November Issue: Smart Art

*Architecture � Design � Art � Travel � Entertaining � Beauty & Grooming � Transport � Technology � Fashion � Watches & Jewellery

november 2020

NATURAL SPLENDOUR

An elevating take on time-travelling art, environmentally conscious architecture and nature-loving design

ENTER

design Mario Bellini - www.bebitalia.com

CONNERY SEATING SYSTEM | RODOLFO DORDONI DESIGN FYNN ARMCHAIR | GAMFRATESI DESIGN BOTECO SIDEBOARD AND COFFEE TABLE | MARCIO KOGAN / STUDIO MK27 DESIGN DISCOVER MORE AT MINOTTI.COM/CONNERY

OCTAVE SEATING SYSTEM— VINCENT VAN DUYSEN

D.355.1 BOOKCASES— GIO PONTI

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MILANO PARIS LONDON NEW YORK ATHENS BARCELONA BEIJING BUDAPEST CHENGDU CHICAGO DUBAI GENEVA HONG KONG ISTANBUL JAKARTA LOS ANGELES MADRID MANILA MEXICO CITY MIAMI MOSCOW NANJING OSAKA SEOUL SHANGHAI SINGAPORE TEHERAN TOKYO TORONTO

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NOVEMBER

ART

088 115 118

Trail maker Sophie Calle on love, loss and how 125 years of lonely hearts inspired her new project, shown across 20 pages (from page 094) Full bloom Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted embrace of Veuve Clicquot Reality check Sarah Sze brings AR to Fondation Cartier

DESIGN

062 074 085

ARCHITECTURE

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Open house Francesco Librizzi’s Milan apartment Urban jungle Vo Trong Nghia is greening Vietnamese cities

Finders keepers Paul Smith’s collected treasures, explored with his friend and travelling companion Deyan Sudjic Tokyo story Marcio Kogan on the Japanese travels that inspired his new furniture for Minotti Soft landing Loro Piana’s first foray into furniture design, at its new Ginza flagship FASHION

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Hothouse flower We’re digging the dandy

A BLACK MACASSAR DIVIDER (LEFT) AND TACCHINI’S ‘JULEP’ SOFA (RIGHT) AT THE MILAN HOME OF FRANCESCO LIBRIZZI, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF FONTANAARTE, PAGE 067

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NOVEMBER MEDIA

168

WallpaperSTORE* Refined design, delivered to your door OFFICEPAPER*

129 134 139

Refit for work Future-proofing the office Holy order David Chipperfield turns a 17th-century convent into a contemporary workspace Heavy lifting Brutalist offices in Athens get a respectful refresh RESOURCES

JACKET, £430; SHIRT, £159, BOTH BY OLIVER SPENCER. SCARF, £300, BY HERMÈS, SEE PAGE 156

169

Stockists What you want and where to get it

FOOD

170

TRAVEL Artist’s palate Frank Bowling’s pig’s trotters in vodka and beer

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Checking in Manuel Aires Mateus’ subterranean sleepover in Alentejo

FRONT OF BOOK

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Newspaper Workwear’s a cinch; Stephen Holl’s new art space in Houston; Sara Ricciardi’s monastic massage tools The Vinson View Picky Nicky’s good dinner guide INTERIORS

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Field studies Interiors with space to breathe

LORO PIANA’S NEW GINZA FLAGSHIP STORE, BY JUN AOKI, IS HOME TO THE BRAND’S FIRST FURNITURE COLLECTION, SEE PAGE 085

COPENHAGEN

GELSTED

STOCKHOLM

DRESSED IN NATURE’S HUES | CH78 |

MAMA BEAR HANS J. WEGNER | 1954

Carl Hansen & Søn is now relaunching the CH78 Lounge Chair affectionately known as the Mama Bear Chair, designed in 1954 by Hans J. Wegner.

Handcrafted by skilled artisans, its special aesthetic character comes from the way it balances soft, rounded curves with dynamic geometries and fine details, such as the signature wooden armrests and legs.

For a limited time only at a special price, the CH78 is offered in six colors in selected natural hues.

carlhansen.com

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Abbracci Collection, design Lorenza Bozzoli

ghidini1961.com

PROJECTS JOURNAL

Exteta. A fluid soul

YACHTING PROJECT

Exteta for Riva 50Metri M/Y RACE

Historically recognized as an emblem of Made in Italy nautical art, Riva enriches the marine scene with precious floating jewels every year. All Riva boats are the result of over 170 years of history; a history made of Italian passion and tradition. It is precisely its Italian roots, that unique and inimitable know-how that Riva sees in Exteta, entrusting it with the furniture design of Race, a magnificent Superyacht of 50 meters, the largest Riva has ever built.

Caprera Sofa

by Massimo Castagna

www.exteta.it

CONTRIBUTORS FRANK BOWLING Artist Bowling lists ‘painting, cricket, jazz and pig’s trotters’ as interests on his Facebook profile. Small wonder that he responded to our Artist’s Palate invitation with a recipe for his signature pig’s trotters in vodka and beer (page 170), a slow-cooked dish that can be prepared ahead of a long day at the studio. A master of colour and expression, the British-Guyanese painter found belated recognition last year, at the age of 85, with an acclaimed solo retrospective at Tate Britain.

SOPHIE LOVELL Writer

PAUL PHUNG Photographer

Family businesses are the backbone of the German economy and, as our longstanding Germany Editor, Sophie Lovell has visited a fair number of their offices, many of which are in surprisingly lovely locations. One such is the Jacobys’ David Chipperfield-designed HQ, which she toured with co-director Ellen Jacoby (page 134). ‘Ellen loves the new HQ as if it were her own home, which, in a way, it is,’ says Lovell. ‘A highlight was the brunch by in-house chef, Michael Wibbeke.’

This month we tasked the London-based Phung with photographing artist Sarah Sze in New York (page 118). ‘It was the most challenging shoot I’ve ever done via Zoom,’ says Phung. ‘Sarah told me she felt we both played the role of the photographer. It was such a memorable shoot and a sign of the times ahead.’ Known for his monochromatic, cinematic imagery and striking fashion shoots, Phung is now working on a new book featuring portraits of dancers.

CHARLOTTE TAYLOR Creative director For this month’s Space story (page 146), Taylor and collaborator Joe Mortell created dreamlike virtual sets that take furniture into the great outdoors, responding to a wellness-inspired concept from Wallpaper* interiors editor Hannah Jordan. ‘My approach is very analogue; I start with a series of hand drawings and annotations,’ says Taylor. ‘Joe translates these sketches into 3D models and landscapes, and we work together on the scenes’ final appearance.’

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ALEXANDRE GUIRKINGER Photographer

SCOTT MITCHEM Writer

Long-time Wallpaper* contributor Guirkinger has travelled the world on assignment, but was able to stay close to his Paris home to photograph French artist Sophie Calle at her base in Malakoff (page 088). With black-and-white portraits of the likes of Jane Birkin and Céline Sciamma already under his belt, Guirkinger had no trouble capturing Calle’s spirit. Some of his photographs, accompanying artist Tarek Atoui’s sound experiments, are currently on show at the Fridericianum in Kassel.

Wallpaper* stalwart Mitchem, a fan of all things design and all things Brazilian, was delighted to interview revered architect Marcio Kogan for us about his new furniture for Minotti (page 074). ‘It was an honour,’ says Mitchem. ‘Marcio and Roberto [Minotti] are lovely people, both quick to praise their teams before taking any personal credit.’ A self-described ‘hotel geek’, Mitchem particularly enjoyed discussing the process of conceptualising a virtual luxury oceanfront resort with Roberto.

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ILLUSTRATOR: SAM RUSSELL WALKER WRITER: LÉA TEUSCHER

Be social

Originals only www.eilersen.eu

Model Float • Sofa 360 x 100 cm • Design by Jens Juul Eilersen • Fabric Soft 07

Four times awarded: The new SieMatic SLX

The SieMatic style collection PURE has been enriched by an outstanding kitchen concept: the new SieMatic SLX, awarded with the ICONIC AWARD 2020: Innovative Interior “Best of Best�, the iF Design Award 2020, the Red Dot Design Award 2020, and, most recently, the German Design Award 2021. The focus is on the newly developed recessed grip, whose filigree design and the batten luminaire integrated into the shadow gap make the worktop appear to float.

Timeless by Tradition

SIEMATIC ST YLE COLLECTION PURE

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Natural instinct

Charlotte Taylor and Joe Mortell Interiors: Hannah Jordan From left, ‘Julep’ sofa, €3,873, by Jonas Wagell; ‘Matera’ ottoman, from €1,034, by Gordon Guillaumier, both for Tacchini. ‘Sistema Parere Madia’ unit, €4,757,

by Anton Cristell and Emanuel Gargano, for Amura. Sculptural object, €105, by Helena Rohner, for Ferm Living. ‘Ruff’ armchair, price on request, by Patricia Urquiola, for Moroso.

‘Lantern’ floor lamp, CNY4,800 ($702), by Kun Design See our story on page 146

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to foods of a single colour each day of the week, shown in a series of photographs.

There are so many shows, so many wonderful encounters with her work to mention. You just never forget them. The interplay between fact and fiction; intensity and playfulness; curiosity and bravado.

Also within our art section, we preview Sarah Sze’s new exhibition for Fondation Cartier, which sees her translate moving images of nature and the elemental into AR for the first time; and Yayoi Kusama’s collaboration with Veuve Clicquot, ensconcing a magnum of La Grande Dame champagne in an exuberantly polka-dotted floral sculpture that comes with a message of hope.

We celebrate the green thumb of Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia, whose new headquarters in Ho Chi Minh City is wrapped in a barricade of vegetation: tropical ferns, pandan plants and other flora native to southern Vietnam. The building is not only a welcome beacon of greenery within a concrete jungle, but also a case study in leveraging plantlife for temperature regulation and ventilation, and a bold blueprint for cities that are more attuned to the environment. Meanwhile, tucked away in the rolling hills of Portugal’s Alentejo region, Manuel Aires Mateus’ Casa na Terra hotel offers outstanding views of the surrounding landscape.

In lieu of the annual office-themed Space story, we’ve brought the indoors out, dreaming up spaces for work, rest and rejuvenation among grassy meadows.

Finally, our main fashion story imagines a horticultural hero at work in the greenhouses of McBean’s Orchids in East Sussex. Enjoy the issue, and may the power of nature sustain and inspire you.

Sarah Douglas, Editor-in-Chief

Limited-edition cover

by Sophie Calle

Calle’s self-portrait for our limited-edition cover accompanies an interview (page 088) and 20-page portfolio (page 094), part of her project, A l’Affût (On the Hunt). The project also includes her photographs of hunters’ watchtowers, and highway surveillance images of animals at night, top left and right Limited-edition covers are available to subscribers, see Wallpaper.com

©Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, London, 2020 / Courtesy Perrotin

Newsstand cover Visual artists:

Welcome to our November issue – our annual art special – which is dedicated to natural splendour. It is an enormous honour to welcome French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who graces our limited-edition subscribers cover with a self-portrait of her camouflaged as a tree.

The image is part of Sophie’s new project, A l’Affût (On the Hunt), which we are proud to present in an exclusive 20-page portfolio, translated into English for the first time.

The project began when Paris’ Museum of Hunting and Nature invited her to exhibit. Combing through archival copies of the hunting magazine Le Chasseur Français, Sophie was drawn to its lonely hearts ads and soon discovered parallels between the hunt for game and the matrimonial chase. And so she went through 125 years of matrimonial ads, grouping them by decade and theme (my favourite being ‘1930-1940: Hard worker, mildly modern’), and juxtaposing them with her photographs of hunting watchtowers, symbolising predators, and highway surveillance images of animals at night, symbolising prey. Far from glorifying a contested sport, Sophie seems to suggest that, for all the trappings of civilisation, we’ve more in common with the natural world than we often recognise.

More than any other living artist, she discovers humour, wisdom and grace within humanity’s mundane moments.

I first experienced Sophie’s work in person at her show ‘Double Game’ in 1999, at Camden Arts Centre in London. There are certain artists in your life that you have an attraction to – Sophie is one, and I was gripped. The show was a response to American author Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan, which features a character based on her. In a particularly memorable work, The Chromatic Diet, Sophie restricted herself

FLAGSHIP STORE - BÄRENGASSE 10 - ZÜRICH HIERONYMUS-CP.COM

WWW.LONGHI.IT

Sylvestrina | Jordi Garcés, Enric Sòria | 1974

Newspaper* Wallpaper’s hot pick of the latest global goings-on Right, jacket, £1,950; skirt, £1,020; belt, £860, all by Prada For stockists, see page 169

Form-flattering attire for the new normal workplace

It’s a cinch

PHOTOGRAPHY: JOSIE HALL FASHION: AYLIN BAYHAN WRITER: LAURA HAWKINS

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Newspaper Top row, jacket, £1,982, by Jil Sander by Lucie and Luke Meier. Dress, £2,350; belt, both price on request,

by Celine by Hedi Slimane.

Dress, £6,250, by Balenciaga Middle row, jacket, £2,390; skirt, £1,250, both by Fendi.

Belt, £790; lighter case, £430; earphone case, £490; pen earring, £490, all by Fendi x Chaos. Coat, £319; belt, £109, both by Boss.

Coat, £9,400, by Hermès Bottom row, coat, £5,075,

by Salvatore Ferragamo.

Jacket, £1,700; trousers, £525, both by Dolce & Gabbana.

