Tobin Heminway began her career in film, achieving a masters degree from New York University’s celebrated film school, producing independent films, and running the annual GenArt Film Festival in Manhattan.
Tobin began her interior design work with Architectural Digest Top 100 designer Hilary Heminway. At Hilary Heminway Interiors, she collaborated on Western projects in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as well as on traditional homes throughout the East coast. Since founding Nest, Tobin has completed a diverse range of projects.
In describing her philosophy of design, Tobin notes: “Decorating is very much like making film: you start with the creative vision of the client and then attempt to
breathe life into that vision. The ultimate goal is to create a warm and inviting home that the client can call their own. A home is to be lived in; fabulous and functional at once. Nest directs the entire process, bringing together all of the different parts that make a house whole, and a home, blending traditional design with contemporary and whimsical elements.”
Elena Colombo is a classically trained sculptor and architectural designer, who owns and operates Firefeatures.com and Colombo Construction Corporation, a full service conceptual design and fabrication firm specializing in site specific, largescale works: fi re, water, and wind features, memorials, markers,
environmental art, and sculpture.
Colombo’s design work has appeared in The New York Times, Architectural Record, Interiors, British Elle Décor, InStyle
Home, Vogue Living, Martha Stewart, Garden Design, Flair, Country Home, Country Living, Robb Report, Domino, Mademoiselle, and Glamour magazines, and several recently published books: Waterside Living, Ancient and Modern, On Display, and Outdoor Spaces.
Colombo works directly with clients and architectural firms to create works that extend the realm of architecture further into the landscape. Colombo creates forms that are simple, elegant and ancient, which address our primal need for the elements earth, fi re, water and wind. She uses bronze, steel, stone, concrete and bone.
Colombo is currently manufacturing a series of interior and exterior fire features for public and private clients. The first in the series are the outsized outdoor fi rebowls. The four to sixfoot diameter steel bowls are fi tted with a 150,000 or 300,000 BTU burner, a connection for propane or natural gas, and a manual pilot ignition system for safe and controlled ignition.
Among Colombo’s early clients are hotelier Andre Balazs, who commissioned fi rebowls for the cocktail terrace at Sunset Beach, his Shelter Island hotel, for his private residence in New York, for the Raleigh and Standard Hotels in Miami Beach, and the new Standard NY in Manhattan; Lisa Marie Presley; Anne Rice; and the landmark Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood.
Firebowls are installed at Jonathan Adler’s Parker Palm Springs; Pebble Beach Golf Resort, The Lodge at Cordillera, Colorado; Marmol Radziner Prefab Prototype House, Desert Springs, California; Paul Hobbs Winery, Solage, Calistoga; Press Restaurant, St. Clement Vineyards, Benzinger Vineyards and Alpha Omega Winery in Napa Valley.
Colombo’s Firebowl has been nominated as ‘Best Outdoor Product’ by the 2004 Design and Decoration Awards, was the featured center piece in horticulturalist Jamie Durie’s gold medal winning garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show; and has recently been nationally certifi ed by OMNI-TEST Laboratories Inc.
“I am ever inspired by the elemental nature of fire, and the primal need we have for it. Fire serves both our need for beauty and our instinct to gather around a warm lighted place; it is a destination wherever it burns. For 600,000 years we have shared food, stories, and experiences around the fire; during the last hundred, we seem to have abandoned the hearth as the focus of community. I would like to restore the hearth as a ceremonial place and as a point of convergence.”
Prior to opening her company, Colombo worked extensively in print and television media as a director of award winning television commercials and print campaigns for Proctor and Gamble, IBM, Kellogg’s, Spalding, Oil of Olay, Chevy, Mattel, Caterpillar, and Nintendo.
After graduating from college, Elena began work at Broadcast Arts in model design and production on the set of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, learning storyboard production, animation, special effects rigging and art direction. She continued working in this design capacity for Woo Art International, MTV and VH1.
Education: Elena graduated from Trinity College, Hartford CT in 1984 with a BA in both fi ne arts and art history, with a concentration in architectural design, sculpture and etching. While at Trinity, she spent a year abroad in Rome at the Caesar Barbieri Center to study sculpture, painting and the Italian Renaissance.
Elena continued her education in the arts at the Museum School in Boston, Massachusetts. Elena lives and works in Brooklyn and Greenport New York.
