Pretty on the Inside
Matty Bennett hits his stride with a new design center.
By Alicia Garceau
Even if you haven’t heard of Matty Bennett, you’ve most likely seen his work. The bamboo wall and community table at Taste Cafe and Marketplace? That was him. The orange graphic wallpaper at Broad Ripple pizza joint ’Za? The galvanized-tin front counter at Posh Petal’s SoBro shop? Milano Inn’s new bocce-ball courts? All Bennett. The in-demand designer and his design studio, Sequences, have created many of the city’s hippest commercial spaces, but his current project is the grandest yet: the redevelopment of the National Car factory at 22nd Street and the Monon Trail. “I treat the factory like an old hot rod in the garage,” says the 34-year-old motorsports fan, who seized the opportunity to collaborate with Mike Higbee, president of DC Development Group, to turn the industrial space that’s well over 250,000 square feet into a Bauhaus-style complex called the National Design Factory. Bennett plans to retain the original brick and masonry concrete facades, hidden for years under aluminum-clad siding, and “add some elements of modern architecture to the existing classic industrial look.” When the final phase is complete in 2011, the National Design Factory could become the design vortex of the city—a hive of artists’ studios, design shops, decorating resources, meeting spaces, boutiques, a restaurant, and Sequences’ newest offshoot, a street-level design center called Sequi.