Jacket, £3,300; trousers, £1,500, both by Dior

O

ur working-from-home wardrobes saw a disposition for a slouchier silhouette, but we’ve been longing for a return to more form-flattering attire. Cinched-in styles appeared in swathes on the A/W20 catwalks, with brands such as Dolce & Gabbana and Dior advocating a tailored hourglass shape. Bonus styling points are scored with the addition of a body-hugging belt, seen in graphic retro shapes at Celine and Balenciaga, where a circular buckle draws attention to your midriff. Prada and Fendi offered even more bang for your belt, cinching boardroom-ready blazers that dangle with utilitarian items or have clips that double as purses. Fendi’s metal mod cons form part of a collaboration with London-based accessories label Chaos, offering a range of glamorous gadgets – from shot glasses and AirPod holders to cigarette cases and lighters – that equip the modern woman.

With pieces that encourage such a striking silhouette, you might just start sporting them on your days off, too.

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Hand made in Italy / ceramicacielo.it

Le Acque di Cielo: —— Colour is our attitude!

Catino Ovale washbasin in Anemone finish, Oval Box mirror: design by Andrea Parisio, Giuseppe Pezzano Era sanitary ware in Anemone finish: design by Luca Cimarra

Newspaper

born again A pair of Marcel Breuer-designed pedestal tables emerge from the archives The paths of British furniture company Very Good & Proper and Isokon Plus merged last year when VG&P founder Ed Carpenter acquired the iconic brand whose archive includes designs by Marcel Breuer, Ernest Race and Barber Osgerby. ‘We shared the same ethos,’ observes Carpenter, who has since been working closely with Isokon Plus director Mark Smith and his team. The two companies’ values align neatly: both create high-quality, long-lasting products, support an ethical use of materials, and have a solid design background. ‘One of the great things

about joining forces with Mark and Isokon were the archives,’ says Carpenter. Earlier this year, Carpenter and Smith came across some blueprints for a pair of pedestal tables, originally designed by Marcel Breuer in 1937. One was made at the Bauhaus, the other was never produced. The duo devised a way to bring the designs back to life using a more energy efficient and environmentally conscious process but still keeping the original features intact.

The tables’ designs were largely experimental, but leverage the same technologies as nine decades ago, when they were initially conceived. ‘There is an intrinsic value to the modernist community,’ says Smith. ‘An honesty to the materials that we both love.’

Round dining table, £1,750; one-legged table, £1,425, both

by Marcel Breuer, for Isokon Plus, isokonplus.com

The round dining table (top) features four identical plywood panels, glued together to form the base, with a birch plywood top.

The one-legged table (left) features three solid timber legs, a timber column with a protective metal strip running up the sides, and a birch plywood top

PHOTOGRAPHY: MAX CREASY WRITER: ROSA BERTOLI

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Newspaper

A striking new art gallery opens its doors in Houston

Kinder surprise In one of the year’s most anticipated cultural launches, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) is about to celebrate the inauguration of the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building.

Designed by Steven Holl Architects, it’s the latest addition to the museum’s ever-expanding Sarofim Campus, which also includes Holl’s Glassell School of Art, completed in 2018.

The new structure, a balanced composition of irregularly shaped, white and translucent volumes topped by luminous, concave roofs, features dynamic interiors, created to house modern and contemporary art. The building is arranged horizontally, and generous, naturally top-lit galleries are interspersed with a series of courtyards, connecting inside and outside. Meanwhile, a cascading sculptural staircase links the atrium with the gallery areas. ‘The atrium is very dramatic and I feel will likely become an iconic example in 21st museum architecture, in the same way the Guggenheim in Bilbao or New York is,’ says the museum’s director Gary Tinterow. The building will open officially on 21 November. mfah.org; stevenholl.com

Vertical, translucent glass tubes clad the façades (right) of the new Nancy and Rich Kinder Building in Houston, while, inside, two floors and more than 100,000 sq ft of exhibition space are connected by a cascading sculptural staircase (above)

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PHOTOGRAPHY: PETER MOLICK WRITER: ELLIE STATHAKI

COOL DESIGN. EVEN AT 100°C. Sophisticated design meets superior craftsmanship. We turn any room into a one-of-a-kind sauna and spa oasis, naturally shaped by your very own ideas.

Find out more at www.klafs.com

Newspaper

We’ve high praise for a new collection of objects inspired by monastic life

Habit forming

Above, the Ora collection, designed by Sara Ricciardi, photographed in the Cavea Arcari, in Zovencedo, designed by David Chipperfield Architects for Laboratorio Morseletto. Pietra Bianca di Vicenza stone is extracted in this area and is featured in the collection, which includes a fount, an incense burner, massage tools, an hourglass and weights

Naples design fair Edit was created in 2019 by curators Domitilla Dardi and Emilia Petruccelli to support and promote the work of young designers and independent makers with a focus on local production.

The programme includes a design residency, a showcase of small companies, and a dedicated ‘creative cradle’ to present the work of the next generation, and the event has already been making waves within the Italian and international design panorama.

Among this year’s participants is Italian designer (and Wallpaper* Handmade 2018 alumna) Sara Ricciardi, who was asked to develop a collection based on wellness for presentation within the fair’s Complesso di San Domenico Maggiore, a religious complex in the heart of the city. The location, Ricciardi explains, provided inspiration for the collection. ‘It’s an evocative place where monks lived a life punctuated by discipline and exercise,’ she says.

‘I wanted my designs to consider the gestures that accompanied it.’

PHOTOGRAPHY: MARCO MARIA ZANIN WRITER: ROSA BERTOLI

The title of the collection, Ora, is inspired by the monks’ traditional motto of ‘pray and work’ (ora et labora), and features a fount, an incense burner, massage tools and an hourglass, as well as weights and an exercise mat.

Every object was carefully considered by the designer to fit within a ritualistic ‘exercise of daily connection’.

Silence, tranquillity, austere geometry and discipline inspired Ricciardi throughout the project, which she developed in collaboration with Padua-based manufacturer Simone Piva, using a library of materials that includes rose quartz, copper, glass, marble and wood, seamlessly combined with a harmonious result. Each piece has its own important meaning for Ricciardi, but it is perhaps her totemic hourglass that stands out.

‘It represents the most important exercise for me, to pause and listen,’ she says.

Edit Napoli is on from 16-18 October, at Complesso di San Domenico Maggiore, Vico San Domenico Maggiore 18, Naples, editnapoli.com

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Newspaper

Celebrating the fabric futurism of technical brand Stone Island

Fibre optics

In 1982, Stone Island released its first outerwear collection constructed from Tela Stella, a canvas impregnated with resin, coloured a different shade on each side, and inspired by military tarpaulin. The release saw the stirrings of a new type of fashion fan, buying not into logos or branding but experimental pieces as a result of industrial innovation. Founder Massimo Osti named Stone Island after the two words that appeared most frequently in the novels of Joseph Conrad. And now, with the release of Rizzoli’s Stone Island: Storia, the brand has established its own literary lexicon. The monograph offers an insight

into the history of Stone Island, celebrating its mythic HQ or ‘kitchen’ where otherworldly materials – like thermosensitive leather and satin weave cotton faded with corrosive pastes – are masterminded. The volume also delves into the brand’s impact on youth culture and the resonance of its compass-patch logo with football supporters, Britpop artists and rappers. In 2017, one of the brand’s biggest fans, Liam Gallagher, was so incensed by the theft of his beloved Stone Island parkas from his hotel room while he was playing Glastonbury that he took to Twitter to demand their return.

Stone Island: Storia, $60, Rizzoli New York, rizzoliusa.com

Above, garments made using Stone Island’s printed, heat-reactive, thermosensitive fabric. Right, jackets constructed from garmentdyed Dyneema (a durable, lightweight fibre), which formed part of Stone Island’s Prototype Research Series, on show during Milan Design Week 2017

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PHOTOGRAPHY: &SON, SABRINA TANZI WRITER: LAURA HAWKINS

In Denmark, winters are dark and rainy.

Fortunately The Vipp lamp collection is now available

vipp.com

Column

THE VINSON VIEW Quality maniac Nick Vinson on the who, what, when, where and why

AWARD-WORTHY KITCHENS...

Offer a menu that has just enough choice and changes with the seasons Are obsessive about sourcing, and develop mutually beneficial relationships with suppliers.

Chef Norbert Niederkofler, of Italy’s Hotel Rosa Alpina, works with 50 local producers Support their suppliers. London’s Gymkhana and Trishna have partnered up with Tiger Vines to bring its wines direct to your home, helping out winemakers who don’t otherwise have distribution outside of restaurants Show a responsible attitude to food waste.

Up to a third of all fruit and vegetables grown is discarded. Minimising waste is even more important with animal produce. Fergus Henderson, of London’s St John, is the early adopter of this with his nose-to-tail eating Think green. The kitchen at Italy’s Il San Pietro’s uses just 25 per cent of the electricity ordinarily used by a kitchen of its size.

An ozone clean each morning means no chemical cleaning products are necessary Ban single-use plastic, such as Skye Gyngell’s Spring restaurant in London

01

Rewrite the stars

The criteria for critiquing restaurants need a revamp

When eating out, I have an aversion to square plates, especially bobbly glass ones.

I detest balsamic vinegar flourishes, foams, sprinkles and other superficial decorations serving no purpose. I don’t want someone to explain the bread basket, nor do I appreciate being interrupted to have an essay read out about what’s so fancy about the next dish.

Tasting menus are not for me, I rarely desire an amuse bouche, pre-desserts spoil the real dessert and post-dessert petits fours and chocolates leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I blame the monstrous Michelin star system.

The fact that a chef has a star or three seems to be the only notable adjective used to describe them. That is all you get, like an email I just received: ‘dinner will be prepared by a two-Michelin-star chef ’. Visit a website for a hotel with a ‘starred’ restaurant and you will find this mentioned in the first part of the first paragraph, as if nothing else is worth knowing. It has a monopoly over the definition of a memorable meal.

In 1900, when it launched, the Michelin Guide was a great idea, guiding the lucky few with a car to where they may stop for a better-than-usual meal. The only time I ever referred to one was in the mid-1990s when shooting on location in the South of England; we ended up in very tacky places.

According to Michelin, one star means high-quality cooking worth a stop; two

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means excellent cooking worth a detour; and three indicates exceptional cuisine worth a special journey. Its assessment criteria, including ‘quality of the products’, ‘mastery of flavour’, ‘personality of the chef in his cuisine’ and ‘value for money’, sound good enough, but who are its anonymous ‘inspectors’ and what do they really know about great food today? All we know is they are full-time employees of the Michelin Group. That ‘personality of the chef ’ bit smacks of Masterchef and Netflix’s Chef ’s Table, which seems to attract bucket listticking diners. Personally, I would head to the restaurants that decline their stars, preferring to take care of their regulars.

The sector values this validation more than it should. Michelin getting all the airtime seems to be a force for influencing the food itself: make your meals more Michelin-esque and your business will take off, and you might even become a TV chef.

Many in the industry are now showing great agility and adaptability, offering home dining, opening online stores to sell suppliers’ precious produce and wine, and feeding key workers and the genuinely hungry. I am hoping that Covid-19 might put an end to the Michelin monopoly on restaurant critiquing, and that we find a better set of criteria to promote excellence in the kitchen.

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02 Lockdown creativity no.1 Florentine restaurateur Fabio Picchi, of Cibrèo, now sells locally-sourced organic produce from his suppliers, as well as prepared dishes to eat at home. cbio.it

03 Lockdown creativity no.2 Spring has been selling fresh produce from its farm suppliers. It now offers prepared foods, ice cream, cake and its fabulous bread. springrestaurant-shop.co.uk

ILLUSTRATOR: DANAE DIAZ

WOOLRICH.COM

#WITHOUTBARRIERS

Lucien Smith Artist & Filmmaker

Design

Finders keepers Fashion designer and inveterate collector Paul Smith shares a few of his favourite things in a new book, and here with his friend and travelling companion Deyan Sudjic

Paul Smith, Vêtements pour Homme, as Smith called his first shop, was a life-affirming injection of wit and tailoring-with-a-twist into the cheesecloth and tank-top darkness of the 1970s. He had a tiny space, just 10ft by 10ft, in Nottingham, the English city in which he grew up. Its hours were 10am to 6pm, Fridays and Saturdays only. Along with the clothes, there was an Andy Warhol print on the wall that Smith still wishes he could have afforded to buy, and a selection of antique jewellery.

Then as now, what drives Smith is the delight he takes in discovering things, and the pleasure that he takes in sharing his finds with his customers, whom he treats as friends. Sometimes the discoveries end up on sale in his shops. He rescued the Filofax from the clutches of generations of compulsive list makers, before it became a badge of shame, a totem of the toxic materialism of the 1980s. He stocked vintage books, as well as Braun calculators by Dieter Rams.

He likes to tell you about the things he has seen. He once called to ask whether I’d been to Matt’s Gallery in London, the pioneering space for installation art run by Robin Klassnik. He had just seen ‘20:50’, the 200 gallons of sump oil that Richard Wilson

had used to flood the building to spectacular effect. ‘It’s the last weekend of the exhibition, you have to go right now,’ he urged.

I had another phone call from Smith soon after he had opened his first store in Japan in 1984. ‘You have got to come to Tokyo, it’s the most amazing place on earth. Come with me next week.’ Luckily for me, I said yes and saw the city through his eyes. At Narita Airport, he pointed out the bus company staff, bowing low to a disappearing coach, a courtly gesture of respect that nobody but us would see. He took me to a tiny bar on an impossible-to-find alley in Shinjuku, where the barman served sake in unvarnished hinoki wood boxes and knew his name, and to the street full of shops near the old Tsukiji fish market, selling surrealist plates of wax spaghetti. He also took me to dinner with Rei Kawakubo, whom he ambushed with a rubber chicken.

Smith is celebrating the 50 years since he opened that first shop in Nottingham with a new book, edited by former Wallpaper* editor-in-chief Tony Chambers, that tells his story through 50 objects, salvaged from the snowdrift of stuff that covers every inch of his office in London’s Covent Garden.

