Design November-December 2018
THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
THE BRIGHT SIDE
Great spaces with second acts, from a row of 18th-century Dublin townhouses to a 19th-century former factory on Lake Como
# Dia m o n d A d dic t io n
Shards of Mirror Collection with Gigi Hadid
Design November - December 2018
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A Writer on Her Quest for the Lost Rose Set against a backdrop of sorcery and magic, a story of hope, trust and forgiveness unfolds in a captivating read by debut author Kummam Al-Maadeed. Weaving an adventurous tale that follows the characters as they travel across kingdoms and battle through chants and spells, Al-Maadeed leads a new genre of fiction writing for Qatari authors. By Debrina Aliyah
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The House Is the Story
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR KUMMAM AL-MAADEED.
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The director Luca Guadagnino has long dreamed of being an interior designer. Inside a former silk mill on Lake Como, he got his shot. By Guy Trebay Photographs by Henry Bourne
THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
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On the Cover
The Lost Rose cover
A guest bedroom at La Filanda on Lake Como, designed by Luca Guadagnino. Photograph by Henry Bourne.
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THINGS
People, Places & Things A new hotel in Arles, On Sacred Ground, The Italian Way.
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PEOPLE 21
New Dimension Curved edges show a softer side of contemporary furniture. Photographs by Anthony Cotsifas Styled by Chloé Guerbois
The Latin Revolution
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Six rising design studios from Central and South America are reviving their countries’ old techniques with even older materials. By Alice Newell-Hanson Photographs by Robert Ormerod
These Colors Run Large timepieces so good you’ll want to sleep in them. Photographs by Anthony Cotsifas Styled by Haidee Findlay-Levin
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Market Report Footed bowls. Photographs by Mari Maeda and Yuji Oboshi
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Shell Game Restaurants now serve one masterfully cultivated oyster after another, but has perfection cost us wild pleasure? By Wyatt Williams Photographs by Kyoko Hamada Styled by Suzy Kim
PLACES
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The Bright Side
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT ORMEROD; CHLOÉ GUERBOIS; TETSUYA MIURA
Whether jewel-toned or printed with North African-style patterns, fabrics fit for draping. Photographs by Azim Haidaryan Styled by Artsi Ifrach
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The Space Between In Japan, Suppose Design Office is combining disparate elements to create the country’s boldest new architecture. By Kurt Soller Photographs by Tetsuya Miura
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The Thing Glazed in shades of gray, a ceramic floor lamp stands tall. By Nancy Hass Photograph by Philip Cheung
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PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS QATAR Studio nights, Syria matters, absurdly deco, individual identities, russian treasures, a cheeky christmas, a brunch affair.
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Montblanc Celebrates Its Mall of Qatar Boutique Opening New boutique offers customers the largest range of expertly crafted, highly sought-after men’s and women’s accessories in Qatar.
PEOPLE QATAR 25
New Icons The definitive name of American cool style launches a classic capsule collection that goes back to his roots of iconic pop culture and Americana heritage. By Debrina Aliyah Photos courtesy of Tommy Hilfiger
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PLACES QATAR
A New Icon of Style and Grace When Halima Aden walked down Max Mara’s runway in Milan last September, clad in a beige leather trench with polka dots complete with a matching head scarf in the same print, the Arab press went into a frenzy. By Debrina Aliyah Photos courtesy of Max Mara
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Seven Wonders The Aeolian archipelago off the Sicilian coast is notoriously difficult to reach but the seven islands charm those who do. By Debrina Aliyah Photos courtesy of Twenty30Forty
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THINGS QATAR 55
Buck the Trend
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A Shoemaker’s Mark in Cinema With the late Salvatore Ferragamo as its protagonist, an exhibition traces the phenomenon of Italian migration to California and its influence on Hollywood. By Debrina Aliyah Photos courtesy of Salvatore Ferragamo
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ABOVE: PHOTO COURTESY OF MAX MARA; BELOW: SALVATORE FERRAGAMO
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Surprisingly versatile for its unconventional shape, the bucket bag bucks the trend in sturdier and roomier versions for fall. By Debrina Aliyah
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Page 21 Gustavo Quintana (left) and Estefanía de Ros, surrounded by their work: two mirrored Eclipse screens, the Observatorio floor lamp and the Lana chair.
Introduces
Photographs by Céline Clanet
with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, he designed a single-story house in the city’s Cypress Park neighborhood and filled it with objects of his own making. Once the exhibition closed, Pardo moved in. ‘‘I’m essentially appropriating architecture,’’ says Pardo, who now lives in Mérida, Mexico, in another structure that could be considered both art piece and functional living space — a ‘‘birdcage in the jungle’’ complete with a hand-painted mural and ovoid pendant lights. Starting next month at L’Arlatan hotel in the Provençal city of Arles, France, for which Pardo designed the interiors, guests can live like the artist. The hotel is owned by Maja Hoffmann, a Swiss entrepreneur and art patron who grew up outside Arles
in the Camargue. She is partly responsible for reviving the area, once a source of inspiration for Vincent van Gogh (and recently, the setting for Gucci’s 2019 resort collection), with her forthcoming 20-acre cultural center, Luma Arles, Left: the hotel’s tiled as well as the 19-room Hôtel du Cloître, a former pool is set within convent reimagined by India Mahdavi. Hoffmann’s the property’s private gardens, which were new hotel, set in a 15th-century palace, is nearby, designed by the Belgian mere steps from the Rhône. From the start, landscape architect Hoffmann knew she wanted Pardo — with whom Bas Smets. Right: one of Pardo’s painted doors, she’s worked before — to be the one to fill the inspired by a Japanese hotel’s dark and neglected rooms with, as she says, scroll painting from ‘‘lightness and joy.’’ the Langen Foundation.
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The artist Jorge Pardo makes work that not only lives outside the confines of the traditional white cube but also interrogates notions of space and setting and our place within them. One of his best-known pieces dates to 1998, when, for a show
To achieve this, Pardo expanded the size of his Mérida studio by 30 percent (almost everything inside the hotel, except the mattresses and some lobby furniture, was created or stored there) and put a Yucatán tile factory back in business. The hotel has an ancient Roman stone column and a sunny courtyard, but its myriad glazed tiles are the standout element. Pardo used nearly two million of them throughout the hotel’s four stories, alternating between 18 vibrant hues (tangerine, sunflower yellow, arctic blue) to create abstract mosaics along the walls and floors. On the ground floor, their glossy surfaces are juxtaposed with exposed stone, an effect heightened by the laser-cut plastic lanterns — which resemble bulbous sea creatures — floating above. More than 100 doors in the hotel, though, are covered not in tiles but in Pardo’s paintings. For these he looked to van Gogh’s more Japonisme-inflected works and to ‘‘random photos on my iPhone,’’ he says. He started by projecting digitally scrambled versions of these images onto the doors and then painting them in, adding improvisational flourishes as he went. ‘‘I like the idea of machines painting, but with me as the operator,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m constantly editing the image.’’ — Gisela Williams
On Sacred Ground
GARDEN GNOMES — those statues of petite men with pointy red hats — started appearing on the lawns of European aristocrats in the 1800s. A century later, they were the epitome of American suburban kitsch. Now, the artist Paula Hayes has given them new life in her sculpture series ‘‘Gnomes.’’ Hayes, who trained at Parsons School of Design and is based in Brooklyn and upstate New York, often references the natural world and plays with expectations about what qualifies as art. A decade before millennials decided they loved plants and magic, she showed handblown glass terrariums filled with crystals and succulents at Salon 94 gallery and the Museum of Modern Art. She’s also designed actual gardens for the likes of architect Rafael Viñoly, and she conceived the living wall that stands where Picasso’s ‘‘Le Tricorne’’ curtain once hung in Manhattan’s Seagram Building. Her new work consists of lumpy, bulb-shaped pieces, rendered in clay and then cast in aluminum, which she paints in cheery shades (periwinkle, chartreuse). ‘‘Some resemble sand castles, while others Right: Paula reflect the hand movements of Balinese dance,’’ says Hayes’s Hayes. ‘‘But they are all unified in their purpose as ‘‘Gnome 4’’ (2017) guardians of the earth.’’ — Alicia Brunker in bikini blue.
RUNWAY REPORT
Sky-high hemlines signal the return of legs.
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The Italian Way THE DEATH OF the furniture designer Luigi Caccia Dominioni — in 2016, at age 102 — closed the chapter on the generation that rebuilt Italian design after World War II. But now, after several years of a Day-Glo-saturated Memphis revival, the understated, elegant designs of Caccia Dominioni and his Milanese contemporaries feel fresh once again. Next month, 25 of the designer’s pieces will also be available once more, thanks to a reissue by the modern furniture company B&B Italia. ‘‘His work shows a rare combination of expression and technical mastery,’’ says Giorgio Busnelli, the president of B&B Italia, which relied on Caccia Dominioni’s sketches to ensure the pieces — which include seating, tables and lamps and were first released between 1947 and 1979 — are true to the originals, down to their rich materials (brass, glass, chrome) and fluid flourishes. There’s an outdoor iron-framed chair with sensually curved armrests, a removable reading lamp that rests on the arched back of a studded velvet sofa (pictured below) and a spare columnar stool whose frame wraps delicately around the sitter. A lyrical counterpoint to their more sober midcentury American equivalents, the pieces are a testament to the unique vision of their maker, who, though usually shy, once said of his fellow Italian designers, ‘‘Quite simply, we are the best.’’ — Heather Corcoran
BEAUTY TOUR
AMAN, THE HOTEL group known for its unerring attention to detail — and for stunning properties truly of a piece with their environment, whether a tiny peninsula in Montenegro or a rocky desert in Utah — will soon add skin care to its offerings. Ranging from creams to serums to oils, the 30-product line incorporates high-quality ingredients harvested from many of the places Aman calls home: There’s jasmine from India, cold-pressed argan oil from
Morocco and palo santo from the Dominican Republic. It was conceived by Aman’s chairman and C.E.O., Vladislav Doronin, who felt it was important to make the formulations as effective as they are beautifully perfumed. Each of the three face mists is infused with a different metal — gold to regenerate, copper to heal and silver to calm — and the Maca Cleansing Powder is rich in magnesium, a natural sleep aid thought to combat jet lag. This being Aman, the sculptural matte-black faux-bois jars and bottles, designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, were hardly an afterthought. They’ll be available at the resort spas and online starting next month. Aman ‘‘converted the course of the history of architecture, in a way, and may have even changed our definitions of happiness,’’ Kuma says of the brand’s commitment to wellness, on which this new venture (coinciding with Aman’s 30th anniversary) expands — while offering a taste to those unable to get away. aman.com/skincare. — Jamie Rosen
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PAULA HAYES, ‘‘GNOME 4’’ IN BIKINI BLUE, 2017 (PHOTOGRAPH: ETHAN HERRINGTON); WEICHIA HUANG; AMAN; B&B ITALIA (2). ILLUSTRATIONS: ILYA MILSTEIN
PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS
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T QATAR INTRODUCES
Studio Nights EIGHTEEN ARTISTS, a converted former fire house, and an evening of artistic exchange and discourse. The Open Studio Night initiative is Qatar Museum’s latest effort in connecting artists with the community by providing a space for dialogue and interaction. The artists, who are all part of the The Fire Station Artist in Residence programme, had their current works on display which included a variety of media including fine art, sculpture and photography. “The Open Studio Night is one of our most popular events because it allows the public to directly interact with the artists and explore their worlds. I am incredibly impressed with the works produced by the artists in residence and I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with by the end of the programme next year,” says director of The Fire Station, Khalifa Al Obaidly. The Fire Station offers artists in Qatar the chance to immerse themselves in their work for a period of nine months. The residency provides them with individualized studios and the chance to collaborate with fellow creatives and find ways to develop and explore their own techniques. The art space occupies an original fire station that was built in 1982. Following its decommissioning in 2012, it was converted for contemporary use, in a design by the Qatari architect, Ibrahim Mohamed Jaidah. It includes extensive studio spaces, alongside a theatre, a cafe and gallery spaces hosting local and international exhibitions.
Fire Station offers artists in Qatar the chance to immerse themselves in their work.
