With its lion’s head door knocker and elegant front walk, Robyn Waters’ home in Deephaven is a world away from rural Minnesota, where she grew up attending one of the state’s last one-room schoolhouses. Waters herself has come quite a long way from the little girl who used to tie Lord Hathaway, her tri-color Paint horse, to the merry-go-round every morning after riding him to school. Armed with thirty years of service at Target Corporation, culminating in her appointment to vice president of trend, design, and product development, Waters embarked on the consulting phase of her career in 2002, not just as a run-of-the-mill “trendspotter,” but rather a full-fledged “trendmaster.”
“It’s not about predicting the next trend,” Waters explained. “A trendmaster gives you the thirty-thousand-foot view from above—she tells you what the trend means.” And right now, the trend Waters is busy defining is paradox—the subject of her forthcoming book. “Look at the Hummer and the Mini,” she said, referring to the models she named in the title of her book. “Cars are getting bigger and smaller. It’s yin and yang.” Waters gestured toward a carving of the black-and-white symbol on her coffee table. Waters’ home is a trove of rare and eclectic objects from her travels around the world. She embraces paradox—devoting her life to analyzing the future while surrounding herself with relics from the past. “It all ties to my fascination with symbols, discovering the story behind the story.”
A tour through the trendmaster’s house revealed other ways in which Waters lives out her trend theories. A sandstone bust from Cambodia was carved by young landmine victims—an example, she said, of “social capitalism.” The antique apothecary chest on which it sat demonstrated how “everything old is new again.”
A stunning pair of hand-painted waist-high statues represented Waters’ interpretation of Maslow’s hierarchy of need, and her place in that order. “When you get to the top, you ask yourself what really matters. All of my things have meaning. They’re more than decorations … I bought these statues in Udaipur, India, and they represent a Hindu feast day, when the wealthy would bring offerings to the Rajistani—the lower castes—and wash their feet. That resonated with me.”
Bright red tassels are attached to the knob of every door in Waters’ home. When asked for their story, the trendmaster paused. “Actually,” she said, cracking a smile, “I found those at Target.”
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