It’s an accumulation that has spilled over

from a desk so full of things that it is no longer usable. There are tin toy cars, piles of books and magazines, Moroccan bottles, old cameras, a mountain of cycling jerseys, and a pink bicycle. There are a lot of rabbit artworks and ornaments, too. ‘I once said in an interview that seeing one brings me good luck, and the rabbits haven’t stopped pouring in ever since,’ Smith explains.

A lot of Smith’s selection is a tribute to his father, Harold, and to his wife, Pauline.

‘My father bought me the Kodak Retinette for my 11th birthday in 1957. It was the first time I’d ever thought about looking and seeing, seeing things through the little viewfinder which makes you look more carefully. It was the birth of being creative, without actually realising it,’ he writes.

Pauline, who taught him how to cut a pattern, introduced him to Yves Saint Laurent, and gave him an understanding of art. The book includes one of her presents for Smith, a tiny steam engine by jeweller Joel Arthur Rosenthal, its boiler exquisitely made in gold, with diamonds for coal. Also featured is a customised wine glass, a gift from Euan Uglow, one of the most distinguished British figurative painters of the 20th century, and »

Book image (this page): courtesy of Phaidon

PHOTOGRAPHY: MATTHEW DONALDSON WRITER: DEYAN SUDJIC

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01. Record player, by Dieter Rams at Braun. ‘Music and cycling are the two things that have stayed with me throughout my life,’ says Smith. 02. 1998 Paul Smith velvet suit, reissued for the A/W20 50th Anniversary Capsule Collection. ‘Wearing velvet in the daytime was quite avant-garde.’ 03. Paramount bicycle. ‘I got the bike for my 12th birthday, in 1958, and I started racing a year later.’ 04. Apple iMac. ‘In 1998, Jony Ive gave me a brand-new iMac G3. I don’t use a computer

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myself, but I’ve never dared to tell Jony that. I do use one of the iPhones he designed, though.’ 05. Filofax.

‘I sold something like 17,000 of them.’ 06.’Toio’ floor lamp, by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni. ‘This lamp is a fantastic example of thinking differently.’

07. Handmade train by Joel Arthur Rosenthal. ‘I love knowing people who are so extraordinarily good at what they do.’ 08. Bauhaus book. ‘I carried the book everywhere with me, even on backpacking holidays.’

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09. Campagnolo seat pillar. ‘Just pure style.’ 10. Wax plate of spaghetti. ‘It reminded me of Salvador Dalí.’ 11. Label. ‘This was the first real Paul Smith label.’ 12. The Dreamer of Dreams, illustrated by Edmund Dulac. ‘One small thing can inspire a whole collection.’ 13. Wine glass, by Euan Uglow. ‘“I dropped it,” Euan said,”so I repaired it.”’ 14. Linen prover. ‘I always had this in my pocket when I was designing fabrics for Leigh Mills in Yorkshire.’

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Pauline’s tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art. The glass reveals another aspect of the artist, and the regard that Smith has for ingenuity and skill. He recalls: ‘We went to Uglow’s studio in Battersea, and it was full of things that he had made himself. I was given a glass of wine. The base of the glass was the handle of a tap. He told me he had dropped the glass, “so I repaired it”. I was blown away.’

Skill is the thread that connects the gold locomotive with Uglow’s wine glass, and with a 22-year-old citrus-green iMac, a gift from Jony Ive. It has never been used, but Smith had put it in the window of his shop on Floral Street, London, as a deliberate contrast with the vintage fittings. (‘As the head of design at Apple, a company that had just teetered on the brink of going out of business, I was never more encouraged or affirmed,’ remembers Ive in the book’s foreword.) Ive’s father, who taught design and technology, had given his son a practical approach to design. Likewise, Smith’s father, who kept a soldering iron and a vice at home, had also taught him to respect people who get things done for themselves.

Smith’s 50 objects are a powerful celebration of touch, a quality that the digital world cannot replace. And they each tell more than one story. Smith is famously a cycling obsessive. But his fondness for a lathe-turned Campagnolo seat pillar represents not just the memory he has of putting it into his bike for the first time, it’s also a reminder of the pleasure we all take in the physical quality of things. ‘I realised that it had a ridge on it, and when I ran my nail along it, I could feel how beautifully it had been made. Not only could you see how beautiful it was, you could actually feel it, too.’

It’s not just that the Braun record player in his selection was designed by Dieter Rams, it’s also about the music – Otis Redding, The Temptations, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin – that has been important to him for almost as long as cycling has. And it reminds him of the Wharfdale speakers that he packed into his car and drove to Paris to provide the soundtrack for one of his earliest shows.

Smith’s anniversary comes in the midst of a pandemic that has up-ended the fashion world. He is still resolutely not doing things the obvious way, still full of energy, and still irrepressibly curious. He has shops in lots of places now, from Melrose Avenue in LA, a shocking pink architectural tribute to Luis Barragán (W*86), to Albemarle Street in London, designed by architects 6a (W*174), where Smith himself is sometimes to be found behind the till on a Saturday. He sees that personal connection as an essential part of the future: ‘When people aren’t travelling, or coming into shops, working online is helpful. But it’s not a long-term solution.

Online is not about enjoying a conversation, or about discovering things.’

Paul Smith, edited by Tony Chambers, with a foreword by Jony Ive, Phaidon, £50, phaidon.com; paulsmith.com

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“MO RE T H A N A FAUC E T, E AC H PRO D UC T IN THE AXOR EDGE COLLECTION IS A JEWEL, A MASTERPIECE, A UNIQUE A RC H I T E C T U R A L O BJ E C T.“

axor-design.com

― Jean-Marie Massaud

FORM FOLLOWS PERFECTION

WORK IN PROGRESS

WAGNER LIVING

D1 / D2 BY STEFAN DIEZ

www.wagner-living.com

In Residence

OPEN HOUSE Dividers rule in architect Francesco Librizzi’s free-flowing Milanese apartment

The key to understanding Francesco Librizzi and, indeed, his new apartment on Milan’s via Mauro Macchi, is how he looks at space. For starters, it is so easy, he points out, to separate one room from another with walls and doors. ‘But how do you let a space and, therefore its users, flow without interruption, while still feeling the specificity of different functions, such as dining and work zones?’

PHOTOGRAPHY: DELFINO SISTO LEGNANI WRITER: DAVEN WU

For the Palermo-born architect, and artistic director of design label FontanaArte, any attempt to restrict movement, much less dictate how a space should be used, is forbidden. ‘I like to unlock spaces and create endless circulation. Working, interacting, cooking are not always distinct moments in time and space,’ he explains. ‘You need to allow a space to change. You have to create freedom, which means accepting that the »

A partition, clad in the same clinker tiles (treated at a higher temperature than normal ceramic tiles) that Gio Ponti used for the neighbouring Palazzo Montedoria, separates the kitchen from the living area, which features Jonas Wagell’s ’Julep’ sofa for Tacchini

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O R I E N T E I TA L I A N O Oriente Italiano brings together the language of fine porcelain with the lyrical forms and motifs of majolica and the traditional ceramics from Faenza. Animated patterns of hand-painted classic carnation blooms and garlands are reborn through a diverse and playful palette.

Vibrant, eclectic, effortlessly cool. Total Ginori 1735. #ginori1735

In Residence

‘I like to unlock spaces and create endless circulation. Working, interacting, cooking are not always distinct moments’

inhabitants will use a space in ways they have not yet imagined and of which the designer cannot conceive.’

These touchstones, already firmly embedded in Librizzi’s 15-year-old architectural practice (which works on everything from buildings to exhibition and product design), took on greater importance for him this year when, as he was in the midst of renovating his new apartment, Italy retreated into its Covid-19 lockdown. The experience, along with his inability to work on the renovation for three months, only amplified his approach to space, its multifunctionality, and its relationship to the human psyche.

Set in an eight-storey corner pile, built in 1957 in a late Italian modernist-style, the pentagonal fourth-floor apartment had interesting bones, not least a balcony fronting each of the principal rooms. But what sealed the deal for Librizzi were the views of the Pirelli Tower and Palazzo Montedoria, both of which were created by his design hero, Gio Ponti. In Milan, he says, ‘you just don’t come across this kind of view’.

The Ponti buildings became integral to Librizzi’s reworking of the apartment’s 130 sq m interiors.

With literally five walls and numerous corners, finding a perspective that was not oriented towards any particular point was a challenge. The solution came when he realised that the apartment, with its five balconies and views, is really a big urban loggia in which a private porch is projected into a public space.

‘An apartment conceived as a small square that’s open to the city can interact with the materials of the

Above left, built-in storage features recessed handles, each cut into a different, organic shape Above right, clad in black macassar in homage to Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, a second partition separates the study and the dining area, with its tiled Superstudio table

buildings it faces, including the street and the trees,’ says Librizzi. ‘In this way, a private life becomes less relevant. What Covid-19 has taught us is that the quality of our relationships with one another and with the exterior environment has become more important.’

Once Librizzi embraced this paradigm shift – the conceit of drawing the city into the apartment and the apartment out to the city – the rest of the puzzle fell quickly into place.

He demolished the walls of two bedrooms to create an internal agora of kitchen, living room and study.

‘I wanted to break the traditional hierarchy of rooms,’ he says. Sticking to the idea that spaces should allow circulation without defined points of entry and exit, Librizzi installed two slender ceiling-height screens. »

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In Residence

Left, the polished concrete floor throughout the apartment is embedded with shards of marble and stone Below, a view of Gio Ponti’s Palazzo Montedoria, as seen from the apartment.

Its dynamic façade, renovated in 2012, features both flat and projecting clinker tiles in a palette of greens

One is sheathed in black macassar – an homage to the partition wall in Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in the Czech Republic – which, in turn, anchors the white-tiled ‘Quaderna’ dining table by Superstudio for Zanotta.

At the other end of the space, behind a hemispheric ‘Julep’ couch designed by Jonas Wagell for Tacchini, stands a shimmering panel wall, clad in the same green clinker tiles that Gio Ponti designed and used for the façade of his Palazzo Montedoria across the road.

In a stroke of luck, Librizzi was able to buy up the last batch of tiles that TeamWork, a bespoke tile maker based in Reggio Emilia, had reproduced when the palazzo was renovated in 2012.

It’s a dazzling sleight of hand in which the green screen faces the Ponti building that inspired it.

‘I’m sure from that building you can see this screen,’ Librizzi says. ‘It creates a visual short circuit.’ The effect of looping perception is unexpectedly moving.

Is it any surprise to learn that the architect references Interstellar and Inception, both films in which the

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physical, emotional and spiritual qualities of humanity are transformed by bending the physical dimension?

This preoccupation with architectural metaphysics runs through the apartment. The concrete floor, for instance, is embedded with shards of mismatched marble and stone, their patterns forming hypnotic abstracts and metaphoric rugs. The kitchen’s mirrored splashback reflects a portion of the study hidden behind the macassar panel. In turn, the study leads into the bedrooms tucked away behind a long spine of aluminium frames, and in a full-circle moment, the ensuite bathroom opens into the kitchen.

One gets the sense that working on his apartment has been a meditative act in which Librizzi has tried to make sense of a space in a post-Covid-19 world where we are increasingly forced to turn inwards.

‘The main goal of every designer is to design something that’s bigger than ourselves,’ he says. With his Milan apartment, he may well have achieved that goal with room to spare. francescolibrizzi.com

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#3

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Opposite and below top, a concrete canopy, the only element of the house visible in the natural landscape, features a circular skylight and covers an outdoor patio. Below bottom, the house’s three bedrooms surround two indoor open-air atriums, which bathe the interiors in natural light

Over the past decade, Portugal’s popularity as a tourist hotspot has inspired a burst of architectural creativity in the hospitality industry, resulting in intimate, boutique hotels popping up all over the country by the likes of Pritzker Prize-winner Álvaro Siza and other acclaimed architects such as Manuel Aires Mateus.

Aires Mateus is the mastermind behind the latest opening to season the country’s landscape. The fifth property to join the Silent Living collection – a small hotel group that also owns Santa Clara 1728 (W*216), a beautiful six-room hotel perched atop one of Lisbon’s seven hills – Casa na Terra, which means ‘house in the land’, lives up to its name. Amid the soft rolling hills and sweeping skies of Portugal’s Alentejo region, a few steps from the shores of Alqueva – the largest man-made lake in Europe – the subterranean house is buried under the Earth’s surface, on the site of a pre-existing property that was submerged when the lake was created. ‘The house is located in an area where construction is not allowed,’ explains Aires Mateus. ‘Our ecological responsibility was also to make the house disappear into the landscape.’

Using concrete as the main material, Aires Mateus smartly inserted the house into the ground like

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a bunker. The only visible element is a canopy, with a circular skylight, which conceals the common areas and covers an outdoor patio that offers both sunrise and sunset views of the lake. The three bedrooms, which are set further back, encircle open-air atriums clad in white tiles that reflect the light from above.

The interiors are just as subtle, inspired, as Aires Mateus says, by the idea of silence. The concrete frame is softened by warm natural woods and bespoke furnishings, many of which have been crafted by local artisans using local materials, and these sit alongside Flos lights and Branca Lisboa chairs. ‘In this case, the interior design and the architecture is not something to be seen, only to be felt,’ he explains.

Local diversions include hiking, water sports or visits to the nearby medieval village of Monsaraz.

Coming soon are bicycles and a jetty from which you can hop onto the house’s private boat for lakeside meanders. Meanwhile, those looking for a more sedate sojourn can take advantage of a private cook, then sit back, relax and savour the sound of silence. ∂ Monsaraz, Portugal, tel: 351.932 251 056, silentliving.pt.