— Debrina Aliyah
Absurdly Deco BOLD, VIBRANT with a little dash of absurdity is how Juliana Bass describes her Fall 2018 collection – a colorful departure from her past works and an uncommon proposition for the cold season. The Tennessee native who cut her teeth in New York now calls Berlin home after having fallen in love with the German cosmopolitan’s cultural and artistic energy. “Berlin has given me this incredible mix of freedom and focus.” says Bass. “I’m able to design from my authentic self.” The deco geometry prints of the new collection were developed in collaboration with Berlin-based artist, Peer Kriesel, to express a juxtaposition of feminine strength and whimsical delight. “This collection reflects the idea of fighting absurdity with absurdity. Not just in direct relation to political climates or battles of inequality, but within ourselves as well and through our relationships with others. It’s about stepping out of bounds,” the designer explains. The collection is now available in all Per Lei Couture boutiques across Qatar. — Debrina Aliyah
Syria Matters SYRIA’S RICH ARCHITECTURAL and cultural history comes to the forefront in a new exhibition to mark Qatar’s iconic Museum of Islamic Art’s 10-year anniversary. “Syria Matters”, a multi-medium exhibition from ancient artifacts to immersive innovative renderings, highlights Qatar Museum’s plea to safeguard Syria’s unique cultural legacy. “We are marking our tenyear anniversary with this major exhibition as part of our commitment to safeguarding the rich culture that has been tragically lost in the civil war. Through this exhibition, MIA hopes to remind people why Syria matters and why preserving its heritage and legacy should be of the utmost importance,” explains director of the museum, Dr Julia Gonnella. Co-curated by Gonnellaand Rania Abdellatif, the exhibition features more than 100 artefacts from MIA and other Qatar Museums institutions, notably the Orientalist Museum, as well as the Qatar National Library and the Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Museum. International loans were secured from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the Louvre in Paris, Berlin’s Museum of Ancient Near Eastern Art, the Berlin State Library, the British Library and the Türk ve Eserleri Müzesi in Istanbul. The museum will also hold performances, lectures, workshops, family activities and book discussions to raise awareness about Syria. The exhibition will run until 30 April 2019. — Debrina Aliyah
Juliana Bass Fall 2018 colorful collection.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP :PHOTOS COURTESY OF FIRE STATION, JULIANA BASS, QATAR MUSEUM OF ISLAMIC ART’S
Cavour Vase, which is the most spectacular example of a very small group of richly decorated cobalt blue and purple made in Syria in the late 13th century.
FEATURING FIFTEEN SENIOR and junior artists from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Arts in Qatar, W Doha Hotel & Residences presents “Minber”, at the brand-new creative space ART 29. “Minber”, meaning “the stage” in Arabic, celebrates the technical prowess of contemporary artists by putting the spotlight on the behind-the-scenes of their work. The students’ years of research and creative practice that reflects individual identities and inspirations come together in a gallery of stirring compositions. “W Doha has become known for its commitment to support emerging local and regional talent. We are always looking for opportunities to provide young, aspiring artists a platform to express their artistic style. We are very excited to introduce a new journey of creative experience and the exploration of fifteen diverse emerging artists coming together to create one unique voice,” explains Wassim Daaje, general manager of the hotel. Minber showcases how the students employed a variety of approaches, materials and techniques in their paintings and printmaking to tell their personal story. The art gallery also provides a snapshot of each of the artist’s conceptual and aesthetic backgrounds and what inspired them to visualize each of their personal pieces. — Debrina Aliyah
Russian Treasures THE QATAR-RUSSIA 2018 YEAR of Culture will close with an exhibition capturing a unique in-depth examination of a key period in Russian art. Sponsored by Russian oil company Rosneft, the exhibition “Russian Avant-garde: Pioneers and Direct Descendants” is organized in partnership with the State Tretyakov Gallery and curated by the Head of its Contemporary Art Department Irina Gorlova, showcasing some of the most influential and significant figures during a critical period in Russian artistic and cultural development. With 81 masterpieces on display, art lovers and enthusiasts can immerse themselves in the bold experiments that defined early 20th - century Russian art, and a historic journey into the works of pioneers including Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova and Mikhail Matyushin. The exhibition also highlights artworks created by the “direct descendants” during the second wave of Russian avant-garde art. During this era, between the 1950s-70s, Yuri Zlotnikov, Vyacheslav Koleichuk, Francisco Infante-Arana, Rimma Zanevskaya- Lyubov Popova (1889 - 1924), Painterly Sapgir and Mikhail Roginsky amongst others shifted their focus mainly to Architectonics, 1918, Oil movement, light and sound as fundamental elements of art. The exhibition will on canvas, 62 x 44.5 cm. State Tretyakov Gallery. run until 3 February 2019. — Debrina Aliyah
A Brunch Affair
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A junior artist from Virginia Commonwealth University School of Arts in Qatar, at W Doha Hotel & Residences.
MARKET BY JEANThe new brunch is GEORGES brings a new offering a definition of brunch to spectacular the table with a new spread of some of the concept to indulge and chef’s main entertain. The new courses. brunch at Market will offer a spectacular spread of some of the chef’s main courses and Parisian seafood platters, served to guests at their tables in addition to the open buffet. With live entertainment including a play area for children, the brunch is set to welcome families for a weekend treat. “The food scene in Qatar continues to thrive, people very much enjoy the social aspect of eating out as families or groups of friends at the weekend. We hope that our selection of brunch dishes with a Parisian twist resonates with our guests. I am personally looking forward to welcoming new and returning diners to experience and enjoy the eclectic brunch and warm vibes,”explains Wassim Daaje, general manager of the W Doha & Residences, home to the restaurant. — Debrina Aliyah
A Cheeky Christmas UP YOUR CHRISTMAS sweater game by adding a touch of Italian irony to the infamous fiddly sweater tradition with Philosophy by Lorenzo Serafini. The Italian label has launched a limited-edition capsule collection dedicated to the holidays with a special focus on the Christmas sweater. The “Dear Santa” collection features a curated selection of apparel and accessories in festive colors and motives but made tonguein-cheek with stylistic elements and slogans. The sweaters, crafted from merino wool, reads“Dear Santa, I’ve Been Naughty”, and “Team Santa, 25” in reference to sports pop culture. For an extra touch of stylistic irony, the capsule includes inappropriately out-of-weather but fashionably inseason high - waist denim shorts, hoodies and scarves. — Debrina Aliyah The “Dear Santa” collection features a curated selection of apparel.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP :PHOTOS COURTESY OF W DOHA HOTEL & RESIDENCES,LORENZO SERAFINI, W DOHA & RESIDENCES, QATAR MUSEUM OF ISLAMIC ART’S
T QATAR INTRODUCES PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS QATAR
Individual Identities
NEW BEGINNING
Montblanc Celebrates Its Mall of Qatar Boutique Opening UNVEILING the Neo² retail concept currently being rolled out worldwide, the new Montblanc boutique in Mall of Qatar offers an immersive retail environment reflecting Montblanc’s constant quest for purposeful and aesthetic innovations. Visiting Qatar for the opening, Montblanc Senior Vice President of Sales, Julien Renard inaugurated the new boutique at an official ribbon cutting ceremony on Monday, 22nd October, alongside Awn Zureikat, Chief Operating Officer of Ali Bin Ali Luxury. Among the guests were President of Montblanc Middle East, India and Africa, Franck Juhel, a select group of VIP customers and friends of the house who enjoyed an exclusive reception and launch of the 1858 Collection. Managed by Montblanc’s longstanding partner, Ali Bin Ali Luxury, the 155m² boutique was designed by French
interiors architect Noé Duchaufour-Lawrance, and offers a pure and uncluttered aesthetic, mixing black, white and wood for a contemporary look and feel. A selection of fine materials pay tribute to the Maison’s rich heritage in writing instruments, timepieces, leather goods, men’s accessories and jewellery. Watchmaking is brought to life through the use of bronze-sheen brass, leather and wood; black leather and walnut wood reflect the Maison’s leather goods expertise; while lacquers and fine metals evoke writing instruments and jewellery. Of interest to watch enthusiasts and modern-day explorers, Montblanc’s recently launched 1858 Collection of timepieces was inspired by the legendary professional Minerva watches, meant for military use and mountain exploration. The collection includes an 1858 Automatic, 1858 Automatic Chronograph and 1858 Geosphere Model 19
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MONTBLANC
New boutique offers customers the largest range of expertly crafted, highly sought-after men’s and women’s accessories in Qatar.
customers in Qatar with the latest of its innovations and high quality products reaching out for them at different locations across the country. Renard, who was recently visiting Qatar to open the new branch of Montblanc, stressed that he was very happy to see the great success of the brand in Qatar. It has been almost 10 years since he last visited the country and many great achievements have been seen there during this time. “Qatar has made great achievements in many fields, most apparently in infrastructure and construction, the economy of the country is booming and Montblanc is keen to be up to the highest expectations of its customers in the country,” he said. He expressed his happiness at the opening of the new branch, pointing out that Montblanc has story enjoyed a long success with its local longstanding partner, Ali Bin Ali Luxury. He said that Montblanc has a good heritage of making luxury writing tools. This links strongly to the Arabic writing traditions and the love of Qataris for such tools. Qataris have also good taste and liking for quality luxury items, making the country a considerably good place for high end brands such as Montblanc. Besides, Qatar is a good market with customers from
different nationalities and backgrounds living the country. “With its origins deeply rooted in the culture of handwriting, Montblanc continues to assert its cultural commitment around the world with the creation of wide-ranging initiatives to promote arts and culture in many forms, while honouring the modern day patrons who support the advancement of the arts,” he said. In the meantime, Montblanc is keen to embrace the latest advancements in the digital technology included Montblanc augmented paper, where handwriting on paper is digitalized and transferred automatically to other smart devices, gaping the link between traditional writing methods and digital entries. Awn Zureikat, Chief Operating Officer of Ali Bin Ali Luxury, said: “We are delighted to be opening the doors to this exceptional new boutique, and expanding Montblanc’s presence in Qatar. We greatly value our long-term partnership with the Maison, and have confidence in its continued success in our market thanks to our loyal and discerning Qatari customers.” The new Montblanc boutique is located in the VIP area of Mall of Qatar, Jahhaniya Interchange, Al Rayyan. — Ayman Ali
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MONTBLANC
NEW BEGINNING PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS QATAR 20 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
and combines materials such as special alloy of bronze that evolves over time with innovative and useful in-house complications. The new boutique also showcases a wide selection of the Maison’s new and limited edition writing instruments including the recently launched Writer’s Edition Homage to Homer, paying tribute to the poet best known for the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as the Meisterstuck Le Petit Prince Special Edition, celebrating Antoine de SaintExupéry’s much loved literary classic. A wide range of leather goods will also provide the perfect gift for today’s styleconscious professional or urban traveller, offering sleek modern design and refined functionality. Montblanc’s brand new line of #My4810 trolleys also brings together Italian savoir-faire, German mechanics and Japanese high-performance technology to deliver the most efficient and sophisticated travel solutions. Commenting on the opening, Julien Renard said: “Montblanc is constantly looking to elevate the shopping experience for our customers and our new boutique design showcases our extensive product collections in an unprecedented way, inviting our clients to a journey of discovery into the heart of the Montblanc universe.” Montblanc is keen to provide its
THE LATIN REVOLUTION
Some of the most exciting work in design today is being made by these six pioneering Central and South American studios, which are using ancient materials (volcanic rock!) to make new shapes and, in doing so, offering both a rebuke to colonial design and a revival of centuries-old craftsmanship techniques. By Alice Newell-Hanson Photographs by Robert Ormerod
WHAT MIGHT A HOME in Guatemala look like today, wondered the designers Gustavo Quintana and Estefanía de Ros, if the country had escaped colonization? The couple, who founded the Guatemala City-based studio Agnes in 2016, spent two years researching pre-Columbian craftsmanship to inform a new line of furnishings that offers a kind of aesthetic revisionist history, one in which Mayan civilization evolved with Agnes less European interference. The collection, which Guatemala City launches this fall, is replete with ancient iconography: A polished aluminum table lamp is shaped like a stepped pyramid; a console, carved from pitch-black marble and volcanic rock, references a Mayan altar. But it’s not just the symbolism that’s ancient; it’s the materials as well. The studio’s preferred one is volcanic rock — a near inevitability, says the 28-year-old Quintana, as the small country has more than two dozen mostly dormant volcanoes. The duo recently visited Lake Atitlán, a magnificent water-filled crater four hours west of the city, where Guatemalan stonecutters have worked for generations in the shadow of the area’s three volcanoes. ‘‘We want to really understand how they work so we can create new forms based on the tradition,’’ says de Ros, 35, Quintana (left) noting that they’ve also collaborated with artisanal and de Ros, wicker makers in the country’s remote western surrounded by their highlands to build a series of round woven screens, work: two mirrored Eclipse screens, as well as an all-female weaving collective in the Observatorio the central mountain town of Momostenango to floor lamp and the design Agnes’s color-blocked wall hangings. Lana chair.
