List
Award-winning interior designer, Paul Schatz, draws inspiration from his many travels throughout the Latin countries of Spain, Portugal, and Mexico, and his interest in Moroccan studies of Islamic geometric art. The hand-crafted mosaics in his Miraflores and Legend collections for New Ravenna are complex, infinite patterns. Miraflores, which means "to watch flowers" in Spanish, has a storied legacy of palaces, monasteries and neighborhoods in Spain and South America. Each pattern is a contemporary abstraction of a classic motif.
Paul Schatz started his firm, Interior Design Imports, in 1977. He works with both residential and commercial projects throughout the United States and Mexico. He calls both California and Mexico home.
Job Titles:
- Founder
- Artist and Designer
Sara Baldwin, founder of New Ravenna, worked with Paul for many years, designing custom mosaics for elegant architectural projects. Of Paul, Sara says, "he has a wealth of inspired ideas from his tremendous love and experience with Mediterranean and Spanish Colonial architecture and interiors, and so for him to collaborate with us and create collections was a natural evolution."