Rates: from €350 (low season)/€600 (high season)

Checking In

DEEP IMPACT Playful shapes and subterranean pleasures in rural Portugal

PHOTOGRAPHY: NELSON GARRIDO WRITER: LAUREN HO

Design

Tokyo story Marcio Kogan draws on his travels in Japan to create new seating for Minotti WRITER: SCOTT MITCHEM

Photography: courtesy of Minotti and Marcio Kogan

It’s not unthinkable that, after a long and complex collaboration between one of the world’s most renowned architects and his industry-leading client, one might use the F-word to characterise the other.

But when Marcio Kogan and Roberto Minotti describe each other as ‘family’, it’s still a bit surprising. Perhaps more surprising is that this genuine warmth extends across their teams – even after their most recent collaboration, a multifaceted, multinational effort, delivered on schedule in the face of the Covid-19 crisis.

The lovefest is likely a reflection of their shared philosophy on the workplace. ‘I saved all of my money early in my career so I could invest in creating the best environment possible in my office,’ said Kogan.

‘It was very calculated. Everything I do is with pleasure.

I love the people that work in my office and they love to work here. The word ‘family’ is overused, but in this case it’s accurate. Everybody is a friend. I care about them all. It’s the same with clients. I don’t work with anyone who I don’t consider a friend. Everything must be done with pleasure.’

Of course, Minotti is a family business, founded

by Alberto Minotti in 1948 and now run by his sons Roberto and Renato, together with the third generation: Alessandro, Alessio, Susanna and Leonardo. They have dozens of employees whose tenures go back decades, in an industry tradition that is uniquely Italian, and a network of international collaborators whom they consider extended family.

‘We only work with people we have a good connection with, that’s the most important thing. We have to have a good synergy with the people we are collaborating with, their culture, their passion for this job we share,’ says Roberto.

Like all healthy relationships, this one with Kogan has grown organically over time. It started when Roberto requested a meeting while he was in São Paulo, solely out of admiration for Kogan’s work. A friendship quickly began, but it would be four years before Kogan would receive his first Minotti commission: the ‘Quadrado’, a modular outdoor seating collection inspired by the classic teak duckboard used in yacht construction (see W*235). Released in 2018, it became a runaway bestseller – which tends to strengthen a friendship.

For his contribution to Minotti’s 2020 collection, Kogan had several ideas for indoor furniture in mind, but Roberto requested that he design pieces for both indoor and outdoor use – a brief driven in part by Kogan’s incredible residential projects in and around São Paulo. ‘It’s hard to tell where the indoors ends and the outdoors begins. This is a common theme in our work. Everything can be open because the climate is so agreeable,’ says Kogan. Celebrated in the pages of this magazine (see W*246), in coffee table books and across social media, his residences are coveted by design enthusiasts the world over – including Roberto, a trained architect who first fell in love with the idea of indoor/outdoor living as a student, learning about the midcentury masterpieces of Richard Neutra and John Lautner. The brief was also driven by Minotti’s ambitious expansion within the outdoor furniture market, to be supported by a new factory currently under construction near its HQ in Meda, Italy.

The heart of the offering is the ‘Daiki’ chair series, inspired by the lobby of the original Hotel Okura Tokyo. Kogan has travelled to the Japanese capital just after Christmas for the past six years running. È

‘I don’t want to do anything but walk and discover Tokyo and experience this amazing culture’ Opposite, main picture, an outdoor version of the new ‘Daiki’ chair,

by Marcio Kogan/Studio MK27 for Minotti, features a curved teak clam-shell and removable cushions upholstered in water-repellent polyester fabric Clockwise from above, Kogan’s highlights of his time in Japan include, the ‘super elegant’ Yakumo Saryo restaurant; street finds such as this ‘casual encounter’ in the residential area of Nakameguro; and Tanikawa House in Nagano Prefecture, 1972,

by Kazuo Shinohara, ‘a Japanese architecture masterpiece’

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Design ‘All I do is walk. I never have a plan. I don’t want to do anything but walk and discover the city and experience this amazing culture, which is the exact opposite of Brazil in so many ways. I think I took 2,000 pictures on my first trip. I was fascinated. Every morning, the only touristic plan we had was to go to the Nezu Museum, which was a 90-minute walk from our hotel. On our way, we stopped at a second-hand shop, then a ceramics studio, a café, a bookstore. We never made it. And that was fine with me,’ recalls Kogan.

It was on one of these endless strolls that he came across the Hotel Okura, its midcentury lobby originally designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi in 1962 (see W*8) and demolished in 2015 despite protests by modern preservationists. ‘I loved the atmosphere there. It was a masterpiece of interior design, very elegant, serene, timeless,’ said Kogan. ‘When I was there, I decided to make a tribute to this hotel and thought that could be a piece of furniture.’

Kogan pitched his idea in an unconventional way.

‘Minotti never imagined I would make a movie,’ he says, a filmmaker at heart. It took only two minutes, 57 seconds for the shock to wear off and for his elegant, passionate film about the project to win approval.

‘It was poetic. I loved it. It was an original way to tell the story of a project. I thought it was in line with Marcio’s spirit; I just loved it,’ says Roberto.

The resulting ‘Daiki’ series lives up to its lofty genesis, a simple, perfectly proportioned design concept that, like the original Hotel Okura lobby, is at once classic and modern. It’s the perfect result for Minotti, a brand itself built on walking the fine line between tradition and innovation. ‘Daiki’ is a blend of both, and includes an indoor armchair, with a shell in either Bolivian rosewood or ash veneer, and an outdoor armchair and dining chair. Teak is used for the outdoor versions, which allow for continuity with interior spaces featuring ‘Daiki’ or other Minotti pieces – a strategic priority and personal preference for Roberto. With the series, Kogan recalls the

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same sense of timelessness that made Taniguchi’s interiors worth fighting for.

Ultimately, Kogan contributed two additional series, the ‘Linha’ tables and ‘Boteco’ sideboards, to Minotti’s extensive 2020 collection – which also includes designs by a global collection of designers, among them Nendo, GamFratesi, Christophe Delcourt and the company’s own art director Rodolfo Dordoni.

In total, there are around 40 original products, each with variations that translate to over 400 new items.

Creating the context within which Minotti products are presented each year is a critical part of the company’s process, and the Covid-19 crisis only added pressure and complexity to an already ambitious release. Roberto, ever the architect, designed a virtual modernist retreat, the Seaview Resort and Lodges, a fictitious five-star resort that gracefully spills down a mountainside in the city of Carmel-bythe-Sea, California. Here, the influence of those famous residences by Kogan, Neutra and Lautner come to ‘life’. The hotel’s public areas comprise a tiered series of lobby space, restaurants and poolside cocktail bars, all with spectacular ocean views and ‘invisible’ boundaries between them and their generous terraces.

It’s the perfect way to present the breadth and depth of the new collection in situ.

Ironically, this virtual resort and its accompanying launch video – which includes Kogan’s short film – was a more concrete way to experience the 2020 collection, free from the pandemonium of furniture fairs and allowing for deeper understanding of the products’ backstory. Global lockdowns forced the cancellation of Milan’s Salone del Mobile, where Minotti’s new collections would otherwise have been shown, but a temporary escape to an idyllic, if only imagined, resort in California was more than welcome. The project is so well done, it raises the question, does Minotti have plans to open a luxury hotel? ‘We are focused on making furniture, but we never say never.’ minotti.com; studiomk27.com.br

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Below, the original 1960s Okura Hotel lobby by Yoshiro Taniguchi and Hideo Kosaka, demolished in 2015 (and later rebuilt), provided some of the inspiration for Kogan’s ‘Daiki’ series of chairs

Architecture Vo Trong Nghia Architects’ new HQ is located on a corner site in Thanh My Loi, a newly developed area in Ho Chi Minh City. Its glazed façade is clad with hanging boxes planted with a selection of vegetables, herbs and fruit trees, all irrigated with stored rainwater

Urban jungle From vertical gardens to bamboo bridges, Vo Trong Nghia is set on greening Vietnamese architecture PHOTOGRAPHY: HIROYUKI OKI WRITER: JOSHUA ZUKAS

A few kilometres from Ho Chi Minh City’s heaving centre, a building is being grown. Unlike its lifeless neighbours, the concrete structure is encased by suspended troughs sprouting tropical ferns, pandan plants and other flora native to southern Vietnam.

The office, less than a year old, is the new headquarters of Vo Trong Nghia Architects, a firm celebrated for its innovative use of nature and environmentally friendly materials. Over the years, the plants will propagate and flourish, eventually wrapping the office in a thick barricade of vegetation. Peppering the green glaze are flowering vines, mango trees and lime bushes.

Embedding trees, plants and flowers in architecture is a trademark of Vo Trong Nghia, who is calling for a rethink of the way that Vietnam is urbanising. ‘We destroy real jungles and replace them with concrete ones,’ he laments. ‘So, our aim is to reintroduce green to the cities.’ Vo’s motivations are practical as much as they are aesthetic; embellishing buildings with plants is less costly than importing marble or wood. The HQ’s verdant blanket also absorbs sunlight, preventing the office from overheating, while large open windows catch the breeze through the foliage. According to Vo, they rarely need to use air conditioning.

‘People think that there’s a lot of maintenance, but there’s not really,’ explains Vo. ‘We have systems that »

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Right, the ground floor of the architects’ HQ. The building’s planted green curtain filters direct sunlight and purifies air, while the water evaporating from its irrigation system helps keep the rooms cool Below, located in the coastal city of Danang, the Chicland Hotel features concrete balconies overflowing with tropical plants and shrubs such as boat orchids, heliotrope trees, ficus, bougainvilleas and Indian camphorweed

allow the buildings to look after themselves.’ In the rainy season, which in Ho Chi Minh City lasts for half the year, tropical downpours water the plants every day. The office also collects water and channels it to the basement, where it is stored and pumped to the concrete plant troughs during the dry season.

A gardener needs to inspect and treat the plants for diseases only a handful of times a year.

While the exteriors are busy and wild, the interiors remain bare and open. A large lightwell pierces six of the seven floors, bathing the workspace in natural light. The vertical void, coupled with a lack of walls, also allows for easy communication: when one of the architects has something to say, they simply shout across the shaft to different floors.

‘Everything needs to be decided quickly and efficiently,’ says Vo, who is confident that his team of 20 or so architects can handle a dizzying array of projects. ‘That’s why I designed the office like this.’

The six floors served by the lightwell are a vociferous hive of activity, but the enclosed top floor is an oasis of calm. Vo requires his staff to meditate twice a day – one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening – and has dedicated an entire floor to the practice.

Vo started meditating in 2012. Witnessing an increase in his efficiency, he began making regular trips to Myanmar for long meditation sessions in 2017. Now meditation is part of the job description for his staff.

Mindfulness has helped Vo focus his efforts on pursuing an architectural transformation in a country experiencing unprecedented urban growth. But his humble upbringing in a remote corner of the Vietnamese countryside also left a strong impression.

‘We didn’t have electricity, so we had to rely on the natural surroundings,’ he remembers. ‘I learned that trees can protect us from the sun and from flooding.’

Like other Vietnamese people from the countryside, he began farming at a young age, and this taught him which plants to select for his buildings.

Vo wants Vietnam’s cities to look like huge parks, a tall order considering only 0.25 per cent»

PHOTOGRAPHY: HIROYUKI OKI

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‘We are trying to work with the government to achieve a bigger impact on Vietnam’

of central Ho Chi Minh City is covered by greenery.

The architect highlighted the issue in 2014 with his House for Trees project, a set of prototypes that demonstrate how residential houses can be both affordable and green. The houses, each constructed for less than $155,000 in a densely populated district of the city, support roofs that double as giant plant pots. The trees provide shade for the houses, and the thick layer of soil can absorb large amounts of water to reduce the risk of flooding.

In summer 2019, Vo Trong Nghia Architects completed Chicland Hotel in Danang, central

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Top and above, one of the practice’s latest projects is a contemporary bamboo bridge for the Thanh Tam Bamboo Ecopark in Thanh Hoa. The 160ha tourist attraction aims to promote organic agriculture, sustainable development and contemporary bamboo construction techniques

Vietnam’s largest city, with balconies that overflow with plants. To spruce up the wall of green, the firm also planted low-maintenance bougainvillea trees on the larger balconies. Throughout Danang’s dry season, the trees erupt with pink and purple flowers to spectacular visual effect. Chicland Hotel gives a sense of what the headquarters may look like in the years to come; a little over a year after construction and its ocean-facing façade is already caked in foliage.

The hotel also boasts another of Vo Trong Nghia’s trademarks: bamboo. Treated bamboo arches over the ground-floor Tra House & Bistro, giving the tearoom a warm, earthy character.

Vo’s firm attracted international attention with its bamboo architecture at the Expo 2015 in Milan, where it constructed the Vietnam Pavilion with 41 bamboo-clad columns. Now able to manipulate the material into increasingly intricate shapes and patterns, it has built bamboo structures across Vietnam. In 2017, the firm completed a collection of five bamboo ceremony domes in Son La, a mountainous province in northern Vietnam. Rather than impose on the landscape, the bucolic thatched roofs, inspired by local basketry techniques, complement the rugged scenery. Earlier this year, the practice wrapped a bridge in Thanh Hoa, a rural province neighbouring Son La, with a mesmerising, undulating sleeve.