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People
DESIGN REPORT
DESIGN REPORT PEOPLE 22 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
THE 29-YEAR-OLD designers Marcos Altgelt and Tasio Picollo met while working as assistants at two Buenos Aires design companies: Altgelt at the experimental architecture firm Normal — which builds large-scale, conceptual interior installations — and Picollo at La Feliz, the city’s chicest lighting boutique. On weekends, they would meet (along with a third friend, Segundo Denegri) to prototype designs for furniture made by rotating and repeating a single shape. Experiments with isosceles triangles formed the basis of their debut Alpina collection, comprising Ries an armchair, a desk, a shelf and a dining Buenos Aires, Argentina table that share the same finger-thin black steel frames and turquoise Formica tops. Two years ago, Altgelt and Picollo quit their jobs to start the studio Ries. Working out of an abandoned house formerly used as a turntable factory near the city’s Chacarita Cemetery, Altgelt and Picollo focus on feather-light furniture inspired by geometry and pattern theory: powder-pink rhomboid desks that can be tessellated across a room; delicately proportioned white steel chairs with hexagonal, square and round seats. With these pieces, they join a cohort of young designers forging a new avant-garde in Argentina, making work that contrasts with the country’s heavily Europeaninfluenced design tradition. ‘‘At Ries’s Picollo (left) some point, I think it’s healthy not and Altgelt with their Bee tables, Alpina to look at everything else that’s desk, Janus wall mirror happening,’’ Altgelt says. and Aro chair.
THERE’S A SPACE in design, Rodrigo Bravo believes, for objects that offer more questions than answers. The round stone vessels in the 37-year-old designer’s Müll series, for example, Rodrigo Bravo function as individual containers but also Santiago, Chile combine into an abstract tabletop sculpture that evokes (depending on your reference point) either an undulating Ettore Sottsass vase or an ancient cairn. As with Bravo’s other objects and furniture, they appear starkly contemporary while referencing centuries-old practices: His wonky stone Tacitas cups and bowls appear as if they were laboriously made to look imperfect even though they are, in fact, hewed from 500-year-old, river-tumbled Andean rocks. Bravo’s Santiago studio — which he started in 2005 with his brother Matias and sister-in-law Sandra Pope — abides by a philosophy that he calls ‘‘geographic design,’’ one that requires using ‘‘materials from our land and techniques that belong to our people.’’ Many of his earliest pieces incorporated Chilean hardwoods such as mañío, coihue and lenga, which grow only in Patagonia. But his latest obsession is combarbalita, a mottled red volcanic rock found exclusively in arid Central Chile. To create his Monolith Series, a set of 80 tiny cups, pitchers and dishes made from the rock, he collaborated with an artisan in the remote town Bravo with his Müll and Monolith of Combarbalá, where internet marble vessels, access is scarce, by sending a white plaster 001 sketches to the craftsman on Lamp for Decimal, his Tronco table the local bus, then receiving and, on the floor, a prototypes back, weeks later, copper La Familia on the return route. container.
Sofía Véliz Guatemala City
THE 26-YEAR-OLD industrial designer Sofía Véliz runs a multidisciplinary practice driven by her taste for unusual materials: She has used asphalt as lacquer for her abstract paintings and salt to crystallize the surface of her aluminum pots. Guatemala may not have a long history of industrial design, but it does have a rich tradition of craftsmanship, and Véliz sees that dichotomy as an invitation ‘‘to push the boundaries’’ — or, rather, to figure out which boundaries exist in what she calls a ‘‘very conservative society.’’ Véliz was born in Mexico City, where her family had moved as political exiles in the early 1980s. They returned to Guatemala City when she was 4, but her childhood remained nomadic: She credits her parents’ complete disinterest in possessions for giving her the impetus to attend design school. While studying at Rafael Landívar University, she discovered such freewheeling international designers as Max Lamb, Maarten Baas and Martino Gamper, all of whom motivated her to ignore convention when founding her studio in 2016; good design, she realized, didn’t have to mean the shiny furniture of her middle-class schoolmates. It Above: Véliz in her studio with a collection of her could be one of her thickly knotted work. Right: the designer’s sculptures, crafted from pouredworkspace, with her (from left) concrete arcs still scuffed from their volcanic stone Ornamentos de Escritorio, red lacquered molds. ‘‘Since there’s not a strict Caléndula lamp, blue Sendero design legacy here, there are no strict sculpture and totemic Tunel rules to follow,’’ she says. Sobre Pilotes.
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Good design, she realized, didn’t have to mean the shiny furniture of her middle-class schoolmates.
DESIGN REPORT PEOPLE 24 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
WHILE HALFHEARTEDLY STUDYING for a business degree in Caxias do Sul, his hometown in Southern Brazil’s wine country, the 31-yearold designer Guilherme Wentz would often procrastinate by surfing. Getting in touch with nature, he says, is what inspired him to enroll in design school instead; eight years later, in 2016, he created an eponymous line of spare furniture and lighting that includes Guilherme Wentz high-backed caned chairs made from São Paulo and indigenous caramel-colored jequitibá Caxias do Sul, Brazil wood and louche smoked-glass end tables, all informed by the Brazilian coast. ‘‘Not that colorful cliché,’’ Wentz clarifies, but the ocean’s muted winter tones. (An old surfing buddy, Rafael Gehrke, oversees production at two studios, in São Paulo and Caxias do Sul.) For decades, Brazilian design has been dominated by the wood-heavy Modernism of midcentury masters like Joaquim Tenreiro and Sergio Rodrigues, but Wentz has eschewed that legacy in favor of references to his country’s highly varied terrain: The Tombo lamp, a mouthblown glass orb with a brass setting and a sinuous cotton-wrapped cord, is intended to lie across a table like a wind-fallen branch, while the inky steel Bowl Table, which curves to accommodate a heavy white ceramic bowl, Wentz with suggests an eroded rock pool. his Vidro table, Tela Every product, Wentz says, Lounge chair and, next to it, his Postaims to connect Brazil’s Tropical vase ‘‘tropical lifestyle to luxury made of copper and and minimalism.’’ sucupira wood.
WORKING MAINLY IN brass and steel, Pedro Paulo Venzon recasts pieces made in the aesthetic of Brazil’s 1950s and ’60s Modernist heroes — including the Italian-born architect Lina Bo Bardi and the avant-gardist Flávio de Carvalho — into sharply silhouetted, unorthodox pieces. Paulo Venzon, 30, who has called this approach mestizo (after the term for people of mixed ethnicity), considers it a way to explain his work’s various tensions — between old and new, domestic and global — as well as his own identity as ‘‘Brazilian, gay and the grandson of immigrants’’ from Africa, Italy and Portugal. His rigid chairs and geometric end tables, though fine-lined, are lively and bristling with ideas: He calls his Leviana chair a ‘‘queer chair,’’ because of its glossy black leather seat atop steel legs that curve outward in a welcoming spread. There’s also his Pedro Paulo Venzon oak-topped Giro side table, whose Florianópolis, Brazil conjoined but contrasting metal legs are inspired by a synecdoche. Paulo Venzon grew up in Southern Brazil making things: His father is a woodworker, his mother is a seamstress. But his interest in design ‘‘arose as much from an academic perspective as from desire,’’ he says. After founding his studio in 2013, he earned his master’s degree in aesthetics at the New University of Lisbon, where he spent is an effort to consider and resist the aesthetic Paulo Venzon with two a year researching Portugal’s aftermath of that country’s invasion of Brazil of his chairs, colonial design tradition. Today, in 1500. The curved back of his Pudica chair, Avoa (left) and Pudica; much of Paulo Venzon’s work for example, mirrors the ogival arches of the his Moca table.
16th-century missionary churches still prominent in many Brazilian cities, though its swooping frame and carbon steel read like a joyful rejection of religious doctrine.
NEW ICONS
ICON as the new mark features across the pieces in the collection.
New Icons The definitive name of American cool style launches a classic capsule collection that goes back to his roots of iconic pop culture and Americana heritage.
IN RECENT SEASONS, Tommy Hilfiger the designer and the brand has been on a trailblazing campaign in bringing back the vibrancy of pop culture into its collections, both by much-hyped collaborations and staging of fashion shows in new cities. From New York, the hyperstaged TommyNow shows incorporating racing elements and technologies - a sport dear to the designer’s heart – has since made pitstops in Los Angeles, London, Milan and this fall, in Shanghai. A constant presence is the unmistakable aesthetic, referenced by the colors of white, blue and red as Hilfiger’s continuous ode to America and its icons that has served as his pillars of design since the launch of the brand. For Fall 2018’s capsule collection that is simply named Icons, Hilfiger revisits well-loved classics that has defined the brand’s embodiment of American pop culture across the decades.
“It’s a celebration of our iconic flag logo and a reinterpretation of some of our most classic styles from the archives with a modern twist,” the designer says. Familiar wardrobe staples, including the Oxford shirt, parka and puffer jacket, are given a contemporary makeover and presented in oversized silhouettes, pleated constructions, luxe fabrics, contrast color-block stripes, and a warm navy, burgundy and gold color palette. “The metallic gold puffer jacket and Arctic-inspired parka are wardrobe essentials that really stand out from the crowd with their bold colors and shapes,” the designer explains. A final touch of tribute, as if a gesture of homecoming, sees the brand’s signature American flag logo tinted in a new minimalist gold design. Working on the capsule, Hilfiger reflects that Martin Luther King 25
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOMMY HILFIGER
By Debrina Aliyah
NEW ICONS PEOPLE QATAR
Harlow and Baldwin behind the scenes, shooting for the global campaign of the new capsule collection.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOMMY HILFIGER
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Jr has always been his ultimate icon. “He shaped our history, culture and attitudes. I have the utmost respect for his passion, devotion and what he stood for as a leader,” he explains. To echo these sentiments, the designer has always valued hard work, passion and dedication in his pursuit in inspiring others. “It is important for others to realize that with these values, you can achieve anything. I love mentoring emerging designers and trend-setting talents by sharing lessons I learnt in my own career,” he explains. Perhaps it is this dedication that got the ball rolling in the brand’s recent enterprise in all things new and now, including immediate retail availability after shows and collaborations with a new generation of influencers. “They are leading the way for the next generation of Tommy women, approaching everything with confidence, dedication and optimism,” Hilfiger notes. And in the case of Hailey Baldwin and Winnie Harlow who have both been named ambassadors for the Icons capsule collection, “they captivate their audience with their powerful drive and inner fire,” Hilfiger says. Baldwin’s passion and dedication are reflected in her 12 years of training as a ballerina before starting her modeling career at the age of 16.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Harlow’s
vocal outreach on inclusiveness and positivity caught Hilfiger’s attention, The original sketches from Hilfiger on the creation of the collection.
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOMMY HILFIGER
“My first memory with Tommy was walking for him in my first show for New York Fashion Week. Baldwin recalls. The co-host of Drop the Mic on TBS cites comfort as a big part of her style – something that she is looking forward to in the capsule. “I love the snow-white-colored fisherman sweater with the statement Tommy crest. It’s one of my favorite looks from the brand’s archives, with the gold and cabernet details adding an elevated twist. It’s perfect to keep warm on chilly evenings. The cropped hoodie is a wardrobe essential to combine with high-waist jeans for a cool, tomboy look,” she says. Harlow caught Hilfiger’s eye through her vocal outreach and passion on celebrating individuality and positive body image. A prominent public speaker with a highly followed TEDx Talk on perceptions of beauty, Harlow embodies Hilfiger’s vision on breaking conventions and stereotypes. “My mom is a huge inspiration to me. Growing up, she always encouraged me to chase my dreams and never stopped believing in me,” Harlow says. “I’ve always believed in the power of embracing who you are, so I am proud to partner with an incredible designer who truly shares this spirit”.
