Bam! Kapow! I’m having a visceral flashback. With a swarm of stackable art, pop-art punches and bold posters, stepping inside a Vancouver hotel room reimagined by Doug Coupland is like doubling back to the writer and visual artist’s own astonishing house.
Of the hundreds of living rooms I’ve interviewed in, the one owned by the author of Generation X—and more than 10 other novels, as well as creator of myriad art exhibitions worldwide—was impossible to forget. Every nook and cranny of his 1960s post-and-beam, Ron Thom-designed home in West Vancouver revealed a collector’s haven of almost, as he put it, “everything you can’t download.”
Nods to his graphic-heavy brain included intricate models of Cold War missiles, concentric wood-art tables, novel pop culture paraphernalia, 3D creations and imagery. All of it choreographed alongside an abundance of buoys, discarded containers, and other flotsam from combed-through beaches on Haida Gwaii—some covered by him with gold resin—and hugged by a bucolic garden shared with his beloved Steller’s jays and a squirrel with one front leg. I moved gingerly in case of disturbing a piece in the packed home that served as an unequivocal volley to the declutter queen Marie Kondo: “What if everything gives you joy?”
Over the past decade since our last chat, however, he admits that his home’s become “a bit hoard-y.” We’re sitting on a B&B Italia sofa in room 1706 at the Fairmont Pacific Rim—curated by Coupland himself—as he recalls how this new project came about. Attending a party at the feted author and artist’s stuffed home, property developer Ian Gillespie (and owner of the hotel) broached the idea of Coupland redefining one of the Pacific Rim’s expansive rooms as Suite X. He didn’t skip a beat at the suggestion: “It felt super, and deeply personal,” he tells me. “From the get-go, it was enjoyable.”
Today, Coupland sweeps his arms over the “ta-da” vistas of Stanley Park, the Pacific Ocean, and his proverbial City of Glass from the 17-storey hotel floor, but the suite’s interior—which includes replicas and designs riffing obviously on his seminal era, as well as a few pieces loaned from his collection—are bound to seduce guests. With his past studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, art and Japan are writ large in a space where his personality is on full beam.
A one-of-a-kind lamp with white and blue square patterns brightens one corner, and a shiny surfboard echoing the geometric patterns he crafted down the side of a West End building hangs—bizarrely yet perfectly—above the bed. From collaborations with Fiorucci to his series on Marilyn Monroe, there are odes to his love (possibly to a point of “medical pathology,” he once quipped to me) of a scramble of colour and morphological art. Sipping on a can of pop, Coupland proffers, “There is no ambiguity: you’re in Vancouver. Secondarily, it’s Doug’s Vancouver—I’m deeply embedded in all this space here. It’s about making a hotel room that is sui generis.”
Indeed, there’s nothing like it at any turn: from the incongruous pairing of a cabinet of ’80s hairspray cans (Ultimate Hold! Breath of Spring!) behind smart bottles of The Macallan 12-year-old single malt and Empress 1908 Indigo Gin to an array of symbols and images—for example the plastic ice cream cone and old lucha libre photo placed behind a loo.
It’s easy to see how it took three months for Coupland to decide on the placement of literally hundreds of pieces, and he doesn’t miss a trick during this visit. “Where’s the Pepsi-Cola machine?” he interrupts our interview midflow to ask nearby staff the location of the bright yellow vintage dispenser. It is quickly reinstated on the glass table that doubles as a cabinet (itself a glorious feast of goodies such as a corded phone and a Mr. Peanut figure), and he sighs as if reunited with an old friend. “It’s like the centrepiece—the flower arrangement of the 21st century,” he enthuses, before his eye suddenly darts to the sun catching the Bocci lights, based on his multicoloured panel pieces and designed by Omer Arbel. “Just beautiful.”
Arriving today with even more of his own books under his arm to add to the curated library—one that already includes tomes on Virgil Abloh, Stanley Kubrick, and Depeche Mode among many others from the hotel’s Taschen collection, it’s obvious that occasional tinkering with the room must be part of the plan. Recently sourced Kraft-Jet Marshmallow pillows, he adds, are already waiting in the wings. “It’s like putting on a show that goes on for 10 years,” he suggests. His prolific oeuvre driven by a strong work-ethic DNA, Coupland admits that today he’s in a “complicated” phase about creating. “I find myself questioning whether it’s a good idea or a terrible idea,” he says, “but meanwhile, you have a ticking clock.… Anyway, it’s still happening.”
He admits there was one idea for Suite X he couldn’t realize. After a lifetime staying in hotels mainly for work (he loved The Hempel, the ultraminimalist, now defunct five-star behind a townhouse in Craven Hill Gardens, London, U.K.), Coupland recalls the large, cubed TVs of the ’90s, which were housed inside armoires that in turn became the place where guests dumped physical things they didn’t want housekeeping to see—such as pornography. “I’d love to find somewhere in here to do that, but I think hotels today are now ‘ditch-proof,’” he continues, with a laugh. “I could have done a museum of shame or something.”
It is the museum of Coupland, however. While everything has meaning for him, the lack of a legend (although there are plans for a book) leaves guests free to discover their own while simply revelling in a gen-X era. Perhaps with a life often immersed in the digital world, his Suite X and own home are an antidote to his oft-quoted slogan: I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain. I fumble over calling the room an analog testament to his life, but Coupland, of course, delivers the clincher at whiplash speed: “It’s a non-downloadable experience.”
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