Vo’s architecture is getting attention beyond Vietnam’s urban elite. But he knows who he needs to win over to enact real change. ‘We are trying to work with the government to achieve a bigger impact on Vietnam,’ he explains. Simultaneously pursuing greener cities and retaining the natural artistry of the countryside is no small feat in developing Vietnam, but Vo remains optimistic. ‘We haven’t achieved anything really impactful yet,’ he accepts. ‘But we will.’ vtnarchitects.net

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PHOTOGRAPHY: DO HUU TAM

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Design

Showcased at the new store, clockwise from below, ‘Ginza’ sofa in biancorecoloured cashmere with green blue piping and green blue cashmere cushions, curtains in green tourmaline fireproof

fabric; ‘Ginza’ armchair in lovat-coloured linen and pillow in lovat-coloured cashmere; ‘Ginza’ armchair in lovatcoloured linen and cushion in lovat-coloured cashmere, all price on request, by Loro Piana

Soft landing Cashmere specialist Loro Piana debuts its first furniture designs and devotes an entire floor of its new Tokyo store to interiors Visitors to Loro Piana’s new 700 sq m Ginza flagship, designed by Japanese architect Jun Aoki, will discover a top floor dedicated entirely to Loro Piana Interiors. It’s the first time the house’s upholstery, curtains, and wall and floor coverings have been presented under the same roof as the men’s and women’s ready-to-wear collection and leather goods. Also on display is a sofa, a daybed and four armchairs, Loro Piana’s first foray into furniture design (after having supplied upholstery fabrics to select furniture makers for some time).

Until now, the interiors collection has been presented in standalone showrooms

PHOTOGRAPHY: DEN NIWA WRITER: NICK VINSON

in Milan and Paris, as well as in showrooms within the Decoration & Design Building in New York and the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, as the majority of business comes through architects, interior designers and high-end furniture makers. The interiors collection launched in 2006, with furnishing and upholstery fabrics woven in cashmere, wool and linen. Around the same time, the brand also launched the most luxurious floor covering of all time, the aptly named ‘One Step to Heaven’ (W 107), woven in 100 per cent cashmere and produced as rugs or wall-to-wall carpets on special looms that can manage 4m widths.

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The first time I visited Loro Piana for this magazine, 18 years ago (W 56), the brand’s third-generation owners Sergio and Pier Luigi Loro Piana had already started producing bespoke textile products – mainly blankets, cushions, throws and slippers – for jets, helicopters and yachts. The brothers then started to cover their own sofas with wool and cashmere in winter, and linen and cotton in summer, and the idea for Loro Piana Interiors was born. The brand remains the only producer of cashmere textiles for upholstery, wall coverings and curtains. One Loro Piana customer has even had wall-towall cashmere carpet fitted on their private È

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For those travelling in off-shore isolation, Loro Piana can furnish the yachts, as well as dress the crew

A ‘Sarto’ chair, above, with green blue cashmere, and a game of Go, right.

The store, combining Loro Piana’s fashion and interiors collections under one roof, has the ambiance of a private home jet (naturally flame-retardant, wool is a prized material in the aeronautical industry).

Founded in 1924 by fabric merchant Pietro Loro Piana, the firm started producing its own cloth in 1941. It was not until the 1980s, with Sergio and Pier Luigi at the helm, that the mill moved beyond producing cloth for tailors and couturiers to create finished goods. It now has 171 stores worldwide.

Today, the world’s most select fibres, including cashmere, merino and alpaca, as well as linen, cotton and lotus fibre, are turned into yarn and woven into cloth in its five production facilities in northern Italy.

The company prides itself on sourcing the best materials, including baby cashmere and vicuña – the finest yarn in the world, with a diameter of 12.5 microns (one micron is onethousandth of a millimetre), and the rarest, too (one vicuña produces only 250g of fleece every other year). Loro Piana sources its raw fibre directly, so it is able to sort it by natural colour, such as the Pecora Nera, or black sheep, which comes ‘tinto in bestia’ (dyed by

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the beast). The merino is divided in three natural colourways; cashmere in four shades of white, beige and brown; vicuña is offered only in its rich reddish brown natural shade.

For Ginza, the brand has also introduced a pleasing palette of pastel shades.

As director of Loro Piana’s interiors business unit since January 2019, Francesco Pergamo is tasked with taking the collection to a new level. He explains that the Ginza flagship not only allows customers a highly tactile engagement with the range, it is also a showcase in itself: every floor is furnished with curtains, carpets and wall coverings from the collection, cabinetry and tables come upholstered, and the staircase that connects all four floors is finished in 1,000m of custom-made wall covering.

The daybed, armchairs and sofa come in linen or cashmere, with brass feet dressed in white rubber anti-slip covers, which not only protect floors but also nod to the house’s most emblematic accessory, the white-soled shoe, first introduced around 20 years ago.

Aside from expanding the range of furniture and outdoor upholstery fabric and carpets, Pergamo is strengthening his relationships with furniture makers, who may offer their collections upholstered in Loro Piana fabrics, and scaling up the yacht design department, where business is booming. (Covid-19 has prompted the wealthy to travel in off-shore isolation.) The team has decades of specialist knowledge working with boat builders; they can now furnish the yachts, as well as dress the crew.

Having tailored the interior of the Villa Cima at Villa d’Este in Como, Loro Piana is also offering its expertise to the hospitality sector. (There may be synergies within LVMH, which has held a majority stake in the company since 2013, as the group also owns hospitality brands Belmond and Cheval Blanc.) The residential sector should be next, but don’t expect huge Loro Piana-branded residences in Dubai or Miami. The offering is likely to be much more bespoke, low-key and refined – just like the brand. loropiana.com

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Art

Sophie Calle, photographed on 15 September 2020 at home in Malakoff, on the south-west outskirts of Paris

It is a stiflingly hot day in August, and Sophie Calle is wearing a flowered dress and tinted eyeglasses, listening to Bob Dylan’s latest album in a loft-like space she calls ‘my church’. The house is a former chapel in the Camargue, the wild region of southern France where the artist has spent summers throughout her life. A zebra bursts from the wall above the door, part of her large taxidermy collection, each animal named after a different friend (the zebra is Daniel, as in Buren, a French artist renowned for his work with stripes). Another wall features an assortment of art pieces by Calle and others, including, framed in silver lettering, the word ‘souci’ (‘worry’), the last thing her mother said. Abandoned tombstones decorate the garden.

Calle, 67, has become one of France’s most important contemporary artists by using her own life and the imagined lives of others as subject matter. Her books and exhibitions combine photos or video with text, exploring such themes as absence, death, suffering and desire. She does not hesitate to break taboos, overstep boundaries, or invite viewers to share in the discomfort (or guilty pleasure) of voyeurism. Even when the content is mundane, the works are provocative and compelling. They can be surprisingly touching, and just as surprisingly funny.

The day before we meet, Calle has taken her camera into the Camargue to shoot hunting watchtowers for her ongoing project, A l’Affût (‘On the Hunt’, previewed on page 094). The related book, Sans Lui, is available now (the title, ‘Without Him’, relates to the untimely death of her longtime editor, Xavier Barral). The project began when Paris’ Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, or museum of hunting and nature, invited Calle to exhibit. It was shortly after her father’s death in 2015, and she was still mourning his loss. ‘I was in a fallow period, creatively, with no real desire to do anything,’ she says. ‘I considered quitting art altogether.’

Gradually, the commission started to excite her, and she discovered that the hunting magazine Le Chasseur Français had been publishing matrimonial ads since 1895. Reasoning that the hunt for wild animals was not unlike the hunt for a potential mate, she combed through the archives to find what mating criteria best represented each decade.

‘They followed the trends of society. At first, money. Then virginity.

After the war, many were related to physicality – a paralysed soldier could now accept a cleft lip.’ By 2017, when Calle included Tinder profiles in her research, she found that proximity was top of the list. »

TRAIL MAKER

French artist Sophie Calle’s work spans imagined lives and actual death. Here, she talks about exhibitionism and intimacies, love and loss, and more than a century’s worth of lonely hearts ads that inspired her latest project and a 20-page portfolio for Wallpaper*

PORTRAITS: ALEXANDRE GUIRKINGER WRITER: AMY SERAFIN

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Sophie Calle created this issue’s limited-edition cover, a self-portrait that nods to her ongoing project – A l’Affût (On the Hunt) – inspired by lonely hearts ads placed in a French hunting magazine.

See more on page 094. Limited-edition covers are available to subscribers, see Wallpaper.com

To accompany the text, she is using her photos of watchtowers, (symbolising predators) and highway surveillance images of animals at night (symbolising prey).

Hunting of one sort or another is integral to much of Calle’s work.

For an early project, Suite Vénitienne (1980), she followed a man from a party in Paris to Venice, stalking him through the Italian city and scrupulously noting her own emotional journey along the way. In other seminal works, she asked her mother to hire a private detective to trail her, worked as a hotel chambermaid and photographed the personal objects in guests’ rooms, and found a lost address book and called every name within to create a profile of its owner.

Though these works disclose much that is personal, their subjects remain as elusive as composite police sketches. ‘I don’t have the impression that I’m revealing intimacies,’ Calle explains. ‘These are moments that I highlight. To know that a man took this street and not another, or dined at 8pm, is not information. The investigation is more about me and my feelings than him. I’m the one going towards him.’ Imagining someone from a distance is a way of exposing herself.

But if Calle is an exhibitionist, she insists it is on her own terms.

‘It makes me laugh when people say, “You don’t know me, I know you well.” No. Not at all. Because I have chosen to tell certain stories and arrange them in my own way.’ Even when working as a stripper in her twenties, she attempted to control how men saw her: ‘I didn’t want men to approach me, so I looked at them with contempt. Maybe that’s what pleased them.’

The American curator Robert Storr regards Calle as one of the three or four most interesting French artists alive. He invited her to participate in a group show, ‘Dislocations’, at MoMA in 1991, and to represent France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. ‘I don’t consider her a capriciously self-centred woman,’ he says, but ‘someone who is obsessed by certain things. Those things are all connected to who she is, or feels she is, so she comes back to herself.’ He says there is a deep sadness palpable in her works, which he traces back to the early break-up of her family. Though her approach is conceptual, the themes she explores are relatable, and the feelings are genuine. ‘She is able to crystallise emotions that all of us have to some extent, and to give them her individual inflection in a way that makes them real.’

In fact, when Storr’s own parents died, he found himself longing for Calle’s photos of parental graves.

Calle’s parents separated when she was three years old, and she then lived with her mother in an apartment near Montparnasse Cemetery, crossing it on her way to school every day. Her father was an oncologist and art collector, mostly Pop Art but also photography.

She carefully studied the photos on his walls, notably those of Duane Michals, who mixed images with text. ‘She was raised in a cultural,

artistic environment,’ recalls the French artist Christian Boltanski, a longtime family friend, adding that Calle’s father was a first-rate collector who acquired many works early in artists’ careers.

At the University of Nanterre, Calle, then a left-wing radical, took a course from the renowned French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who encouraged her to travel. When she dropped out of university to do so, he covered for her, adding her name to another student’s exam paper so she would get her diploma and her father would continue to support her. Calle travelled for seven years, to rural France, Greece, Mexico and beyond. In Bolinas, California, she took her first photographs, of tombstones inscribed simply with the words ‘Father’ and ‘Mother’.

Returning to Paris at age 26, she moved in with her father while honing her photography skills. (Long overlooked in favour of her ideas and text, her photographic talents were finally rewarded with the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2010, followed by the Royal Photographic Society’s Centenary Medal in 2019.) Calle claims she became an artist as a way to ‘seduce’ him, in the non-sexual way the French employ the term. ‘I loved my father, and he was disappointed in me, because I was doing nothing with my life.’ At first, she photographed people walking the streets of Paris from behind.

‘I had forgotten my city, and didn’t know where to go, so I thought I would see where they went.’ She then invited people to sleep in her bed for eight hours at a time, while she photographed them. By chance, a woman she met at a market and invited into her bed was the wife of an art critic, who, upon learning of the project, invited Calle to take part in the 1980 Biennale des Jeunes, her first museum show.

When I ask if her father accepted all of this happening under his roof, she pauses: ‘I don’t even remember if I told him.’ Moments later, she stands up and starts searching for a pen, explaining that she is currently creating a work about everything she does not remember.

She jots down the question of whether her father gave her permission for people to sleep in her bed. When I leave, she will write it up in the direct, concise style she has developed for museum walls.

Her phone rings, and the name Laurie Anderson appears on the screen. The two have been close friends since first meeting at the 1995 Telluride Film Festival, where Calle was showing her road movie No Sex Last Night. In the film, Calle and her boyfriend, filmmaker Greg Shephard, drive across America, each carrying a camera to document their dysfunctional relationship (it culminates with their short-lived marriage at a Las Vegas drive-thru window). Anderson was fascinated by the film and subsequently participated in two of Calle’s works, including Take Care of Yourself (2007), for which Calle asked 107 women, from a criminologist to a proofreader, to interpret a break-up letter she had received by email. »

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The artist at her Malakoff home

Calle claims it is the idea of absence that drives her, ‘the things that are missing – my mother who is no longer here, a lover who leaves, an idea that doesn’t come’ Calle hangs up and tells me that, in 2016, she, Anderson, and another friend decided to hold an impromptu – and non-legal – wedding ceremony at a church in San Francisco, just because it seemed like a beautiful place to get married. Somebody present took a photo, and the next day, to their surprise, it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle as news. Calle says, ‘Laurie started receiving letters: “Why didn’t you tell me?” She wondered, “What do we do?” I said: “Nothing.”’

When I call Anderson a few weeks later, she chuckles at the memory, then says, ‘I took it seriously, I was happy to tie the knot with Sophie. I meant every word.’ I ask if the person we see in Calle’s artworks is the person she is. ‘Absolutely,’ Anderson responds.

‘And that’s a real achievement, because she doesn’t have a carefully constructed art persona. She really is that way, and talks that way, and thinks that way.’