PEOPLE QATAR
THE ARTIST’S LIFE
When Halima Aden walked down Max Mara’s runway in Milan last September, clad in a beige leather trench with polka dots complete with a matching head scarf in the same print, the Arab press went into a frenzy. By Debrina Aliyah
WITH THEIR SMARTPHONES OUT, the editors were live-sharing snapshots of the newly minted model whose outfit did not look one bit as if it had to be appropriated to seem modest. In fact, the chicly put styled head-wrap had appeared on the runway before Halima Aden, ushering in a style narrative for Max Mara’s SS19 collection. Modesty is a subtle element, and a matter of class and taste in the modern fashion landscape. But it helps to have somebody like Aden at the forefront flying the flag not only from a style viewpoint but also from a human perspective. Her meteoric rise has as much to do with being a style icon as a symbol of
breaking barriers and giving a voice to the marginalised in a world that seems to be moving one step forward and two backwards on the issue of tolerance. “Beauty isn’t a one size fits all. We need to celebrate everyone and welcome those who are different than us. This year has had so much negativity, it’s time to move away from the hate and learn to accept. I’m choosing love because a nation that doesn’t stand together will fall,” the model says. Born in a refugee camp in Kenya after her parents had fled Somalia, she moved to the United States at the age of six and flourished in her new life while maintaining her cultural identity.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MAX MARA
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A New Icon of Style and Grace
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF MAX MARA
As the first Muslim homecoming queen at her high school, the first woman to wear a hijab in a Miss USA state pageant, and the first to grace magazine covers with a head scarf, Aden’s message of diversity is loud and clear. “I signed with one of the most influential modelling agencies in the world and still wore my hijab as my crown. Don’t ever change yourself, change the game,” the model announced when her contract with IMG Models was official. “I am so excited to join the IMG Model family and spread the message that diversity is beauty.” Her passion has led to another feather in the cap this year when she was appointed as a UNICEF ambassador in recognition of her work in empowering young people and her desire to give back to the community. She brings awareness to programs that save and protect children’s lives and uses her platforms to advocate for children’s rights. “I’ve seen UNICEF’s incredible, impactful work for children first-hand. When I was young, UNICEF gave me an education, empowering me, my
THE ARTIST’S LIFE
The region-specific collection features the MaxMaragram, an original pattern inspired by the original lettering of the Max Mara logo of the 1950s and includes the celebrated double-breasted coat in pure camel wool with silk MaxMaragram lining and gold personalized buttons. To complete the look, key pieces include a silk satin shirt and a pencil skirt that can be worn with a classic pair of stretch MaxMaragram logo satin trousers. The original lettering appears throughout the whole collection including the accessories. The trio of a silk head scarf, a rhinestone brooch and a pair of T-bar pumps is the musthave of the season. “It’s a look that’s sharp, smart and savvy. Its camel and gold tones communicate discrete opulence and understated glamour, and the kind of power that doesn’t have to raise its voice to be heard,” Griffiths explains. And that is just the exact kind of philosophy that fits right into Aden’s emblematic stand for power and grace.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MAX MARA
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PEOPLE QATAR
family and our community in the process. It’s an honor to have this platform with UNICEF USA and I look forward to advocating for children around the world, just as others advocated for me,” the model recounts. On the style front, Aden continues to set the tone for a niche market that has grown in importance and influence in recent years. This season, Max Mara launches an exclusive Middle East capsule collection with Aden as the face of the campaign epitomizing a perfect coming together of style and grace. “We were one of the first brands to cast Halima in a runway show,” says Ian Griffiths, the brand’s creative director. “She impressed us with her intelligence, charisma and courage - a unique combination of qualities that make for breathtaking beauty. She is a shining star and an outstanding role model,” he adds.
OBJECTS
The Bright
Side
Expressive fabrics for draping and upholstering in vivid jewel tones, retro tropical prints and North African-style patterns. Photographs by Azim Haidaryan Styled by Artsi Ifrach
The inspiration for New York-based Azim Haidaryan and the Moroccan-Israeli artist Artsi Ifrach’s collaboration for T’s story, shot in Marrakesh, is based on a photography project they recently partnered on in which the human form was obscured with textiles and other materials.
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From left: Manuel Canovas Bessey in mandarine, cowtan .com. Manuel Canovas Bessey in turquoise. Jim Thompson Lamun in sunflower, jimthompsonfabrics.com.
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From left: Romo Forenza in Venetian blue, romo.com. Romo Forenza in lacquer red. Dedar Modern Illusion in ottanio, dedar.com. Romo Forenza in henna. Stroheim Rivoli in fuchsia, stroheim.com.
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SET DESIGNER: CHLOÉ GUERBOIS
From left: Brunschwig & Fils Islamorada in spring green, brunschwig.com. Brunschwig & Fils Les Palmiers Print in onyx. Brunschwig & Fils Clarence Paisley in palm. Brunschwig & Fils Isla Bonita in coral/ivory.
PLACES
ON ARCHITECTURE
THE SPACE BETWEEN 34 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
By Kurt Soller Photographs by Tetsuya Miura
ON A MAY morning that was somewhere between rainy and sunny, in a Tokyo neighborhood that was somewhere between Shibuya and Shinjuku, I arrived at a nondescript brown-tiled building to visit Makoto Tanijiri and Ai Yoshida, the 44-year-old principals of Suppose Design Office, a Japanese architecture firm known for its raw, unfinished aesthetic — bookcases made from shipping pallets, houses with gaping holes instead of windows — that has been frequently praised and often copied in recent years. Suppose, which has more than 35 employees between this office and another in Hiroshima, and which is responsible for some of the most idiosyncratic contemporary homes and offices throughout Japan, moved into this partly below-ground space in late 2016. In a departure from convention, they built a workspace entirely open to the public: If someone could bring her laptop to a coffee shop and call it her office, couldn’t an office do the reverse, inviting people in from the street for an obsessively crafted cup of cold brew? Suppose even branded its own bags of arabica beans for this exercise, lining them up beside a library of design books, which customers can browse while drinking espresso near high windows that look onto the sidewalk. In the back of the 2,058-square-foot
A freethinking Japanese architecture firm makes its mark exploring the intersections between public and private, indoors and out, function and form. Above: the al fresco living space of Anjo House, by Suppose Design Office, in Japan’s Aichi prefecture. Suppose designed some of the furniture as well, including the concrete kitchen island. Left: the house’s asphaltshingled exterior has three open sides, bringing a garden and an ash tree into the interior.
THIS ETHOS IS perhaps best captured in Tanijiri’s own apartment, designed in 2015. (As might be expected from a pair that specializes in indistinct boundaries, the two were once romantic partners as well, though this was never Yoshida’s residence.) On the fifth floor of a mid-1970s building in Hiroshima — now a bicycling haven on the southern shore of Japan, where they both grew up — Tanijiri wanted to find ‘‘completeness in incompletion.’’ Rather than build a home, he unbuilt one, dismantling nearly all the existing walls, exposing rusty pipes and cement foundations. He then subtly demarcated the 1,270-square-foot space, employing casement doors and windows, shelving and entryway arches — all in steel. The furniture is little more than a huge cushion covered in patchwork indigo denim atop matching steel floors and a few wooden dining chairs.
Left: the concrete exterior of a house near Hiroshima, perched on a hill above rail tracks, is stained a rusty hue that may redden over time. Below: its spare interior, spanning three levels, is meant to improve the acoustics of the owners’ piano.
As with most contemporary Japanese architecture, simplicity does not necessarily mean ease or lack of complexity: Tanijiri’s home requires constant upkeep. Like a good Japanese knife, all of the steel demands incessant cleaning and polishing or it will rust before acquiring its desired blue-gray patina over the next few years. The metal’s transformation, though beautiful, is actually a form of controlled decay; the process speaks to Suppose’s obsession with permeable materials, such as concrete and unfinished wood, which require constant maintenance, and then, despite care, still diminish over time. But perhaps the most compelling aspect of the disassembled apartment is the one that escaped destruction: Located near a window at the back corner of the living area is a traditional Japanese-style room that came with the place, with tatami-mat floors and shoji-screen walls. Without this flourish, the home might feel like the industrial lofts that have overtaken New York, London and other Western capitals. But by integrating the local vernacular, the project helps demonstrate why dozens of corporations have hired Suppose to bring their Western sensibilities east: In 2015, for the 40th anniversary of the French fashion brand Agnès B., Suppose skinned the company’s Ginza flagship store in pine plywood, which will wear over time to mirror the natural textures of the line’s custom fabrics; when Airbnb opened its Tokyo office in 2016, the architects created internal parks dappled with delicate Amazon olive trees. With these projects — as well as with the 100 or so residences they’ve built all over Japan — Suppose has defined itself less by a particular aesthetic or specific materials than by its working methods. Unlike larger firms, where employees tend to specialize in one aspect of the process — say, drafting blueprints or sourcing fixtures — Suppose’s designers form small teams that collaborate on every detail from start to finish. The lack of formal division reflects the firm’s origins: Tanijiri and Yoshida met during a two-year program at Hiroshima’s Anabuki Design College — neither studied architecture, nor did they train within their country’s traditional kohai-senpai (master-student) system. They simply taught themselves, building by building. When young architects consider working at Suppose, they quickly learn it’s somewhere between a job and a lifestyle: The staff shares a daily lunch of fish and rice together, and there are showers and futons for employees who pull all-nighters. In hiring, the partners prioritize efficiency over creativity, perhaps a radical notion: Tanijiri and Yoshida don’t necessarily think they can teach people to be good designers, but they can train them to listen and interpret clients’ sometimes inchoate dreams (a tree planted in an entryway floor, a completely transparent private residence) and to respond to strange spatial constraints (a house balanced over a cliffside reservoir). This being Japan, that last part is critical. In the countryside, much of the terrain is hilly; within the cities, the destruction wrought by World War II and the rezoning brought by the 1980s economic bubble have resulted in development sites that are narrow, perilously close to streets or shorelines, abandoned or otherwise left in disarray by storms or residents who couldn’t afford to maintain them. Instead of concealing these blemishes, Suppose
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room, beyond a steel coffee bar, a dozen architects meet in small groups or draft plans on computers in rows on long tables, performing their jobs in plain view of a largely disinterested audience. Sitting in the cafe can be an odd and exhilarating experience, like sneaking backstage in the tense moments before a play begins. But after a few sips, you ease into it, enjoying the quiet bustle; you become part of a human machine that toggles between labor and leisure. Architecture, after all, dictates behavior: Public or private, indoor or outdoor, extravagant or humble, old or new, fake or real — these are a few of the obvious binaries by which we assess the spaces we inhabit. They are also the edges against which most architects hone their signature styles. But since their firm was founded 18 years ago, Tanijiri and Yoshida have instead devoted themselves to the liminal place where these elements break down; their designs (from a suburban house in Higashi with a dirt floor to a Tokyo cafe that transforms into a hostel) unite concepts that seem opposed. They aren’t interested in referencing the codes of Japan’s architecture establishment — nor in iterating upon their own past successes, as many distinguished firms do — but rather in envisioning new spaces that rest somewhere between the disquieting and the thrilling.
PLACES
ON ARCHITECTURE
Like a good Japanese knife, all of the steel demands incessant cleaning and polishing or it will rust before acquiring its gray-blue patina.
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highlights them. Forty minutes east of Hiroshima, a couple asked for a house in 2004 where they could relax and play their grand piano, even though their tiny plot hugged a constantly rattling rail line. Rather than hide the sights and sounds of passing trains, the architects designed a giant glass wall that put them on display (along with the mountainous island Miyajima across the nearby sea). The window is mounted seamlessly into a cantilevered, 968-square-foot concrete box, which is folded in an origami-inspired style that allows its three rooms to zigzag upward. The exterior is stained a rusty hue; over the decades, as the whooshing trains kick up reddish metallic dust, it will further burnish the building. BACK AT THE TOKYO office, we sat at a table that bridged the cafe and the workspace. ‘‘Do you know engawa?’’ Yoshida asked me. In Japanese, the character for en translates to ‘‘edge,’’ the one for gawa to ‘‘side.’’ The term has evolved to represent the verandas outside a Buddhist temple or a traditional house. Protected from rain by a sloping roof, divided from the interior by shoji screens and intended as an exterior hallway or a quiet place to meditate upon a rock garden, the engawa is both part of the structure and excluded from it. Although the Suppose architects rarely design such terraces — they have little interest in preserving or even invoking the country’s historical nuances — they are nonetheless devoted to the engawa as an ideological cornerstone of their practice. Initially, it was hard for me to understand what they meant; we could only communicate with the help of translators, hovering between two languages, so Tanijiri grabbed a pen and began drawing. With a few crude lines, he sketched a stick figure standing inside a child’s version of a house — square walls, triangle roof — with a branchy, leafless tree out in the yard. He then drew the same house a second time, but this time he extended the roof until it encompassed the tree, bringing the outside in, or the inside out, neither and both at the same time.
