Ellen Van Dusen featuring the Shanog sofa

My name is Ellen Van Dusen and I am a Designer and founder of Dusen Dusen - Brooklyn based clothing and home goods company.

My husband Ben, my son Woody and our dog, a Boston Terrier named

My parents are architects so I grew up deep in it. Every trip would be about the buildings we could visit and "how many stairs can we climb today?" because we need to go to the top of every tower. So it's always been a big part of my life, which I kind of took for granted.

An architect duo that I am intrigued by as of recent, is Arakawa & Gins. They are a couple - a Japanese man and an American woman - who had a philosophy that architecture could reverse the aging process if you use their insane method. It doesn't exactly work, they are both dead, but they made these insane buildings. I think they had a system of 36 super-saturated, bright, crazy colors. They'd have undulating floors made out of rammed earth. Everything was slightly off-kilter. I went and visited one of their buildings in the Hamptons. It was for sale a couple years ago, but they couldn't sell it, nobody wanted to buy it. I think they are historically significant. They have buildings in Japan that are a tourist attraction.

They also did, randomly, a stairwell at the Dover Street Market store here in New York.

There is one stairwell there that looks completely insane, and that's the one.

And contemporary designers that I look to are Chen [Chen] and Kai [Williams]. I just think they're so good. I think everything they do has never been done. They like to come up with these weird processes of making things that I think is very unique and special.

My dad, like I mentioned, makes furniture and so did my grandfather, so I have a lot of those types of things. I have a table my grandfather made me when I was six. It says

"Ellen" on it, which is cute. I also have jewelry boxes my grandfather made, and a birdhouse he made that's in the same room as the sofa. It kind of looks like a church, which is slightly weird but still very cute.

I just want things to last. That's pretty straightforward but so much furniture these days feels like it's built for you to have it for two years. I'd rather stick with something for 15 years instead of buying something that's mediocre.

As a designer I think it's super important to know how to work with your hands and to know how to understand the way things are made. I started my line just as a clothing line, and I was sewing everything by hand in my apartment. I think that taught me so much about production and materials and how hard it is to make something that looks like production quality. Sal think as somebody who is making products that go out into the world it's really important to know how to do it yourself and to understand the process.

I grew up doing so many handmade projects because of my parents. They are DIYers.

They are architects and my dad is a woodworker. So at any moment we'd be doing a project. I guess an early one that we did is we sponge-painted a bathroom. We cut out shapes and we sponge-painted the bathroom walls, it was really cute. We actually sponge-painted a room in our upstate house, too, to bring this full circle. We all cut out leaf shapes for upstate and did a leaf room. It's pretty wild-looking. It was really fun, a big group project.

I went to Ireland when I was 18. I was studying abroad and I had a friend who was studying abroad there so I went to visit him. I went to Dublin and I remember seeing an Alex Katz show. That was the first time l'd heard of Alex Katz and it really resonated. It was really beautiful, very green. I was 18 so I was experiencing it in a very different way than I would now. It was great, l'd love to go back sometime.

I think it is the most comfortable sofa l've ever sat on, and l've sat on a lot of sofas. For my place in Brooklyn, I feel like I sat on every single sofa in Manhattan when trying to make a choice. Eventually I didn't make a choice. I kept the same couch that l've had for 14 years. It's too hard.

This Shanog is leather and I got the toffee color, which I think is a classic. Usually l go for as much color as possible but I'm learning how to work with neutrals. It is a big thing,

actually. It's huge. It looks amazing in the space that it's in.

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This is for a house that I bought upstate with my younger brothers. The three of us went in on a house together, which has been really fun. The original owner was a

textile designer which obviously resonates with me. We had a room with no sofa. And that's where it lives now. That room has upstate vibes and gets so much amazing light.

The [previous] owner did a lot of the work himself; he was very crafty. There is one wall that's all distressed brick because he somehow found out that a ship that was carrying bricks capsized in the Hudson. And all these bricks were at the bottom of the Hudson so they were free and somehow available for him to take. I'm sure someone else retrieved the bricks but they were all free. So he got these bricks from the bottom of the Hudson and built part of the room using those bricks.