When Alexa Colas realized she needed more music in her life, she found a simple solution.
She turned her living room into a record store. And a listening room. And a performance space. And the set of a PhillyCAM TV show.
And now, Colas is taking her living room on the road.
Her immersive art installation, Clubfriends Radio & Records: I Turned My Living Room Into a Record Store, is featured at the DesignPhiladelphia Festival, which runs through Oct. 12 with 68 events at galleries and other spaces all over the city.
For the festival, which is showcasing Colas as an emerging designer, she has recreated her living-room installation at the organization’s headquarters (formerly the Center for Architecture + Design).
That means moving a vintage sound system — including a Technics turntable and pair of giant Fisher speakers — along with Colas’ collection of over 300 LPs and CDs, and her estate sale-purchased mid-century modern furniture, like a leather sofa where festivalgoers can settle in to listen. The records lean heavy on electronic dance music but also include classical, jazz, R&B, and rock, or visitors can spin albums they bring themselves.
Colas, 30, grew up in Bergen County, N.J., and discovered DIY music culture while at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she attended a particularly memorable electronic dance party in the woods.
“That really changed my trajectory,” she said, while listening to an album by the Philly soul group the Stylistics that a guest had brought to her apartment. Two days later, Meetinghouse Movers hauled her belongings to the DesignPhiladelphia site at 1218 Arch St.
In 2016, while studying abroad and frequenting dance clubs in Amsterdam, Colas got hooked on vinyl culture, hanging around and interning at record store Zwart Goud, which translates as Black Gold.
Now, Colas only listens to physical media — no Spotify or other streaming services at Clubfriends. She insists she’s not an analog snob, though.
She sees CDs — like Janet Jackson’s Control, which she played for visitors last week — as having one great advantage: “You don’t have to get up and flip it.” Portable disc players are available for listeners to use with headphones at the Clubfriends installation.
Colas moved to Philly in 2021, working remotely as a YouTube strategist for Paramount-owned cable TV channels BET and VH1.
“It was a demanding job,” she says. Long hours put limitations on her ability to enjoy a music-filled nightlife with a like-minded community.
In 2023, she started throwing listening parties in her living room.
“I would just have friends come over, bring physical music, and we would gather together,” she says. “I didn’t want those connections that I made on the dance floor to be completely lost.
“So I was like, ‘Let me create a space where I could facilitate some of the same interactions I’ve had in the club, but in a daytime environment, and also in a substance-free environment.’”
The listening parties were fulfilling, but Colas was growing frustrated with her job, and last December, she quit. She still works part-time as a consultant.
“I wasn’t particularly resonating with the trajectory of my life,” she says. “I was uncertain of my future. Chasing corporate titles, which I still might do. But I wanted to explore and celebrate moments where I did feel certain. And a lot of those moments first happened on the dance floor, and then in record stores.”
She took a monthlong trip that included stops in dance music capitals like London and Berlin.
In Amsterdam, she visited her mentor, Zwart Goud owner Ilker Soylu, who records richly textured electronic music under aliases like Mastering Black.
He had a suggestion to add to her listening party concert: “Why don’t you sell records?”
So she did, launching Clubfriends Radio & Records in February, which exists as an Instagram feed, a PhillyCAM public access TV show where Colas interviews Philly cultural figures, and a performance space.
Clubfriends is by no means a conventional record store, like the many vinyl-centric shops around Philly, from Beautiful World Syndicate in South Philly to Main Street Music in Manayunk to Vinyl Chickie in Glenside.
It’s not a walk-in but a by-appointment experience, where visitors can purchase LPs curated by Colas, with LPs like Mastering Black’s Ten, or releases by Bark Culture, the band fronted by Philly-based Brazilian percussionist Victor Vieira-Branco, who performed at Colas’ apartment this year.
In May, Colas went to a DesignPhiladelphia panel on AI and the future of design at the W Hotel. There she connected with creative projects director Jelani Abdul-Aziz, who was interested in finding ways to bring music to the festival, now in its 21st year and drawing over 16,000 visitors in 2024.
Colas told him: “I’m designing a record store, I’m designing a place for people to congregate around music. Not necessarily to buy it, but because I want to give the experience I’ve had in record stores around the world and in Philly.”
That conversation led to Colas’ novel idea of actually moving her living room to the DesignPhiladelphia space, an undertaking that Rebecca Johnson, the nonprofit’s executive director, says the festival has never done before.
“Alexa is one of our emerging designers, and the installation she’s doing is a little quirky, but it’s a different way to think about design, and that’s what we’re excited to show.”
As the finishing touches were being put on recreating Colas’ living room, Johnson said, “We’re all blown away at how good it looks. It’s super mid-century modern, it’s cool. It’s just a vibe. You just want to sit there, and hang out there.”
Clubfriends’ creator plans to hang with festivalgoers at her installation all day, every day. “I’m going to be there 9 to 5,” Colas says. “It’s like a little performance art. I don’t know how I’m going to eat. I’ll sneak a protein bar behind the couch or something every day for 12 days.”
Before DesignPhiladelphia, Colas says she never considered herself a designer. And she still doesn’t, really. But there is a sense that the emerging designer tag feels appropriate.
“I’m designing my life,” she says. “That is really what this entire experience is. Going from a place where I didn’t feel the things that I wanted to feel, and figuring out a way I can integrate that into my life, and into my future. That’s what I’m doing.”
DesignPhiladelphia