Above: Tanijiri preserved a traditional Japanese room inside his Hiroshima apartment. The window-side steel console of his own design is topped with glassware he made by splitting wine bottles. Left: Tanijiri and Yoshida in their Tokyo office.
He had more or less depicted Anjo House, an 1,818-square-foot home for a family of five that Suppose finished in 2015 in the foggy Aichi prefecture, near the Pacific coastline. The interior of the asphalt-shingled structure is made almost entirely from plywood, down to the light-switch plates that follow the grain of the walls in which they’re inset. Half of the open-plan, triangular home is al fresco — with a dramatically pitched, skylight-punctured roof that partially covers a garden, dining area and kitchen where the family cooks, eats and lounges throughout the year. There is an outdoor hammock for sleeping. (There are also upholstered pieces, including a leather couch, which can be enclosed from the elements with sliding doors.) Unusual for a Japanese architecture firm, Suppose designed and sourced furniture, too, as they do for most of their projects. The result is not the sort of indoor-outdoor fantasy the clients likely first envisioned but a more elemental version of it: Three sides of the exterior have giant, rectangular holes where the walls would normally be, as if the family had chosen to live, mouselike, inside a set of conjoined garages with their doors left open. A dramatic answer to a request for a home that embraces nature, Anjo House is also a manifesto of sorts. No matter how closely the architects listen to clients’ desires and plans to use the space, working with such a firm ultimately requires that the inhabitants leave much of that behind. Even its name, Suppose, dares them to question their own assumptions. Earlier this year, Tanijiri and Yoshida themselves decided to further challenge the notion of what an architecture practice should be: Rather than merely improve real estate for others, they created their own construction firm. Their next project, in Hiroshima, into which they will move their offices, will crash together public and private domains, just as their cafe-meets-back-office in Tokyo does. In addition to a restaurant, the building will have a hotel and a gallery. With this ambitious concept, Suppose will straddle an indistinct line: somewhere between what an architecture firm is — and what it could be.
WANDERLUST
Seven Wonders The Aeolian archipelago off the Sicilian coast is notoriously difficult to reach, but the seven islands charm those who do.
FOR THE AVERAGE VISITOR, IT TAKES A FLIGHT, a scenic two-hour drive, and an hour or so on the hydrofoil to get to these islands. The actual journey of course includes hours of waiting in between connections, accident-prone highways and a dash of southern Italian laid-back vibes that could prolong the entire process altogether. It is no wonder then that the Aeolian Islands, though magical with abreathtakingly gorgeous landscape, has stayed under-the-radar away from the throngs of tourists heading to Sicily every summer. But as you are about to surrender to traveling fatigue, gratification and awe hit you the moment you step off the hydrofoil onto shore. The locals speak of a folklore that the seven volcanic islands that make up the Aeolian archipelago are demigod sisters descended from the mythical figure, Gea. The beauty of the sisters manifests in the geographical landscapes of the islands formed by years of volcanic activity. Rugged, steep cliffs with vegetation of agaves and prickly pears, jagged coasts from cracks and hardened lava formations, black sandy beaches and hot springs give character to the seven islands of Panarea, Stromboli, Lipari, Salina, Vulcano, Alicudi and Filicudi. Cluttered around the north-east sea of Sicily, the islands enjoy clear blue waters and splendid weather all-year long. Set up base in any of the larger islands of Lipari, Salina or Vulcano and hop on and off boats to explore the rest.
Boat trips offer a chance to see geographical formations around the islands.
STAY Therasia Resort Sea & Spa A stylish luxury resort sprawled over the rugged cliffs of Vulcano island with its own private spa and a one-star Michelin restaurant, Il Cappero. The property adopts an eco-design philosophy by adapting common spaces into the natural landscape – the cascading sun decks offer an exceptional view as you make your way down the cliff to the water. Most rooms boast a private sun terrace. www.therasiaresort.it
Capofaro An establishment on Salina island with a narrative that is tied to the history of the locality, from the fertile grape-growing land to the nineteenthcentury lighthouse. Run by the Tasca d’Almerita family, rooms are available both in the main building and within the lighthouse itself. Guests can immerse in the island life by trying their hands at working in the vineyard or visiting the in-house Marina and Malvasia Micromuseum. www.capofaro.it
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PHOTO COURTESY OF TWENTY30FORTY
By Debrina Aliyah
WANDERLUST PLACES QATAR 38 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
Raya Hotel A rustic retreat on the island of Panarea with natural forming pools irrigated by hyperthermal and hypotonic waters of volcanic origins. Its holistic wellness approach extends to the signature restaurant where only organic local produce is used. www.hotelraya.it
EAT Il Diavolo dei Polli Its name literally meaning“The Devil of Chickens� belies the main offering of the kitchen:
seafood so fresh that they are best served raw, which is the signature antipasti dish on the menu. It is best to have a chat with the staff and let them tell you the catch of the day and how grandma in the kitchen wants to cook it. Alternatively, give the one item that has been on the menu since the restaurant opened decades ago a try, the Roast Chicken. Via Cardo, Vulcano. +39 0909853034. Trattoria Cucinotta This cozy little trattoria occupies a traditional white-
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP : Lipari is one
of the busier islands among the seven,Traditional Sicilian sweets for breakfast.
washed rock house overlooking the waters of Salina island. Traditional Sicilian fare is the focus here with lots of hearty appetizers and seafoodbased pastas. Be sure to try the stuffed sardines – a local favorite. Via Risorgimento 66, Salina. +39 090 984 3475. Ristorante La Sirena Charming and most definitely off the beaten track, this is probably the only place to get a decent bite on the island of Filicudi. It makes for a good excuse to do a quick pit stop to visit one of the smallest and furthest Aeolian islands. Fresh seafood and simple cooking for a fuss-free dining experience. Località Pecorini, Filicudi, +39 090 988 9997. EXPLORE
The Aeolian Regional archaelogical museum on Lipari is housed in an old castle on a cliff, The island is covered in vegetation of agaves and prickly pears.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF TWENTY30FORTY
Boat Trips Sail the days away on island-hopping tours and soak in the sights of little grottos, bays and caves that are unique to these volcanic landscapes. The crystal-clear water is also perfect for both snorkelling and diving – most boat trips are tailored for individual preferences. A highly recommended must-do is the night boat trip that takes you out to the still-active crater on Stromboli where the volcanic eruptions create a spectacle of red fireworks against the pitch dark sky. www.dimensionesicilia.com
WANDERLUST PLACES QATAR
Hiking Dormant craters, cones and ranges make the perfect setting for hikers of all levels to admire the views and sceneries across all the islands. For sweeping views of Malvesian vineyards and the surrounding seascape, climb Salina’s highest peak, Fossa delle Felci, that takes you mountainside through green forestry right up to the peak. For a more amateur- friendly
hike, take a gradual climb up Fossa di Vulcano that will take you about two to three hours. www.ilvulcanoapiedi.it Mud Baths Apart from Stromboli, Vulcano is the only other island with active volcanic activity though on a more mellow scale. The constantly smouldering volcano gives rise to bubbling fumaroles
and black sandy beaches. Immerse in the mud baths for its purifying properties but be sure to take precautions against the sulphur stink afterward. Fanghi di Vulcano, Via Riccardo Conti 20.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TWENTY30FORTY
40 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
The cascading cliffs of Therasia Resort Sea & Spa.
Things
OBJECTS
Twists and curves soften the hard edges of contemporary furniture. Photographs by Anthony Cotsifas Styled by Chloé Guerbois
DIMENSION
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NEW
Clockwise from left: Josep Lluscà Woody armchair, $150, dwr.com. Guilherme Wentz Corda lamp, $825, mattermatters.com. Hermès Équipages d’Hermès Bouchon stool, $4,350, hermes.com. Karoline Fesser Hide side table, $259, hem.com. Gerrit Thomas Rietveld 279 Beugel chair, $1,200, cassina.com. Stark Coxwell Slateblue rug, $43,600, starkcarpet.com.
OBJECTS THINGS 42 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
From left: Marcel Wanders Mariposa suspension lamp, $2,345, roche-bobois .com. Studio Paolo Ferrari Rolled Back lounge chair, $3,965, goodcolony.com. Martin Hirth Cinétique lamp, $1,290, ligne-roset .com. Shore Star Cloud rug, $576, shorerugs.com.
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From top: Sebastian Herkner Pipe chair, $4,110, morosousa.com. Tufenkian Billow II Grass rug, $7,125, tufenkian .com. Fort Standard Strata coffee table, $10,500, fortstandard.com. Begum Cana Ozgur Shade rug, $2,151, nanimarquina.com.
OBJECTS
RETOUCHING: ANONYMOUS RETOUCH. PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS: KARL LEITZ, CALEB ANDRIELLA AND LLOYD McCULLOUGH. SET ASSISTANT: JEFFREY CUNNINGHAM
THINGS 44 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
From left: Jean-Marie Massaud Ilda table, $5,852, poliform.com. Ron Gilad Teorema 10-drawer unit, $12,005, moltenigroup .com. Studio Paolo Ferrari T stool, $2,110, goodcolony .com. John Koga Moon (Mahina) floor lamp #1, $12,000, ralphpucci.net.
TRADITIONS
The ancient art of marble painting gets a 21st-century update. By Leslie Camhi Photograph by David Chow Styled by Theresa Rivera
THE ORIGINS OF marbling — the ancient technique of creating bewitching, swirling patterns of pigment on water and capturing them on paper — remains shrouded in mystery. Japanese aristocrats practiced a related, largely monochromatic technique, called suminagashi (‘‘floating ink’’), to enhance calligraphy and haiku, as far back as the 12th century. But it wasn’t until about 1600 that European travelers returned from Turkey and Persia with
COLORS
examples of the marbling we know today: wildly colorful papers that sparked a craze for embellishment among bookbinders, cabinetmakers, stationers and others that lasted well into the 19th century. Today, the craft is being embraced — and revolutionized — by a group of young artisans. ‘‘Marbling, to me, is the visual equivalent of a very good book,’’ says Rosi de Ruig, a London lampshade designer who wraps many of her shades in handmade marbled papers. ‘‘It’s stood the test of time because it appeals to an intelligent eye.’’ The 45-year-old has earned a following for her vibrant pieces, which are sold at Casa Lopez Paris and Newport Lamp & Shade Company in Rhode Island. She sources much of her paper from the British craftswoman Jemma Lewis, who creates her combinations of rich greens and maroons or pale violets, peony pinks and sky blues in her studio — a cottage in the English countryside. Like the work of many of marbling’s new guard, Lewis’s designs take a
RUN
Young female artisans are revisiting the age-old craft with new patterns, techniques and modern applications that move the tradition into the world of interior design. Above: marbled papers by Julia G. of Tomàs Avinent in Paris, Jemma Lewis in New York and Natalie Stopka in London.
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PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANT: TIMOTHY MULCARE. STYLIST’S ASSISTANT: ANTHONY MORFA. MARBLED DESIGNS COURTESY OF JEMMA LEWIS, NATALIE STOPKA AND TOMÀS AVINENT ATELIER RUN BY JULIA G.