Calle has many friends (her phone buzzes repeatedly while we talk), yet describes herself as a solitary person. She has been seeing her current companion, an architect, for 16 years, but does not spend more than eight days with him at a time. She has never wanted children. The closest she came to motherhood was the relationship with her cat, Souris; when he died in 2014 she asked various musicians (including Anderson, Bono and Pharrell Williams) to record songs about him, creating a triple album. I inquire if she has plans to replace him, and she stands up and calls out ‘Milou!’, explaining that a stray showed up on her doorstep three weeks earlier and has never left.

‘I wasn’t ready to do it over again. It was convenient to no longer have my cat, to be able to leave home without anything holding me back.

I thought, “It will happen on its own, or not at all”. And it happened.’

It is often written that Calle’s artwork revolves around intimacy, but she claims it is the idea of absence that drives her, ‘the things that are missing – my mother who is no longer here, a lover who leaves, an idea that doesn’t come’. Her mother, whom she describes as flamboyant and self-absorbed, once noted in her diary, ‘[Sophie] is so morbid that she will visit me in my grave more often than on rue Boulard’. When her mother was dying, in 2006, she was gratified

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to see Calle place a camera at the foot of her bed, to finally make an artwork about her (Rachel, Monique).

When Calle asked her father for permission to photograph him one last time, in 2015, he allowed her to shoot his hands. ‘He was more discreet,’ she says. ‘If I filmed him dying, it would be an act of war.

Filming my mother dying was an act of love.’ These works have been a way for Calle to keep her parents around. But this is art, not therapy, and she emphasises that she does all of her work, no matter how personal, first and foremost ‘for the wall’.

One subject she has never explored is the fact that her mother and Jewish grandparents survived the Second World War because they were hidden in the mountains near Grenoble. ‘There were many in our family who died in the camps,’ she recalls. ‘My grandparents refused to talk about it. And I didn’t get interested early enough to insist. When it became necessary for me to know, they were all dead.’

Currently, she is starting a piece around her own death. She has tried, unsuccessfully, to buy herself a burial plot at Montparnasse, where both her parents are buried. In the meantime, she has acquired a gravesite in Bolinas, California, where she took those first photos.

It lies next to a site belonging to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who was born in 1919. ‘I wanted to meet him, I explained we’d be neighbours in death, but he said no, he was too tired.’ In an embarrassment of riches, she was also offered a plot in Brooklyn, where she created a 25-year project in 2017, inviting visitors to write down their secrets and drop them into the earth through the slot of a marble obelisk she designed.

As she grows older, Calle’s obsessions remain the same, but her willingness to drop everything and pursue her subjects to the ends of the Earth has faded. In 2014, for an exhibition around the theme of highways, she spent a night in a toll booth, asking commuters, ‘Where could you take me?’ Afterwards, she realised, ‘Twenty years earlier, I would have closed my house, packed my toothbrush and my photo material, and told my friends I’d be back in 15 days. This time I went without a suitcase, because deep down inside I knew I’d go home.’

Sans Lui, by Sophie Calle, published by Atelier EXB, €36, exb.fr; perrotin.com

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L AUF EN 1 8 9 2 | SWI T Z ER L A ND

ON THE HUNT Inspired by 125 years of lonely hearts ads, gleaned chiefly from a French hunting magazine, artist Sophie Calle’s latest project explores the thrill, and the mundanity, of the matrimonial chase.

Here she shares selected excerpts. Having catalogued adverts by theme and date (overleaf ), she pairs original French text with images of hunters’ miradors and night-time prey, before offering further imagery and English translations. Happy hunting

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Sophie Calle

RULE OF THE GAME A catalogue of the main qualities sought by men in female partners, and by women in male partners, as seen through a selection of lonely hearts advertisements published in Le Chasseur Français between 1895 and 2010.

A monthly magazine dedicated to hunting, Le Chasseur Français is also known for its personal ads. It was first published in June 1885. Publication was stopped by the government between August 1914 and July 1919 because of paper shortages. The classified ads initially focused on guns, cows and dogs.

The first lonely hearts column appeared on 15 July 1896, on page 40, between ads for a wood treatment product and an investment scheme. From the 1990s onwards, the study includes men’s advertisements taken from the weekly current affairs magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, and the online dating service Meetic. For the years 2017 and 2019, the study also includes messages from the dating app Tinder.

– Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle

MEN SEEKING… 1895 — 1905 NOT POOR 1905 — 1914 WITH OR WITHOUT STAIN 1920 — 1930 KIND EVEN DISABLED 1930 — 1940 HARD WORKER MILDLY MODERN 1940 — 1950 OF SIMPLE TASTES IN GOOD HEALTH 1950 — 1960 GOOD CATCH ABLE TO REPLACE DEAD MOTHER 1960 — 1970 COMPATIBLE COMPLEMENTARY 1970 — 1980 PREFERABLY PRETTY INTELLIGENT IF POSSIBLE 1980 — 1990 CURVY BUST AND HIPS PREFERABLY SWEET 1990 — 2000 NS, ND, GOOD SORT, GOOD STYLE RUBENESQUE 2000 — 2010 NOT A PAIN IN THE BUTT 2017 NEARBY

WOMEN SEEKING… 1895 — 1905 HONOURABLE OF MEANS 1905 — 1914 WEALTHY EVEN IF UGLY 1920 — 1930 CHRISTIAN HAVING SUFFERED 1930 — 1940 SIMPLE, HEALTHY, SOBER KIND 1940 — 1950 WELL-EMPLOYED 1950 — 1960 ESSENTIALLY KIND AND GENTLE 1960 — 1970 TALL PLEASANT PHYSIQUE 1970 — 1980 FIT, VIRILE, SVELTE 1980 — 1990 PROTECTIVE SECURE 1990 — 2000 TRULY AVAILABLE 2000 — 2010 EASY-GOING WILLING TO RELOCATE 2019 CLOSE BY

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AVEC OU SANS TACHE    * Gentleman of leisure seeks lady of means. Would ignore any stain if good dowry Young man 25 years Indigent old no relatives and Catholic would like to meet a deaf-mute woman from a good family Single man 43 years old, good, boy, 23 years old, wishes to marry an indigent girl, even with stain slightly rheumatic, wishes to marry a lady of leisure or landowner in an area abounding in game, even if Seeking a very well brought-up young girl, good and simple, very ill, would share the suffering Single man, 28 years honest and very upstanding, dowry essential unfortunately a necessity of life old, honourable family, vineyard owner, income 4 000, would marry now or in a few years young lady, Young man 34 years deformed, crippled, not a socialite, wealthy, having encountered many setbacks old, handsome chap, income 7 000 francs, good situation, would marry young lady with equivalent Officer 30 years old nobleman with title would marry very honourable, fortune. Would tolerate stain Young Belgian man, 36 years old, 20 000 francs, would marry very rich young lady, without stain Gentleman young girl between 18 to 30 years old, with or without stain, either pretty or wealthy 36 years old, with advanced diploma, bored of being alone, wishes to correspond with a view to marry Gentleman 32 years old, would like to get nice little madame without stain and with some wealth Single man 35 years old, impeccable past, from an old and to know very simple girl for marriage Landowner, honourable family, would marry robust young lady. Delicate health please abstain 24 years old, secure situation in horticulture-husbandry, seeking young girl with simple tastes, some Widowed shopkeeper, 31 years old, would marry widow even infirm owning wealth and good health Affectionate young man, good situation, would marry young lady in good health, who 9 000 francs Gentleman, 49 years old, with title, Earl, very good, 8 000 income, likes greengrocer business Landowner 48 years old, good, with references, income seeking woman with equivalent situation Young man, 1 300 francs, would marry well-to-do lady. Would pass over stain, family, infirmity 24 years old, nobleman, Catholic, intelligent and hardworking, seeking young lady without stain, 19 Single man 56 years old has suffered a lot would marry lady with big to 24 years old, raised on a farm heart. Any region

*The loss of virginity in a young girl, in veiled terms

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RICHE MÊME LAID   if  Sincerely serious advertisement: lady 45 years old having encountered great setbacks, fond of elderly men. Will she find one? Octogenarian, infirm, ugly, whatever. As a reward for the fortune that he will 47 years old, bring, this lady will be the ideal companion for old age and will show him great affection distinguished, wishes to become the married companion of a very elderly and very rich gentleman, without children even illegitimate, bored of being alone with his more or less dedicated servants. He will Beautiful young girl 23 years old, very organised housekeeper, wishing to be assured of the best care Little typist 24 years develop product without competition, would marry a worker with 15 000 francs old, nice physique, would correspond with a tall gentleman from the construction industry or dentist Lady from Amiens in the Somme, 34 years old, orphan, 9 million, would marry anyone with good Poor young lady would marry wealthy man, elderly or infirm situation who would ignore stain Widow 38 years old, true owner of 200 000, would marry very elderly gentleman even if ugly with very Young woman of the world, having been disappointed, seeks tender very big fortune. Send stamp Respectable family seeks Catholic veterinary doctor for nice young girl girlfriend, well-to-do, any age Parents wish to 21 years old. Would pass over smaller income. Possibility to take over customers marry girl 27 years old, acceptable physique, very docile, remarkable pianist, with well brought-up 26 and 23 years old, good housekeepers, with good gentleman 32-45 years old with portfolio fortune Lady 30 years old, no dowry but talents that earn a living, would marry workers without defects Brunette hardworking, would marry someone of modest means. Wouldn’t mind living countryside with blue eyes, 23 years old, keen to marry nice young man, 25-32 years old, good-looking, profession with Lady with a noble heart, 45 years old, descendant a return of 3 000 per year with prospect of pay rise of Napoléon 1st seeks pious gentleman, very old, very rich, with a title of nobility. I say very old because Lady 37 years old living in a melancholic hamlet, would in marriage only want a good companion To ladies wishing to marry will offer wishes to correspond with a rich gentleman in his autumn years addresses of wealthy gentlemen

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BON PARTI, POUVANT REMPLACER MÈRE MORTE Good catch, able to replace late mother South of France. Retired man 300 000 young-looking, normal physique, 1st prize in Fine Arts, owner of 8 houses, alone with 80 year old father, seeks 40 year old soulmate, with great quality of the heart, able Non-practising Southerner 55, in good health, building valued at 4 million, to replace dead mother Talented DPLG architect, lacking connections, would like to meet a person in the dairy business Divorced, 47 years old, shopkeeper, owner, would marry daughter of an architect or entrepreneur car, sober, Catholic, without children, would correspond with women of a similar age, minimum Former industrialist, setback, 70 years old, 76 kg 1 m74, sober 1 200 000 to pay ex-wife allowance frugal healthy car, would correspond with gentle understanding landlady owning a house with small Gentleman 48 years old normal divorced hotelier 5 million car outbuildings for a peaceful end of life Distinguished wishes to correspond with disinterested and serious lady capable of managing a hotel single man, divorced, Catholic, French, excellent family, having experienced setback, would correspond with a view to marriage, distinguished young woman who is a homeowner or will bring funds to buy a Complicated young man 27 years old average property. Solicitor or priest accepted as intermediary Single, 45, metalworker, wishes to correspond with a housekeeping health poor seeks ideal young girl Single, 30, good physique, health, serious, loyal, perfect morals, BE certificate, and farming lady would marry young woman maximum 30 years old, pleasant physique, health, irreproachable morals, Model maker, with possibility to help him obtain a situation in colonies. Adventuress please abstain production manager, single, 33 years old, friendly, 1 m80, slim, practising Catholic, able to head technical department of a womenswear or menswear clothing factory, would like to meet young girl, tall, elegant, Practising Catholic farmer seeks wife, affectionate, parents in the clothing industry for collaboration Single man, serious, good in all respects, 1 m84, 20-30, with capital to buy building in Lourdes experienced manager, high references, holdings 7 500 000, would marry serious, tall, slim, pretty, 37-43 Personal driver, 54 years old, in good shape, years old bringing industry or business with good income serious, would like to meet quite distinguished lady, simple tastes, looking for affection rather than Breton, 43, single, average in everything, would support a wife with similar affinities willing fortune Nice single to facilitate expatriation in dry climate without this being absolutely necessary however 42, sportsman, elegant, civil servant, man, 1 m71, farmer, 2 units, would like to marry equivalent 600 000, seeks love marriage with cheerful, gentle, affectionate, beautiful shapely woman. Black eyes 42, shy, good, serious, seeks cute woman 30-35, simple, loyal, gentle Civil servant, 30s, excluded Office worker, 28 years old, 1 m80, brown would marry young lady. Pretentious, fat, please abstain hair, single son, shopkeeper mother, would marry modest woman, preferably seamstress if intelligent.

56, single, in very good shape, 1 m68, Inclined towards full-figured silhouette if pretty face distinguished, large bourgeois villa Marne riverside, leg amputated war, 45 000 pension transferable to widow, would marry rich woman, without children, pretty, gentle, devoted, romantic, only child, good Navy officer, 30, tall, graphologist, would correspond with young lady good housekeeper, in-laws OK Dental prosthetist, tall, good, wealthy, would marry dental surgeon not family pleasant handwriting ugly, Catholic, 33-45, good morals. Voluptuous ladies, make-up wearers, intermediaries, please abstain Affectionate gentleman, 55 years old, flourishing business, would marry 38-48 attractive person, with Deaf-mute 34 years old, woodworking business, car and conversational skills to visit factory managers Single man, seeking marriage with hardworking young lady, 25 to 35 years old, to help with customers 50, disabled veteran, with assets, would marry lady 30-40, not common, and who wants to love him.

