Flux Design - the work

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Milwaukee Home: Ideas in Motion
August 2004

The guys at Flux Design make stuff. Concrete stuff. Steel stuff. Wood stuff. “I like making stuff, and it doesn’t matter what it is,” says Jeremy Shamrowicz, president and co-founder of Flux. “But I don’t get to do much of it now.”

That’s because Shamrowicz and his co-founder Jesse Meyer are too busy coordinating he installation of interiors for top Milwaukee hotspots like Terrace, Roots and Eve, not to mention an ever-growing list of high-end residential projects. Though its Web site defines Flux as a “custom design/build firm,” the real stuff of Flux is wild, sculptural design with a decided edge.

Think graceful: metal vines and budding branches curving around the bars, tables and ceiling panels at Eve. Think structural: winding concrete tables, steel fireplace and translucent kitchen windows at Sauce. Think steel: beams, garage-door panels and a rooftop patio at Terrace Bar, a new watering hole on Water Street.

Creatively, the company goes with the flow, as its name implies. “We create things,” Shamrowicz says. “We design and build things with pretty much any material you want, in any way you want it.”

Steel, marble, concrete, plastics, and wood are just some of the mediums they use. “They’re artists with power tools,” says Charlie Koenen, who consulted Flux about a simple kitchen remodel. “They’re able to work with what you want, but if you let them go, they’ll impress you.” What happened to Keonen’s Mequon living room could best be described as a Flux invasion: The ceilings and walls came down, and a steel tree was “planted” in the midst of it all. The spectacular result is a design that’s both functional – the tree holds up the roof in place of a load-bearing wall that was removed – and artistic, with the tree’s branches mimicked in the cabinetry’s opaque glass panels. “It’s like a blessing – pinch me, I don’t believe it” Koenen says. “I try to figure out a way to work here from home and bring everybody over here.”

Calling the Flux crew “artists” isn’t far from the truth. Shamrowicz and Meyer met while taking graduate-level classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and most of their employees also hail from their alma mater. Shamrowicz began studying sculpture, but ended up in industrial design. He and Meyer decided to take a chance on an empty loft space at 326 N Water St.: They forged together various scrap materials into furniture and sculpture pieces, chalked directions on the sidewalk, and opened the space at Gallery Night five years ago.

Fast-forward to today: Flux works out of a 20,000-square-foot fabrication facility in the Riverworks Business Park in Riverwest, and has done work in Chicago, New York and Florida. They’ve also attracted interns from as far away as France and Switzerland; their current intern discovered the Flux Web site from his home in Japan.

“We’ve had people say, ‘Shouldn’t you be somewhere else, like New York, California, Chicago or Atlanta? Milwaukee’s not ready for your deign,’” Shamrowicz says.

But he believes Milwaukee is ready for Flux designs, and points to Tangerine, a new nightspot on Milwaukee Street with a highly stylized interior that has a similar urban feel to Eve. “We didn’t work on it, but it’s a nice place,” Shamrowicz says, adding that such competition in not only healthy, but necessary, as Milwaukee’s design tastes continue to evolve.

Lest anyone think that Flux is only interested in making its mark in commercial design, Shamrowicz reminds that the firm began by crafting furniture, a very residential endeavor that keeps the company busy even today. But to label Flux pieces as furniture is a bit of an understatement – a Flux tree tale, for instance, features a flowing, organic foliage-covered piece of glass and a ropy metal trunk. Each individual branch of the trunk is a solid piece of steel bent and twisted by one of Flux’s design/build specialists.

“It’s not just a table – it’s an art piece, a family heirloom,” Shamrowicz says. At the moment, Flux designer are busy working on several bookcases – to match some tables – for a North Side couple, and they’re working on a 50-foot winding staircase and fireplace for a Third Ward condo.

They also just finished Flux’s new Gallery 326 space, with its own DJ booth, located inside the Flux fabrication plant. They’re also working on a personal project: a new home for Shamrowicz, his wife and son. “We’re going to call it a Flux Home,” Shamrowicz says. “Who knows, it could be a new division of Flux.”

By Jeanette Hurt
Photography by Todd Dacquisto
P56-61

Milwaukee Home, August 2004