THESE
TRADITIONS THINGS
variety of shapes, including the deep teal and gold-veined wallpaper in the lounge of the recently opened London member’s club the Ned and the mint-colored curls atop macaroons baked by the London-based cake maker Emma Dodi. But if the craft has moved beyond endpapers, the method itself remains unchanged. Trays of water are spiked with powdered, carrageenan-rich seaweed extract, which lends a viscosity that allows paint pigments (historically gouache, but now also acrylic) to float on top of the water’s surface. These streams of color are then manipulated by an artist into patterns — there are dozens of traditional ones, some dating back to the mid-15th century, including the fanned ‘‘peacock,’’ the splattered amoeba-shaped ‘‘Turkish spot,’’ the spiraling ‘‘French curl’’ and the Carrara-like ‘‘Italian pattern’’ — using everything from wooden combs and squirrelhair brushes to swan- and goose-wing quills. Paper or fabric is then lightly placed atop the water’s surface to absorb the design. Though the process is exacting, the goal isn’t perfection but personality. Indeed, signs of the artist’s hand are at the heart of marbling’s appeal, says the London-based interior designer Beata Heuman, who has launched her own line of all-marbled velvet and viscose fabrics and wallpapers. The decorator used a swirling paper she calls ‘‘marbleized’’ for Notting Hill’s Farm Girl cafe and its just-opened Chelsea outpost and textiles from her line for her West London townhouse, where the sink skirt, among other things, is made from her rich velvet peacock pattern. ‘‘The print uses over 1,000 colors,’’ but, she says, ‘‘because there is a sense of movement in it, it doesn’t insist on itself too much. That’s why marbled patterns can work in even a very streamlined, contemporary setting.’’ Indeed, the versatility of marbling’s new look — equal parts ancient and modern, Old World and New — could be attributed to the mix of cultures, colors and philosophies at play in work by contemporary makers. ‘‘One of the most exciting things happening today is the crossover between suminagashi and European marbling styles,’’ says the American artisan Natalie Stopka. ‘‘In the Japanese tradition, the patterns are much less controlled — they’re really an exploration of fluid dynamics.’’ Stopka infuses that delicacy and lightness with ornate color combinations in her line of stationary, cotton cocktail napkins and ribbons, which she
Clockwise from left: the London interior designer Beata Heuman’s 1,000-color marbled wallpaper, which decorates an archway at the Notting Hill cafe Farm Girl; lampshades by the London maker Rosi de Ruig; a thoroughly modern marbled art print by the French artist Julia G. for her Parisian atelier, Tomàs Avinent; marbled wrapping paper by the American artisan Natalie Stopka.
marbles in delicate shades of putty, shell pink and mauve. This year, she’s also begun creating fine-art prints using handmade dyes extracted from the herbs and flowers she grows in her quarter-acre garden in Yonkers, N.Y. Practicing a more pronounced interpretation of the suminagashi aesthetic is the 31-year-old Parisian artist Julia G., who launched her Paris marbling atelier, Tomàs Avinent (named after her great-grandfather, a Barcelona typographer) last year. Her art prints take marbling to a refreshingly minimal, modernist extreme: hand-drawn, vividly colored geometric shapes, for example (à la Hockney), floating on marbled backgrounds. ‘‘In Turkey, they call marbling ebru — meaning ‘cloud.’ No relation at all to stone,’’ she notes. In her own work, the artist embraces the natural fluidity and improvisation of the process. ‘‘So many things can affect the final result — the temperature of the water or the room, the density of the paint,’’ she explains. ‘‘Our society is confronting the limits of industrialization and mass production. So whether it’s in food, textiles or art, people want that return to a human dimension.’’
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: SIMON BROWN; KALINA KRAWCZYK (2); TOMÀS AVINENT; JEMMA LEWIS
46 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
These streams of color are manipulated by an artist into patterns using everything from wooden combs and squirrel-hair brushes to swan- and goose-wing quills.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: HANDS ON DESIGN GASSAN CENTERPIECE BY GIULIO IACCHETTI, HANDSONDESIGN.IT. GEORG JENSEN LARGE ILSE BOWL BY ILSE CRAWFORD, GEORGJENSEN.COM. BITOSSI CERAMICHE LARGE BLUE CENTERPIECE BY ETTORE SOTTSASS, ARTEMEST.COM. MONDAYS PROJECTS FOOTED BOWL, SPARTAN-SHOP.COM. MITCHELL GOLD & BOB WILLIAMS PEDESTAL SILVER-LEAF DISH, MGBWHOME.COM. ROCHE BOBOIS MEDIUM GRAAL BOWL BY CÉDRIC RAGOT, ROCHE-BOBOIS.COM. SAINT-LOUIS LES ENDIABLÉS CHANGE TRAY BY JOSÉ LÉVY, SAINT-LOUIS.COM. NICHOLAS NEWCOMB LARGE TRIPOD BOWL, NICHOLASNEWCOMB.COM
Clockwise from top left: Hands on Design, $378. Georg Jensen, $125. Bitossi Ceramiche, $630. Mondays, $65. Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams, $250. Roche Bobois, $50. Saint-Louis, around $947. Nicholas Newcomb, $374.
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MARKET REPORT
Vessels that elevate whatever they hold.
Footed Bowls
Photographs by Mari Maeda and Yuji Oboshi
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THINGS
FOOD MATTERS
ONE MORNING IN 2014, Tom Perry drove his truck out to the end of Virginia’s State Route 695 and found himself at the edge of Windmill Point. This is a remote peninsula, mostly undeveloped, where the waters of the Rappahannock River and the Chesapeake Bay meet. He couldn’t get to where he was going by car, so he carried his kayak over the beach grass and set out into the water. As he turned the corner of the Point, he could see the place he’d come to find, the shallow waters running along a stretch of quiet beach spotted with dead scraggly trees. This, he hoped, might be the perfect place to raise oysters. He’d brought a depth sounder and a salinity meter, a long stick for testing the bay bottom. Perry, 30, had done dozens of test runs. He’d even had one brief, failed partnership trying to raise oysters
Shell Game
Oyster farmers have perfected dainty, briny, name-brand products to supply America’s thriving raw bars. But are they cultivating away the bivalves’ strange, natural beauty? By Wyatt Williams Photographs by Kyoko Hamada Styled by Suzy Kim
in Maryland. This spot was different: The uniform depth would be just right for the floating cages he planned to install. The northeast exposure promised waves that would buff oyster shells into tight, tidy shapes. The brackish water would make for a balanced flavor: not too salty, nor too sweet. Four years later, the bivalves grown at White Stone Oyster Company have the clean, minimalist look of a designed object: simple lines, muted colors, a porcelain-white cup packed with smooth earthy meat. When they are lined up on a platThis page and next: ter, you realize that they all seem to the engineered be this way, each oyster exactly as glory of Virginia’s perfect as the last. Perhaps that’s White Stone oysters, with their why so many American chefs favor smooth meat and them; Jeremiah Langhorne, who pearlescent shells.
ocean water, the muddy depth of a riverbed. There are only a handful of species in the world; from them, farmers have engineered the hundreds of brand names served at restaurants today. In recent decades, no single oyster has had better name recognition than the Kumamoto, a small, slow-growing species introduced to the West Coast from Japan. Taylor Shellfish, a 128-year-old family company in Washington (the largest shellfish producer in the country), created a brand out of them by marketing to celebrated seafood chefs. Customers loved the dainty, polite shape. After selling three and a half million of them in 2008, the Taylor family wanted to improve on that success. They floated mesh bags over open waters in Willapa Bay, north of Portland, Ore., where raising Kumamotos had proved impossible, and loaded them with Crassostrea gigas, a less finicky species. The waves rocked the oysters against one another inside the sacks until they had created something equally deep-cupped but fastergrowing and meatier. The Taylors named it Shigoku, which translates from Japanese to something like ‘‘ultimate.’’ By the end of 2018, they expect to sell nearly six million of these.
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TO RAISE AN OYSTER, you merely need to spread spat (baby oysters, essentially) in water with a suitable bottom and wait. Oysters do not need to be fed or herded. They just grow, feasting on phytoplankton until someone decides to take them back out. In the 2,000 years since the Romans started farming them, though, the process has become increasingly complicated. In the 1920s, producers in Japan started hanging oysters from strings to protect them from sea-floor-dwelling predators. In the early 1980s, West Coast hatcheries started selling oyster larvae attached to crushed bits of shell that could be grown individually, rather than in clumps that required hammering the shells apart. In 1986, an Australian patented a cylinder that floats in open water, using the tidal forces to knock those individual oysters against one another like rocks being polished in a tumbler. This technique — which breaks off the animal’s long, brittle bill in favor of a deeper, shorter, stronger cup — combined with those previous innovations, ushered in the perfect oyster of our current era. According to Mike Lata, the chef and co-owner of the Ordinary restaurant in Charleston, S.C., the oyster has become ‘‘the only feel-good story in our food chain right now’’ — an easy-to-raise, in-demand delicacy that cleans the environment as it grows: As a filter-feeder, it removes impurities from the water, which increases local biodiversity. Like a grape, the flavor of an oyster is sensitive to minute variations in place and climate. An oyster makes itself from whatever is in the water around it: the vegetal notes of certain algae, the salty bite of open
These are bizarre creatures, hiding inside their rocky homes, holding their door to the world closed with every ounce of their strength.
Such astronomical sales are due, in part, to a new class of oyster purveyors (like Maison Premiere in Brooklyn, the Walrus and the Carpenter in Seattle and Kimball House in Decatur, Ga.), which has evolved in tandem with these farmers. These are not funky-smelling shuck houses but refined raw bars. The gnarled oyster once served in such joints now sits up like a gem on glistening, perfectly lit platters of crushed ice. The bivalves’ obvious beauty offers another explanation for our current era of cultivation: At a time when Instagram can make a restaurant successful, when the physical beauty of food has never been more celebrated, an oyster shows everything on its shell. Yet in its new popularity, the oyster has lost something of its threat, its divisiveness and, therefore, its romance. They are bizarre creatures, hiding inside their rocky homes, holding their door to the world closed with every ounce of their strength. And so they have also become a kind of initiation into the realm of adult pleasures: ‘‘For I was fifteen / and eating oysters / and the child was defeated. / The woman won,’’ the poet Anne Sexton wrote in 1972 of her first. Through increasing refinement, they’ve become less dangerous and more predictable, no longer that dare we once knew. As we’ve done with many things in nature, we have sacrificed their weirdness for our own ease and pleasure. What was complicated is now merely delicious — because we made it that way.
GUTTER CREDIT TK.
ANTIQUE BOXES COURTESY OF ANTIQUE CUPBOARD, PHIL DREIS, BIG BEND, WIS. OYSTERS COURTESY OF WHITE STONE OYSTER COMPANY
helped popularize the brand at his Washington, D.C., restaurant, the Dabney, likes to say that it’s as if ‘‘a very talented chef opened the top, seasoned the oyster perfectly and put the lid back down.’’ Of course, the same might be said for a Kusshi from Vancouver Island. Or for the Peconic Gold from New York or a Murder Point from Alabama. That’s because we are living in the age of the perfect oyster. In fact, we’re lousy with them. This decade, a new era of farming has produced dozens of name-brand varieties: Montauk Pearl from Long Island, Sea Cow from Puget Sound, Standish Shore from Duxbury Bay. In Virginia alone, the number of cultivated oysters that were planted grew from six million to more than 135 million in just over 10 years. Up until this point, for centuries in fact, an oyster had been a difficult thing to love. It was a food for the brave, one who dared to venture into the tangled, oddly textured, vaguely sexual, bottom-feeding realm of mollusks. They had good months and bad months. They could make us sick. If we chanced upon a superlative one, they could also delight us, like a carnival game. That was their appeal. Indeed, Americans couldn’t get enough: We dredged up our bays and spoiled our rivers until there was almost nothing wild left. There was little choice but to cultivate them. Along the way, a few farmers thought to make improvements. Didn’t we want the shells to be more shapely, round and deep? Wouldn’t it be nice if the meat were a little less sinuous and more consistent? Couldn’t they be a little easier to shuck? In answering these questions, we prevented domestic oysters from disappearing — but we also homogenized them, making something safe and predictable out of what was once wild.
50 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
The THING
By Nancy Hass Photograph by Philip Cheung
Growing up in Zurich with Italian parents and a passion for knitting and crocheting (she made her first sweater at 10), the artist Carmen D’Apollonio always knew she wanted to make beautiful things with traditional techniques. In 2014, after a decade as a studio assistant in Berlin and Brooklyn for the multimedia provocateur Urs Fischer — during which she co-founded a fashion line called Ikou Tschüss (ikou means ‘‘let’s go’’ in Japanese and tschüss is ‘‘bye-bye’’ in German) — she moved to Los Angeles to become a potter. Her voluptuous one-of-a-kind ceramics, which Céline commissioned for its Beverly Hills store, include massive planters that resemble upside-down heads and biomorphic, wormlike lamps glazed in rich neutrals. New floor versions in tones of gray (pictured here) are her biggest ones yet; the tallest stands 7-foot-2, including the shade. The piece had to be fired in a walk-in kiln and took six months to complete. ‘‘Clay is the ultimate material,’’ she says. ‘‘Once you live in three dimensions, there’s no going back.’’ Price on request, linnluehn.com.
MARKET REPORT
Surprisingly versatile for its unconventional shape, the bucket bag bucks the trend in sturdier and roomier versions for fall. By Debrina Aliyah
Bonsai leather bucket, QR2,600, Simon Miller. Alligator bucket bag, QR61,880, AlaĂŻa. Nelia two-tone leather bag, QR1,440, Nico Giani. Tab small color-block tote, QR1,520, Yuzefi. Bobbi leather bag, QR1,740, Danse Lente. Umar 13 embellished bag, QR3,060, Boyy. Crossbody leather-trimmed canvas bag, QR1,144, Paravel.