49, slim, alert, 1 m70, education, honourability, business, assets, wishes Disabled, amputees welcome to marry pharmacist 34-49 brunette tall to merge compatible businesses

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Sophie Calle

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Sophie Calle

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ESSENTIELLEMENT BON ET DOUX

©Sophie Calle / ADAGP, Paris & ARS, London, 2020 / Courtesy Perrotin

essentially kind and gentle 33 years old, war widow, upper middle class, 5 children, seeks exceptional widower not stingy wintering Widow of cattle trader, possibly good collaborator, in Nice to replace late father. Minimum 1 million cannot offer anything else, would marry kind physically diminished 40, excessively gentle, not difficult, Is a young woman 42 allowed to dream future happiness with a SNCF agent 44-50? not demanding Tired solitude, nurseryman widow would escape to marry poetic soul 55-58 good presentation and end her days among animals and flowers. I have enough to buy house and garden that could have space True young lady 23 years old would marry baker or butcher. Short men for the former and the latter Who, from a respectable background, good, disinterested, would marry kind person please abstain a little childish despite 34 years old, sickly, without fortune, without house, without relatives? Preferably Alert. Divorced from philandering doctor, 550 000 pension + liquid assets, house former scout furnished adequately, seeks great personality without conceit, 32-45, clean, healthy, free but gentle.

54 years old, without useful connections, 4 CV car, plush apartment in Obese, bald, don’t bother Le Havre, seeks chic young man, normal physique, non smoker non drinker, very clean. Preferably Chatelaine 68 marvellously young, anti-concordat, ash blonde greying hair uncut naturally bricklayer curly, superb chompers, pleasant faults, strong qualities, seeks remarkable soul for sweet autumn Grocery shopkeeper, 43, pleasant ensemble, good revenue, slight swaying walk, comfortable car, married Seeking M 50 daughter, would make gentle and serious gentleman happy. Shared costs and profits good appearance absolutely not lazy, practical knowledge of heating engineering, plumbing, central Single mum not bad, neglected by unscrupulous Y M, 24, maid, seeking Catholic radioheating Polytechnician daughter having had setbacks, expecting baby in November, seeks electrician sweet happiness with good gentleman. Would accept non-contagious disability morally compensated.

For my daughter, 26, more pleasant than pretty, slightly irregular face, Indecisive please abstain Compassionate 15 million dowry, father garage Paris, seeks mechanic son-in-law spotless past widow, 64, culinary abilities, references, health, would marry widower medical sector perfectly ready to Charming, wit, enthusiasm, it is said she has everything to please, this take on the role of a husband ravishing 40 year old blonde flees from adventure and seeks a loyal essentially good man, vigorous, wellTall beautiful 50 years old girl, aristocratic read, chic, playful, not bald, without glasses nor moustache surname, really very very good physically, not snob, without defect, without fortune, bourgeois qualities, would marry Protestant or neutral Catholic, clean background, millionaire, if possible orphan 43 looking 29, idealistic secretary, her profession her only wealth but not overlooked, seeks home Trouser-maker, 52, corpulent, good cook, little education, would marry gentle retired worthy of envy What perfect gentleman would marry island girl, 25 years old, 1 child, with for only fortune man Blonde, 26 years old, general appearance Marlène, would marry architect, her big dark eyes?

Vivacious civil servant, body 35 – spirit – 27, 1 m60, real general decorator or 30 million if impaired qualities, has suffered a lot but has kept smiling, higher-than-average intelligence, seeks happy days 30, legs paralysed polio, with pension, cheerful, at last with rational, decent and good Frenchman living with widowed mother and grandmother, would marry loving and gentle single man, car if 79, lonely, physically old, spiritually young, deafness corrected by hearing aid, seeks possible 25, adopted as baby, unknown beneficial marriage with gentleman who reads and follows the Bible family, neither pretty, rich nor perfect, one breast removed, shopkeeper, wishes to marry broken heart Florist 40 would marry gentle horticulturist not passionate

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Art

Depicting five psychedelic polka-dotted flowers, Yayoi Kusama’s editioned sculpture My Heart that Blooms in the Darkness of the Night wraps around a magnum of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 2012

Full bloom Yayoi Kusama’s interpretation of Veuve Clicquot’s premium cuvée is alive with flowers, polka dots and optimism PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDY PRICE WRITER: TF CHAN

Yayoi Kusama has partnered with Veuve Clicquot to reinterpret its premium cuvée, La Grande Dame, in one of the most ambitious collaborations between an artist and a champagne house.

Billed as an ode to ‘vital energy, love and celebration of life’, the partnership comprises a floral sculpture titled My Heart that Blooms in the Darkness of the Night (limited to 100 pieces), and a similarly themed bottle and case, intended for a broader audience. »

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Shown here with its gift box, Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame x Yayoi Kusama limited edition 75cl, £160, featuring the same flower motif set against a polka dot background in distinctive yellow and black

The collaboration is available in France, Japan, the US, and the UK, where its launch will be marked with a takeover of Selfridges Corner Shop in November.

The sculpture is intended to coil around a magnum of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 2012, a new vintage that cellar master Didier Mariotti describes as ‘precise and delicate’.

Kusama has depicted five flowers, each exuberantly polka dotted in psychedelic hues and recalling the ‘Flowers that Bloom at Midnight’ series she first presented in 2009.

Like the original larger pieces, My Heart that Blooms in the Darkness of the Night is painted by hand, each piece bearing more than 1,000 precisely placed dots and representing 250 hours of craftsmanship. The mesmerising

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Kusama’s new artwork conveys a message of hope and optimism amid a historic menace

blooms, along with foliage and stems in a vibrant palette of green, blue and yellow, are made of resin and copper, and UV-coated with lacquer for an alluring sheen.

The same flower motif appears on the more widely available 75cl champagne case, set against a polka dot background in the brand’s distinctive yellow and black. A similar pattern appears on the bottle label and collarette, subtle interventions that are nonetheless instantly recognisable as Kusama’s work.

Kusama and Veuve Clicquot previously collaborated in 2006, when the artist overlaid an original portrait of the champagne house’s founder, Nicole Barbe Ponsardin (known as Madame Clicquot), with red polka dots for a charity auction in Tokyo. Then as now, the French brand has been keen to point out the visual similarities between polka dots and champagne bubbles, as well as the parallel ambitions of Kusama and Madame Clicquot.

Taking over her late-husband’s champagne house at the age of 27, Madame Clicquot became one of the few women entrepreneurs of the early 19th century, and famously insisted that her product ‘must be both flattering on the eyes and on the palate’.

Likewise, Kusama rose to fame within the male-dominated Western art world of the mid-20th century, channelling her hallucinatory visions into polka-dotted paintings, sculptures and performances.

She remains a ring-leader among experiential artists, conjuring immersive, kaleidoscopic environments that engage multiple senses.

The title of the sculpture, My Heart that Blooms in the Darkness of the Night, conveys a message of hope and optimism. It echoes a statement ‘to the whole world’ that the famously reclusive artist released in April, in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic: ‘In the midst of this historic menace, a brief burst of light points to the future, let us joyfully sing this song of a splendid future,’ she wrote. With its suggestion of rebirth and transformation, Kusama’s new artwork is a pitch-perfect way to conclude a challenging year and look to happier times ahead.∂ The collaboration will be showcased at Selfridges Corner Shop, 9-22 November, 400 Oxford Street, London W1, selfridges.com; veuveclicquot.com

Reality check Artist Sarah Sze explores the shadowy spaces between physical and digital worlds PHOTOGRAPHY: PAUL PHUNG WRITER: NICK COMPTON

For a while, early on, the American artist Sarah Sze didn’t say much in interviews.

She wanted the interviewer to do a lot of the work. Now she talks a lot. And her conversations, like her work, are expansive, dizzying, serious but sometimes funny, fractured but propulsive, and explosive with ideas. They do focus, if you nudge them that way, on the experience of art and how art is about the way we experience everything. She talks about, and makes art about, the internal and external machinery of experience.

Sze studied architecture and painting, but she is known for large-scale sculptural installations – a logical confluence – mostly

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built using found objects and scraps of paper, sometimes potted plants and moss.

The installations mostly spread beyond their assigned space, precisely strewn, constellations to explore, as much nothing as something. Sometimes they look like exploded workstations in a dust cloud of information, notions and conjecture.

Increasingly, Sze has introduced (or rather reintroduced) moving image into her work, projections on walls and those paper scraps, often of nature at its more emphatic – geysers in full gush, cheetahs in full flight. Roaringly physical elements are presented as fragments, flattened and faded. And Sze’s work more

and more addresses the indistinct edges of the digital and physical, our willing offloading of remembering, our immersion in the second-hand. In her new show, ‘Night into Day’, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris – not conceived during the pandemic but impacted by it and spookily prescient and pertinent – she takes this conversation further, adding new engines of experience.

Part of her ongoing Timekeeper series, the physical centrepiece of the show is Twice Twilight, a sphere, or the suggestion of a sphere – outlined in torn paper and photographs, potent debris and projected images – held in place by a scaffolding of

Art

bamboo and metal rods. As Sze says, there is no sphere there at all, we construct the sphere in our heads. ‘It harnesses space, nesting a void,’ she says.

Again, there are moving images of nature and the elemental. And the installation suggests a planetarium, something cosmological in ambition. Though as the French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour says, the implied scale of Sze’s work is often hard to gauge. Is she conjuring up expanding universes or imploding stars, or drilling into the sub-atomic?

A second work, Tracing Fallen Sky, is a mirrored concave bowl made of steel and glazed clay, reflecting, distorting, fragmenting, splintering Sze’s universe of matter and moving image. Above it swings a pendulum, keeping some kind of time, though nothing you could dance to.

The two works fill Fondation Cartier’s Jean Nouvel-designed building and take advantage of its transparency. It is a building she knows well and knows how to work with. The Fondation Cartier presented one of Sze’s first major solo shows back in 1999. It was dominated by a giant single

installation, Everything that Rises Must Converge (after a Flannery O’Connor short story), a stopped tornado of 39 disassembled aluminium ladders and a multitude of objects. (Sze says she was somewhat spoiled by the early attentions of the foundation.

‘They just do things extremely well. I was a very young artist when I did that show and it was my first catalogue. And they are in an industry where everything has to be excellent so the printing was amazing, everything was colour corrected perfectly, the writing was beautiful. It was just exquisite. The second show I did was at an academic institution and when I got the catalogue, I was horrified.

I couldn’t wait for it to go out of print.’)

Much of Sze’s work is site-specific, sometimes even conceived and created on site. ‘With the Cartier show, I had actually conceived and done one whole piece before the pandemic. So the second one would have been much more improvisational and created on site, but I’m doing it improvisationally from the studio in New York, directing someone in Paris.’ And Sze is getting used to working remotely, off-site but on-site. ‘We’ve done six shows or major pieces since the »

Opposite and above, Sarah Sze, photographed in August via Zoom, at her Manhattan studio, with a painting in progress

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AR project renderings, 2020, Sarah Sze Studio

Above, a render showing how smartphone-enabled daytime visitors to Fondation Cartier might see how the exhibition looks at night with the use of augmented reality technology

beginning of the pandemic and we’ve figured out how to do things pretty successfully, but it needs really amazing people on the ground.’

For an installation artist, and certainly one as alert to the particular topographies of her work, and to the creation of energy and accident, this is no small deal. ‘I wanted to make work that felt like it was totally made in the moment, in that gallery, not in the studio. I’ve tried to preserve some of those very fragile moments of discovery that make you feel like you’re in a live space.’

These new creative mechanics reflect some of the concerns of Sze’s work, that digital/physical divide, ‘what needs to be done physically, what can we do digitally and what is that dystopic place between the two.

And how that affects the way we remember things. The way we imagine things.’ (Sze did, she admits, enjoy the degree of control our Zoom photo shoot allowed. ‘Because it’s very invasive when a photographer comes into the studio. You have no idea what they want and they’re capturing your space, your artwork. And that can go well or it can go very badly. But this way, I have the

screen, you can see yourself and it becomes a complete collaboration.’)

A key motivation to return to the Fondation Cartier was the building itself.

Completed in 1994, Nouvel’s gallery is a giant glass box with a wildflower garden fronted by another huge glass wall. It is an emphatic but barely-there building, playing with ideas of inside and out, layers of reflection and transparency, de- and re-materialising according to the weather, light, time.

Few galleries offer as many conversational angles as Nouvel’s. ‘I’ve always loved this building,’ says Sze. ‘I think it’s a masterpiece.

When I installed there in 1999, I spent like a month in it, so I really know it. It has a very strong language and you have to engage with that language so it becomes a conversation.

In my first show I wanted to turn up the play in the building, to show that it is playing with us. This time I’m using the building as a machine, an image maker, co-opting the building as almost like a camera itself.’

For Sze, for all of us, the screen (phone, iPad, laptop, TV) is a portal, a point of departure into peril and possibility. Nouvel’s

building allowed her to supersize that idea.

‘One of the strangest, most radical things about the building is that it is a massive glass screen, a screen that you are kind of passing through. It’s a gateway and then the interior and exterior are constantly flipping.’

As the show’s title suggests, Sze is taking advantage of autumn’s earlier nights.

As darkness falls, ‘the entire building will become like a mirage of spinning images, a large zoetrope’. Clearly, during the day this effect will be less impressive. Which is where augmented reality (AR) comes in.

Those looking to advertise the creative potential of AR and VR have long courted Sze. Her work, super-smart, a bit sciency and crucially multi-dimensional, porous and walkable through, seemed like the perfect base material of some kind of AR treatment.

Sze wasn’t seeing it. The technology – at least the applications of it that had been suggested to her – was a ‘hammer without a nail’, a tool with nothing to offer.

Here, though, there was something AR was good for: it could offer smartphoneenabled daytime garden visitors the chance »

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Sze had been fascinated by the Pokémon Go phenomenon and wanted to do something similar, choreographing her own kind of dance

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to see the building at night, to overlay the nighttime display onto day. The phone could become a sort of time machine, zooming you half a day forwards or backwards.

