Cool shop alert: Eurostyle Your Life, Seattle

There is an ongoing lifestyle shift at play in the US and beyond. This shift is all about favoring clothes and household objects from sources that rely on sustainable practices, recycled materials, and small production batches. I wrote back in September about a number of shops in Sydney that have followed this general impulse along quite divergent aesthetic lines.

Seattle’s Eurostyle Your Life is part of this global trend, with an eclectic product base focused somewhat on European small-scale designers. Eurostyle Your Life’s inventory includes clothes, bags, jewelry, children’s toys, greetings cards, and various decorative objects for the home.

One tried-and-true favorite at Eurostyle Your Life is its selection of remarkably elegant shoulder bags crafted out of inner tubes by Amsterdam-based designer Doreen Westphal. Another beautiful standby is a set of notebooks by Andrea Kohler, a Swiss bookbinder resident in Seattle.

Newer objects of note include jewelry made out of recycled silver and pewter by Potluck Paris, washable Pappelina rugs (made out of discarded plastic) from Sweden, Tyvek coats by New York’s Mau, leather bags by an Argentine designer named Guadalupe Martiarena, and “Frizzle Sizzles,” wildly colorful and very attractive children’s miniature play stove tops made out of reclaimed tins by the dynamic Switzerland-based rafinesse & tristesse.

The shop’s current location opened in summer 2009; from that point through this past summer, Eurostyle Your Life operated at two locations. The prior venue, in Seattle’s Fremont district, opened its doors in April 2008. The current location benefits from the next-door wood workshop, which is actually owned by the store’s proprietors, Leslie Conti and Urs Berger. The workshop churns out a steady stream of high-quality children’s wooden toys for the store.

The resulting product base is a mash-up of craftsy wooden objects and very modern, very sustainable reclaimed and recrafted goods. The latter impulse is nicely summed up by the tagline of Mau, one of EYL’s suppliers: “post industrial folk wear.”

Eurostyle Your Life is located at 2008 Westlake Avenue in Seattle’s evolving Denny Triangle neighborhood.