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Buck The Trend
THINGS QATAR
APPAREL
The Hollywood Boot Shop is recreated within the exhibition.
A Shoemaker’s Mark in Cinema With the late Salvatore Ferragamo as its protagonist, an exhibition traces the phenomenon of Italian migration to California and its influence on Hollywood.
IF YOU WERE A Hollywood filmmaker in the 1920s, chances are you would be getting the Italian shoemaker from the Hollywood Boot Shop to dress the feet of your stars. The Roaring Twenties would have marked Salvatore Ferragamo’s final but glorious years in the United States before he went home to Italy for good in 1927. But before the glitz and success of the renowned store on Hollywood Boulevard, Ferragamo had arrived in North America along with thousands of southern Italian immigrants just as Italy had joined the first world war. Alongside his brothers, he ran a custom-shoe repair shop in Santa Barbara, California which drew the attention of prominent film directors of the time including D.W. Griffith, James Cruze, and Raoul Walsh. It was Cecil B. DeMille who commissioned Ferragamo to make the shoes for some of the most notable movies of the decade; The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings. His rising fame prompted the opening of the Hollywood Boot Shop and cemented the influence of Italian leather craftsmanship in the world of cinema. “I seem to glimpse a parallel between the film industry and my activity”, writes Ferragamo in his autobiography, “when the majors (players in Hollywood) overcame the early phase and began
expanding and growing, my shop followed right behind them.” Drawing from this period of the shoemaker’s life, the exhibition Italy in Hollywood captures a little-known yet fascinating moment in history that ignited Italian influence in American culture. The historical reconstruction of Ferragamo’s life represents a broader phenomenon of Italian migration to California, the role of the Italian community within the context of the West Coast and the resulting interchange in the world of art, crafts and entertainment arts – areas where Ferragamo’s creativity was prevalent. From a social commentary perspective, it examines the contradictory perception of Italian-Americans, between a positive opinion of Italian history and tradition, and negative criticism of some of the traits that characterized the stereotype of the Italian including instinct, passion, and sentimentalism. A larger part of the exhibition delves deep into Italy’s presence in filmmaking in California, from cinematic styles to on-set work culture distinguished by the image of certain immigrants, the likes of Ferragamo. Italy in Hollywood is curated by Giuliana Muscio and Stefania Ricci and currently runs until 10th March 2019 at the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo in Palazzo Spini Feroni, Florence.
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF SALVATORE FERRAGAMO
52 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
By Debrina Aliyah
Ramon, Silence and Special
Bella
Foxtrot
Worn by Gloria Swanson in the 1928 movie, Sadie Thompson, directed by Roaul Walsh. The American actress was one of Ferragamo’s biggest clients from the days of the Hollywood Boot Shop.
An iconic model designed for Joan Crawford, a loyal client of Ferragamo. This shoe was patented on 21st June 1933 and is a celebrated signature design of the brand.
Assoluta A personal favorite of Mary Pickford, silent cinema’s most prominent actress and producer. Ferragamo made several versions of this model throughout the Roaring Twenties.
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BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF SALVATORE FERRAGAMO
Shoes were also made for men and actor Rudolph Valentino were often seen in the various styles including boots and dress shoes.
APPAREL
CREATIONS MUSEUM CAPSULE
THINGS QATAR
A capsule collection developed especially for the Italy in Hollywood exhibition commemorates some of the most iconic Ferragamo shoes seen on the silver screen in the 1920s. The collection is currently exclusively available in the region in Qatar.
Rainbow Future, a psychedelic colorful model inspired by the Rainbow sandal made in suede in 1938 for actress Judy Garland is now available in a limited edition of 100 pairs as part of the prestigious Ferragamo’s Creations collection. The Creations line draws from the museum’s shoe archive to reintroduce in limited and numbered edition of some of Ferragamo’s most iconic pieces, and are entirely handmade using the original constructions, leathers, and shapes, and carries the brand’s historical label, designed in 1930 by futurist painter Lucio Venna. The Qatar selection will also showcase three other iconic shoe styles, the Norma and the Honey pumps which were originally designed for Marilyn Monroe in 1959 as well as the sculptural Calipso sandal from 1956, featuring the ‘cage heel’. The top handle bag, a revival of one of Ferragamo’s best known styles, is available in crocodile and ostrich, in vibrant colors on top of the classic brown and black. Custom orders are also available at the boutique in Villaggio Mall.
From Top: Prominent Italian personalities who influenced American culture across artistic industries, The exhibition housed within the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence, The Rainbow Future shoe is also the brand’s commitment to sustainable production strategies.
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF SALVATORE FERRAGAMO
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CREATIONS COLLECTION
November- December 2018
LLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF JOWHARA MOHAMMED
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A Writer on Her Quest for The Lost Rose Luca Guadagnino’s Décor Debut
Set against a backdrop of sorcery and magic, a story of hope, trust and forgiveness unfolds in a captivating read by debut author Kummam Al-Maadeed.
A Writer on Her Quest for The Lost Rose
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF JOWHARA MOHAMMED
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By Debrina Aliyah
SET AGAINST a backdrop of sorcery and magic, a story of hope, trust and forgiveness unfolds in a captivating read by debut author Kummam Al-Maadeed. Weaving an adventurous tale that follows the characters as they travel across kingdoms and battle through chants and spells, Al-Maadeed leads a new genre of fiction writing for Qatari authors. Al-Maadeed’s The Lost Rose sits comfortably on stands along side international bestsellers in Doha’s swankiest book stores and the young author has garnered quite a following across different demographic groups in the region. While a sense of regional pride fuels her popularity – a young female Arab author breaking out in an unconventional genre – the younger fans are entirely devoted to the world of the protagonists Clara and Luca that defines the book’s universe. “I’ve always made up stories in my head and with some encouragement from my sister, I finally decided to put pen to paper ten years ago and I haven’t stopped since,” she recounts. Though The Last Rose is her first ever published work, she emphasises that it’s obviously not her first ever written work. Fantasy, made popular in mainstream media in the last two decades through big budget adaptations, has finally lost its nerd image and found a brand new cool appeal. “It was a personal triumph when another writer told me that I had inspired her to finish writing her book, also in the fantasy genre,” recounts Al-Maadeed. “She wasn’t sure how people would react to this genre and having someone else open the path gave her new hope.” In Qatar, it is a sign of the times that ties in with its futuristic buildings and forward-thinking economic visions – building a literary scene away from the standard romanticized fiction set in sleepy deserts. “I want to see the writing scene in Doha evolve so that our authors can reach an international audience,” she says. With a day job at Qatar University in media and publications, she continues to travel to promote her book while engaging with fans and the literary community on social media – an indispensable communication tool for the young generation in the region. “I consistently answer writing questions and use social media as a platform to promote and discuss literary awareness,” she says. The Last Rose is available on Amazon and across book stores in the region. A SNIPPET FROM THE LAST ROSE The world stood still around Anya. and the cold numbness she feared overcame her as she saw Adrian ride toward her. She could barely feel Luca’s protective grip on her or hear Julia’s shouts as she ran to them. This can’t be happening, she thought.
and the thing that she thought could stop or at least weaken him: the jewels in her bracelet. But even the jewels wouldn’t be enough. She couldn’t even remember the spell to enchant them. She wasn’t prepared. She wasn’t ready! “You have to go,” she said to Luca.
Panic paralyzed her, but the fear for Luca, who stood beside her, made her fight it. Her head began to spin as she thought of ways to make them safe. Protective spell? She could try, but Adrian was too powerful. She wasn’t prepared to face him. She needed potions, strength spells,
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BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF JOWHARA MOHAMMED
The author Kummam Al-Maadeed.
“To where?” Julia asked, terrified. “He will stop us with a flick of his finger.” “We can fight,” Luca said, and she saw that he had his sword ready in his hand. “Are you mad?” Julia said, her panic rising. “You think we can fight, oh, the most powerful sorcerer in all the four kingdoms?” “We can try,” Luca eyes sharp in a way Anya had never seen, causing the fear in her heart to transform into courage. “Yes, we can try,” Anya said and grabbed Julia’s hands. Julia looked at her for a few seconds and then nodded. “We’re going to die eventually anyway, I guess,” she said with a quivering smile as she gripped Anya’s hands and started to chant. Anya followed suit and put her heart into the spell. Adrian would not hurt Luca. He couldn’t, and Anya would make sure of it, even if it was the last thing she did. As they chanted, she felt Lex sit between her and Julia, and she felt him helping her with the spell. Luca stood in front of them. Even though their spell would be stronger than his sword, she appreciated his will to fight with them. Deep down in her heart, she knew that even if they weren’t trapped, he would still fight for her, and for that she put her soul into the spell to protect him. A circle of rushing wind formed a shield
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around them, and the pounding of horses’ hooves and shouting men made her believe the spell was working, so she kept chanting, not daring to look up and get distracted. She had to focus, to draw on all the pain, the hurt, and guilt she suffered since the moment she left the castle. But as soon as she felt hopeful, a rope of flaming fire cut through the circle of wind with such force that made her let go of Julia’s arms. She was thrown onto her back. She scrambled to her feet and saw Adrian standing before her, with three or four men behind him. His icy gaze pierced into her soul, only to bring back a mountain of emotions that paralyzed her and drained the courage out of her heart. “Stay behind me,” she heard Luca say, before he shielded her from the approaching men. Next to him Lex stood, baring his teeth and ready to pounce. On their other side, she rubbed shoulders with Julia. “We are so dead,” Julia murmured. “Clara.” Anya’s heart stopped. It was Adrian’s voice. So calm and gentle, yet so cold and loud enough for all of them to here. “I came to take you home.” “You’re not taking her,” Luca shouted, his sword raised, ready to strike. She heard Adrian laugh softly. Anya wanted to see what he would do, to predict which magic he would perform, but she couldn’t move. She could hardly take a breath. She hated her weakness and helplessness.
nothing, nothing but the dread of meeting Adrian’s eyes again. “Clara,” she heard Adrian say again and suddenly time stood still. Her breathing was shallow, and her heartbeat slowed down. It was as if she was in one of her dreams. Maybe it was a dream and Lex would bark soon to wake her up. But, as she turned her attention finally to Adrian, she knew it was real. It was so real, she could feel his living soul touching hers. Oh, how she had loved him, how she had believed in him. Yet, he had betrayed her and hurt her family. But, you did that, a voice told her. You listened to him and did what he asked without question. The image of her parents and brother lying in their own blood passed through her mind, and every nerve and muscle in her body shivered. Yes, I did it with my own hands, she thought as anger burned her heart. Because you love him, the voice said. Because deep down in your heart you know he was right. That throne is yours. You deserve it. No, I don’t. Yes, you do, and you will rule beside him, the one you love; the only one who loves you. The one who gave you everything you wanted and was denied. Because you are as dark as he is. You deserve him. You love him. I love him. I do. She knew it now. You will be his queen. “I will be his queen,” she whispered. 59
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF JOWHARA MOHAMMED
“Stay back,” Luca said again as he pushed her behind him, while he took a step forward. The four men behind Adrian walked toward them, weapons in hand. Luca braced himself for the clash, while sparks flew from Julia’s hands. “Oh, I won’t die by a novi’s hands!” Julia said as threw the first blow, which hit one of his men. He swayed from the impact, and from the panicked look on Julia’s face, Anya knew the blow was meant to deliver great harm. The man she hit with her spark rushed toward her with an ax. She whispered a spell and flicked his hands at him. This time the hit knocked him off his feet and Julia clapped her hands in victory, which didn’t last long as two other men rushed forward to attack. Anya started casting a spell to help her, but the men around Julia made it hard for her to aim at one without harming Julia. Anya was shaking too much, and the sound of metal clashing rang in her head. She panicked. Luca, on the other hand, was fighting a huge man whom she recognized as Cedric, Adrian’s first man. Unlike the other men, she knew Cedric had never been the object of strength spells or any type of magic, which gave Luca a chance to beat him, but with Luca’s injured leg, she could never be sure. She had to help him, but her mind could think of
In his movies, the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino is known for creating sumptuously layered, subtly detailed environments that tell stories themselves. Now, inside a former Lake Como silk factory, he’s applied that same eye to his first interior design commission.
The HOUSE
Is the STORY
At Federico Marchetti and Kerry Olsen’s weekend retreat, matte lacquered cabinets in shades of green in the laundry room. Opposite: a spiral staircase designed by Luca Guadagnino covered in an ombrÊ carpet by La Manufacture Cogolin.
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By Guy Trebay Photographs by Henry Bourne
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FIRST, CUT SHARPLY off a two-lane road leading around Italy’s Lake Como and dodge the local stray cats until you hit a cobbled lane lined with scruffy mulberry trees. Follow this to its end. Then, on your left, you’ll see the stucco facade of an apparently anonymous edifice — an ocher two-story rectangle overlooking a simple walled garden and lawn, the lake just beyond them. This is La Filanda (the Mill), the name a nod to the 9,600-square-foot building’s original 19th-century function as a silk-weaving factory. Only a small nameplate — that says simply ‘‘housekeeper’’— hints at the place’s current residential use. ‘‘We felt it was more interesting having something beautiful inside that nobody knows,’’ says Federico Marchetti, 49, the Milanbased entrepreneur behind the Yoox Net-a-Porter online retail empire. For the past four years, he and his partner, the British journalist Kerry Olsen, 41, have devoted themselves to constructing this privately opulent weekend refuge on a stretch of lakeshore best known for the palaces of American movie stars and Russian oligarchs. In this they had an unusual collaborator: Luca Guadagnino, the Italian filmmaker, who had always wanted to be an interior designer. Marchetti knew of that dream from an interview that Guadagnino, 47, once gave; while Marchetti was visiting him on the set of ‘‘Call Me by Your Name’’ in 2016, he proposed that they collaborate on the house with the architect Giulio Ghirardi. Despite being in preproduction for his next project — a reimagining of the director Dario Argento’s 1970s Italian cult horror classic ‘‘Suspiria,’’ to be released in November — Guadagnino immediately agreed. ‘‘I’m a little bit irrational,’’ he admits. Marchetti and Olsen had long been friends with the director, whose densely atmospheric film sets are memorable for their layered, subtle details: a barely seen armoire full of linen in 2009’s ‘‘I Am Love’’; an actual notarized land deed used instead of a facsimile for 2017’s ‘‘Call Me by Your Name.’’ Guadagnino often films his movies in aristocratic villas or Art Deco-era wonders little known outside of Italy — environments are as critical to his vision as actors or scripts. ‘‘Space is the most important thing that comes to my mind when I analyze things,’’ Guadagnino says. ‘‘In cinema, you are an impostor, in a way, because you can always edit afterward and change the story. You cannot do that with a house.’’ A house, after all, is not a fiction. And far from being theatrical types, Marchetti and Olsen envisioned their life at La Filanda as one oriented toward family and domestic pleasures. Marchetti, who was born and raised on the Adriatic coast, in Ravenna, is attracted to water and loves to swim. Olsen, from the north of England, enjoys gardening: Guided by Guadagnino’s colleague, Gaia Chaillet Giusti, she planted modest parterres in a chevron pattern, had two mature palms helicoptered onto the property from nearby Tremezzina and installed a dollhouse-like structure for the family’s pet tortoise, Frittata. Inside, the couple sought a harmonious retreat. Guadagnino started with a psychologically detailed questionnaire: What colors do they like? What time of the day do they prefer? How do they see themselves in a room? Answers in hand — bright jewel tones, mornings, playing board games with
In the entry of the house, a pair of Adnet floor lamps, pendants by Michael Anastassiades, a rug by Cogolin and walls covered in brass-detailed oak paneling designed by Guadagnino. Opposite: in a nautical-inspired powder room leading to the indoor pool, the emerald stone and brass hardware are by Studio Luca Guadagnino.
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their 7-year-old daughter, Margherita — the director began composing a storyboard in the form of a workbook, a thick volume that encompassed a minutely detailed inventory of the exemplary collection of 20th-century furniture that Marchetti had been amassing for years. ‘‘I’m a storyteller,’’ Guadagnino says. ‘‘That’s my first job.’’ THOUGH SKILLED AT creating sumptuous movie sets, the director is neither a trained architect nor an interior designer. Along with a general contractor, the 150 Italian craftspeople Guadagnino assembled like a crew executed his design for the brass-trimmed, ribbed oak paneling used on the lower part of some walls (inspired by, Guadagnino says, ‘‘a very precious wood box, the kind you can find in Japan’’); upholstered those same walls above the dado with Kvadrat wool fabrics in geometric panels in reference to both the structure’s origins as a textile factory and its mid-20th century Modernist design; and applied in stucco at the cornices a motif of double-ended ogives, a vaguely maritime style that alludes to the lake visible beyond the brass window frames. Still, La Filanda isn’t baldly literal in its references. While it is tempting to think of the place as engineered with the taut economy of a yacht interior, the house more accurately evokes a puzzle, one whose interlocking pieces seamlessly, and seemingly inevitably, fit together. Before Guadagnino began, the couple had already gutted the building, which was constructed more than a century ago during a boom in an industry first begun at Como in the 1400s, when Ludovico Sforza (then the Duke of Milan) commanded that the lakeside be planted with mulberry trees for the delectation of silkworms. (Until as recently as the 1970s — when the industry migrated to China — silk remained the area’s most important commercial export.) In the decades after the shuttlecocks stopped clacking through looms at La Filanda, the mill was used as a tennis racket factory, then as an auto repair shop and, finally, as a depot for boat motors before sinking at last into pigeon-haunted desuetude. It was the building’s shoe-box shape that inspired Marchetti and Olsen to acquire it five years ago, after having spotted it on strolls from their nearby rental. If executing their vision would prove complex, the impetus for the home’s purchase was simple: ‘‘My dream was always to have a pool,’’ Marchetti says. Originally intended for the ground floor, it was relocated to the basement after workers discovered that the soil beneath the building was contaminated with lead and would need to be removed. After the subterranean bathing pavilion was completed, the house’s transformation picked up pace, Guadagnino filling the home with treasures accumulated by the couple as well as pieces he found for them. Guests enter La Filanda at the structure’s midpoint, a sunlit foyer dominated by an immense Claude Lalanne Bagatelle mirror framed in looping bronze tendrils and hung above a matching Lalanne console. For Marchetti, the pair of bronze mice he specified to scurry up the table’s struts are as much a source of pleasure as the Giorgio Morandi still life from the 1950s that he impulsively purchased from an online auction and that now hangs in the ground-floor powder room.
‘In cinema, you are an impostor, in a way, because you can always edit afterward and change the story. You cannot do that with a house.’
AS WITH HIS films, a second take was sometimes required. At the core of the house is an oak stairway resembling the interior of a chambered nautilus that links all three floors. Built once in its entirety, it was torn out and recreated after the original curve
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Left: in the living room, Guadagnino designed the molding detail and bold yellow wall panels covered in Kvadrat fabric. A Candida Höfer photograph hangs over an Italian rosewood sideboard. The 1930s caned mahogany chairs are by Kaare Klint, the sofa is by Frits Henningsen, the side tables are by Hermès and the low table is by George Nakashima. Above: the yellow palette continues into the kitchen.
To the left of the entry, there’s a pantry whose lacquered pistachio cabinetry is branded Studio Luca Guadagnino, the filmmaker’s new design firm, and is rendered, like so much else in the house, in the confectionary hues of Jordan almonds. Beyond this is a kitchen with custom-paneled shelves in varying tones of yellow (also created by Guadagnino’s firm) alongside an enormous suspended lighting fixture created in 1933 by Gio Ponti — merely one example of Marchetti’s irresistible attraction to every imaginable form of artificial illumination. Extending toward the lake, the main 62-by-20foot living area, which spans nearly half the length of the structure, is divided into three discrete zones of seating. What is most notable in each is how Guadagnino has arranged — as though a group of actors were conversing in a scene — decorative elements as disparate as a rugged 1960s George Nakashima slab table, a 1950s sycamore and rosewood Italian bar cabinet, caned chairs copied in Mumbai from early 20th-century designs by the French architect Maxime Old and a colossal 2009 photograph by the German artist Candida Höfer of the national library in Naples. A helipad-size marble table, custom built by Hermès, anchors the room. (With bespoke waxed-leather legs, it’s a marriage of Guadagnino’s passion for the handmade and the retailing mogul’s acquisitive appetites.) Together, the designer and homeowners also plundered the archives of venerable European manufacturers. At the Nymphenburg Porcelain Manufactory in Munich, Guadagnino and Olsen unearthed a disused French rose glaze to color a portion of their 303 pieces of china, some of which feature a pattern designed two centuries ago. At Manescalchi, a linen purveyor favored by the Milanese haute bourgeoisie, Guadagnino found from dead stock a collection of pristine place mats and napkins with elaborately handworked fagoting details. At J. & L. Lobmeyr glassworks in Vienna, he commissioned gossamer glassware etched with outlines of Lake Como.
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was judged to be clumsy. In keeping with the house’s palette, the treads are covered in a bespoke rainbow ombré carpet from France’s Gobelins Manufactory, the colors of which increase or diminish in intensity — yellow to orange to red to blue to green — as you ascend to the bedroom floor or descend to the screening and changing rooms at the pool level. ‘‘Even though the house is contemporary, it’s also meant to be a sensual place,’’ Guadagnino says. This is most evident on the private upper level, where he designed cocooning spaces for each occupant, appointing the master suite with furnishings either quirky (reproductions of a pair of wavy 1940s Paolo Buffa nightstands), austere (an Hermès re-edition of a 1924 Jean-Michel Frank parchment dressing table) or, as with the textured Cogolin rug, seductively tactile. Connected by a hallway that runs the length of the house, there are three bedrooms — one each for parents, daughter and guests — along with a study, a library and Olsen’s boudoir. (‘‘Finally,’’ she says, ‘‘I have more closet space than Federico.’’) It is in these rooms that Guadagnino seems to pay frank homage to one of his greatest influences: Villa Necchi Campiglio, the magnificent Milanese manor designed in the 1930s by Piero Portaluppi for two heirs to a sewing machine fortune, in which ‘‘I Am Love’’ was filmed. As with that house, the hand of a decorative mastermind appears in every detail at La Filanda. Throughout, cultivated restraint takes the place of ostentation. ‘‘Of all the great houses you could find on the lake, Federico and Kerry decided to go for this old factory,’’ Guadagnino says. ‘‘Here, everything important is inside.’’
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Left: a view of Lake Como from the house. Right: a corridor on the second floor runs the length of the former factory. Opposite: in the master bedroom, the custom fireplace of emperador marble was inspired by a radiator cover in a Milanese palazzo, the chairs were designed by Pierre Jeanneret for Knoll in 1952, the fabrics are by Kvadrat, the rug is by Cogolin and the lamps are from the Netherlands’ Morentz gallery.
OF A KIND
Madeline Weinrib’s Turkish ceramics
EIGHT YEARS AGO, on a wander through Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, Madeline Weinrib, the artist and textile designer (and granddaughter of the founders of ABC Carpet & Home) spotted an intricately painted blue-and-white vase. Thus began her obsession with late 20thcentury pottery from Kutahya, a Turkish city known for a particularly colorful form of patterned earthenware that has been produced there since the 15th century. ‘‘They’re beautiful but not precious, and I actually use them — the vases for flowers, the bowls for olives and nuts,’’ says Weinrib, whose collection numbers about 30 pieces. ‘‘I like things that feel special but also serve a purpose.’’ An affinity for bold design and utility is also what defined Weinrib’s namesake line of home décor, a business she recently closed to focus on special collaborations, made-to-order fabrics, rugs and vintage finds she’ll sell at her eponymous Manhattan studio. In addition, she’s working with local artisans to create pillows, caftans and textiles that will be sold at Vanessa Branson’s Marrakesh hotel, El Fenn, later this year, and in the spring, she’ll release a collection of carpets she created with the late poet and artist Rene Ricard. — John Wogan Illustrations by Aurore de La Morinerie
Dinner plate. ‘‘This style reminds me of my textiles. Each one is hand-painted and different from the other, but when you put them all together, it just works.’’
Vase.
Platter. ‘‘I love the detail of the Islamic calligraphy in the center.’’
68 T QATAR: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE
Earthenware bowl.
Vase. ‘‘The first Turkish ceramic I bought at the bazaar in Istanbul. It’s one of a pair.’’
Dinner plate. ‘‘The colors in my collection really inspire my work. This dish has a turquoise glaze that’s just beautiful.’’
Bowl. ‘‘This star-shaped bowl was a gift from a woman I worked with in Istanbul for many years. She knows my taste.’’
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