Sze had also been fascinated by the Pokémon Go phenomenon and how that AR treasure hunt became a kind of global mass choreography. She noted how willing people were to become part of that choreography, to happily wander into and linger in that liminal space. Here she could do something similar, choreograph her own kind of dance in the garden. ‘It was a way of activating the outside space,’ she says. ‘And you’re in nature but having this human-made experience. It was the first time I thought there is a need for AR here, to expand the experience of space, rather than let’s think up an AR project.

So this isn’t an AR show, it’s a show with a piece where the digital goes into nature and makes you weirdly more aware of your body and that nature. Hopefully it will work and in ways that I don’t understand.’

There is another fascination for Sze in this digital/physical between place; that it might,

in some ways, approximate our interior world. ‘Scale is totally screwed up on a screen because scale only relates to the human body. And so trying to create something that surrounds you on a screen is such an interesting idea. And it mirrors the space of the interior world more than the space of the physical world. When we dream, there is no real sense of scale. And we spend so much time with the images that are in our head, but we discuss this as a physical space far less than we should.’ That’s where Sze’s art lives, on the borders between our interior and exterior worlds, and physical and digital worlds. It talks about what passes between, experience, memory, what sense-making machines and engines we build. ‘If you are a visual artist and you are trying to depict something from the real world, you are constantly humbled by the complexity of seeing or perceiving something, remembering something or recalling or imagining it.’

‘Night into Day’ is showing 24 October–7 March at Fondation Cartier, 261 Boulevard Raspail, Paris 14e, fondationcartier.com; sarahsze.com

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© Sarah Sze, photography: Sarah Sze Studio/© Jean Nouvel, photography: Luc Boegly

Below, an installation prototype in Sze’s studio, 2019 Right, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, an airy glass and steel structure designed by Jean Nouvel in 1994, will host an immersive installation by Sze that will transforms the visitor’s perception and experience of the building

www.baxter.it

Time frame Photographer Paolo Roversi captures the essence of Italian furniture company Poliform as it marks 50 years of high craft and creativity

Photographer Paolo Roversi, best known for his work in fashion, is a true aesthete. His eye sees truth and beauty in everything, from supermodels to inanimate objects, the natural to the man-made. Even the camera that he uses – a large-format Deardorff constructed from Honduran mahogany with brass and aluminium fittings – is admired for its tactile, voluptuary qualities.

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‘It is so sensual, with its wood and its folds,’ says the Paris-based Italian photographer. Roversi likes the simple slowness of the camera, its essential craving for light. He works with the Deardorff ’s lens wide open, to the very highest stop, theorising that a long exposure makes for a more intense image, and renders an object’s presence stronger and deeper. È

Wallpaper* Bespoke

This page, ‘Senzafine’ walk-in closet,

by Poliform, 1997 Opposite, from left, Poliform founders Giovanni Anzani, Alberto Spinelli and Aldo Spinelli

This page, clockwise from top, ‘Kensington’ dining table,

by Jean-Marie Massaud, 2018; ‘Bristol’ sofa, by Jean-Marie Massaud, 2014; ‘Sophie’ armchairs, by Emmanuel Gallina, 2017, all for Poliform

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Wallpaper* Bespoke

Right, Paolo Roversi with his 8x10 Deardorff camera. He likes to shoot using long exposures, Polaroid film and flashlights

‘Time, light and space: these are the founding elements of photography and design, their essence’

Now Roversi has applied his technique and philosophy to photographing furniture, working with Poliform to create a new book, Time, Light, Space, seeking to highlight the life, soul and substance in the Italian manufacturer’s products.

The photographer (also behind the 2020 Pirelli calendar, campaigns for the likes of Dior, Cerruti and Comme des Garçons, and the subject of solo exhibitions around the world) has interpreted the 50-year history of Poliform with images that express the traditions of the designers and craftspeople of the Brianza-based family business, refocusing their work for a contemporary audience. Featuring texts

by Vogue Italia photo editor Chiara Bardelli Nonino, the book depicts a unique way of living, tracing the evolution of a company founded in 1970 that has successfully transformed storied artisanal traditions into contemporary furniture, showcasing Italy’s culture of design excellence all over the world.

By using what have always been his raw materials – ‘time, light, space’ – Roversi takes the reader on a photographic journey to the heart of the Poliform universe, retelling the company’s story and capturing the distinctive quality that makes the surfaces, textures, materials and volumes of its products sing.

‘Time, light and space: these are the founding elements of photography and design, their essence,’ say the Poliform team. ‘This is not coincidental. The search for an absolute synthesis, for radical simplicity is, in fact, what unites the work of Roversi, one of the most eminent Italian artists and one of the world’s greatest photographic artists, with the driving force behind the planning of [Poliform founders] Giovanni Anzani, Aldo Spinelli and Alberto Spinelli in their constant reinterpretation of the living space.’

The book is not a catalogue, but presents a voyage through Poliform’s years of innovation, its challenges, encounters and triumphs, using images of its products, such as the 2017 ‘Sophie’ armchair by Emmanuel Gallina and the 2018 ‘Kensington’ dining table by Jean-Marie Massaud.

‘They say that seeing oneself through the eyes of another is one of the most difficult things to do,’ reflect the Poliform team. ‘After 50 years, Poliform has decided to do just that, recounting its timeless values – love for work, respect for quality and dedication to excellence – in the universal language of photography.’

‘Poliform: Time, Light, Space’, by Paolo Roversi and Chiara Bardelli Nonino, is published by Rizzoli New York, $95, rizzoliusa.com; poliform.it

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Officepaper*

The future workspace must go beyond the bubble, allowing for flexibility, function and a strong sense of place

Refit for work Abandoned in a hurry, quickly forgotten by some, and desperately missed by others – what next for the workplace and its design?

Architects, designers and manufacturers are having to forge their way through an unfamiliar new landscape of work. Twelve months ago, a report on future offices could afford to speculate on fripperies such as greenery, bio-walls, wellness and breakout spaces, all the little accoutrements that added up to create a welcoming work community that was a home from home, a centre of holistic positivity and a place that employees went to feel valued.

Who sees the inside of offices now? With desks empty, water coolers belching lonely

ILLUSTRATOR: DAN MATUTINA WRITER: JONATHAN BELL

bubbles and security guards living even more solitary lives, the office plants are the only things enjoying regular care and attention.

Vitra is just one company with a vested interest in ensuring office culture survives and flourishes. This summer, the Swiss manufacturer announced the Vitra Summit, a digital assembly of industry names ‘to reflect on what the pandemic means for the future of great workplaces and the function of our homes’. Their aim is to take the discussion ‘well beyond furniture’, but there’s no escaping the critical economic subtext.

The summit is organised into four areas: ‘dynamic spaces’, ‘materials, products and the design process’, ‘remote world’ and the all-encompassing ‘the human and the office’. Although many of the questions being asked haven’t changed much in over a century of office work – how to achieve the magic balance between flexibility, dynamism, warmth and efficiency – the new anxieties are front and centre. You might think, given most of us now occupy ‘remote worlds’, that this topic trumps the other points, but as architects and designers have È

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ZUP DESIGN - PHOTO: SIMONE CASETTA - MODEL: YOKU D/SH

YOKU SH Yoku is a sauna+hammam system whose name, and inspiration, comes from a particular branch of Japanese natural medicine based on the beneficial effects of contact with plants and the forest atmosphere.

Yoku can be completed by elegant library elements connecting it to the surrounding ambient.

Design: Marco Williams Fagioli www.effe.it

Officepaper* known for decades, short-term thinking is never the best solution.

During the pandemic, Los Angeles-based architecture studio Johnston Marklee completed its first office project, a corporate HQ for cloud storage pioneer Dropbox. The studio’s founding partner Sharon Johnston describes working on an office project in uncertain times. ‘We design for change,’ she explains, ‘but Covid is a level of change we weren’t anticipating.’ Despite this, Johnston is optimistic, although she acknowledges that ‘the boundaries between where we live and where we work were already blurring. Many Vitra pieces are designed so that they can look amazing in your home, for example.’

Nevertheless, Johnston Marklee’s approach is based around translating the domestic model into the workspace. ‘The Dropbox office has “living rooms” nested within the traditional space,’ she says. ‘We need to leave space in our design environments to allow the unknowable to unfold, for other designers to come in, even for “un-designed” elements.’

If there’s one thing the pandemic has highlighted, it’s that the cultural angst around our work/life balance is universal

and expanding. Can the design landscape that emerges counter these fears? It’s proving hard enough to get people away from the newly rediscovered comforts of home (in the UK, spending on DIY, gadgets and home furniture, inside and out, all rose during lockdown) and back into the workspace.

‘Coming together is of paramount importance right now. Even as architects, we really miss that,’ Johnston says.

There are clear environmental advantages in reducing travelling and office energy consumption. ‘The more flexible architecture is, the more sustainable it is in terms of adapting to new requirements – the building sector is responsible for over 30 per cent of global CO2 emissions,’ explains the Swiss architect Stephan Hürlemann. His ‘Dancing Wall’ grew out of a 2017 project, PwC’s Experience Centre building in Zurich, and was introduced as a product by Vitra in 2018.

Essentially a partition on steroids, the highly mobile wall offers multiple configurations, from bookshelf or planter to presentation space or simple room divider. It’s a product that embodies constant change: ‘The client wasn’t able to tell me which rooms he would

need for how many employees, because his business is always in flux,’ Hürlemann recalls.

‘I realised that many companies would be facing this kind of uncertainty in the future, so I developed an interior concept that is more flexible than anything previously on the market.’ Finished in wood with heavy-duty castors and a deep profile, the system is both unobtrusive and architectural, adding another tectonic layer to an open plan space.

The day-to-day practicalities of distancing and division might be catered for, but the psychological role of the future office is harder to define. Johnston speculates that as we move past the traditional 9-to-5 workday, we’re also redefining the ‘theatre of the office’. That means finding a new way to perform. London-based designer Sevil Peach has worked closely with Vitra for many years, including redesigning the interiors of the offices at the Weil am Rhein Campus (W*31). ‘Humans thrive on face-toface interaction,’ says Peach. ‘Our newly enforced distancing requires a far higher level of clarity in our communications, trust and sensitivity in interpretation between all involved in online conversations.’ È

‘We need to leave space in our design environments to allow the unknowable to unfold, and for “un-designed” elements’

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Her suggestion is that offices, such as they are, need to diversify to meet different needs. ‘There is a range of work settings, including teamwork, focused work, meetings, retreats and communication, that can be presented in a framework that supports wellbeing and safe social interaction,’ she says. In other words, employees need to try harder. The ‘sense of global consciousness’ created by the pandemic might ultimately prove more unifying than any number of collaboration platforms. ‘I hope that this situation will allow us all to learn from each other,’ Peach observes, noting that work cultures are still very different around the world.

‘European companies clearly interact with their employees in a different, more inclusive manner than, say, American or Asian companies do.’

Zoom fatigue has crushed the spirit, adding to our existing device addiction and whittled down attention spans. To stop the post-pandemic landscape from serving up more of the same, there must be programmes, plans and products that transform work from an anvil-like obligation to a more meaningful, efficient and ultimately beneficial part of our lives. The pandemic has given designers a chance to explore why some offices don’t work, and suggest alternatives. Now we’ve proven we can work effectively from home, Peach speculates that the office might eventually come to embody a company’s culture and ethos, rather than just be a place

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of production – ‘a focal point, an innovation centre and a social hub’. Hürlemann agrees.

‘I believe that the response to the “home office” will be the “office home”. With many people living in small apartments, it would be ideal if employers would start making office space available for private use as well – a place to entertain friends, organise movie nights or throw a party. Architecture must be able to reflect and encourage this increasingly fluid boundary between home and workplace.’

However, once the physical partitions finally come down, should we still retain a few mental ones? The Pandora’s box of technological connectivity will outlive any floorplan or furniture solution, offering no respite to those suffering from chronic overexposure to Slack, Zoom, Meet, Trello, et al, even before the unholy trinity of eternal distraction, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, can hijack any remaining minutes of your time. Pre-Covid, the ideal modern office was a city-state in miniature, a multilayered, multifunctional archipelago of interactions designed to foster a sense of place and belonging, dissipating monotony and encouraging the creativity of chance. In order to retain any kind of allure, the office – and the world of work itself – needs to become hybridised, empowering occupants with real choices about how they decide to use the workplace. It’s time to slow down, ease off, and make ourselves some space.

The Vitra Summit is hosted online, 22-23 October, vitra.com/summit

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www.neolith.com @neolithbythesize

NEOLITH UK SHOWROOM: Business Design Center, 52 Upper Street, London | NEOLITH WAREHOUSE: Lovet House, Lovet Rd, Harlow CM19 5TB

NEOLITH® STRATA ARGENTUM Space I NEOLITH® Urban Boutique Milano (Italy) I Designed by Héctor Ruiz Velázquez I Photography: Ignacio Uribe Salazar

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Officepaper*

Holy order

David Chipperfield Architects turns a 17th-century German convent into a 21st-century office complex

PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON MENGES WRITER: SOPHIE LOVELL

Successful architecture serves its users as well as its environment. It responds to its physical, social and historical context.

It gives back more than it takes. David Chipperfield Architects is not only great at getting the aesthetics right, but also a master at responding to existing context, then harmonising and enhancing. Its recently completed Jacoby Studios office building, in the small German city of Paderborn, is a perfect example.

Paderborn, in North Rhine-Westphalia, is, as the name implies, where the river Pader is ‘born’ from some 200 springs across the city centre, threading together in interconnecting streams. It was founded

by Charlemagne in the 8th century but, like many European cities, suffered damage during the Second World War – 85 per cent of it was destroyed. Nevertheless, the central urban plan from the Middle Ages is still very much intact. There are parts of the old city wall, large Catholic churches and smaller buildings in a typical 1950s West German style – a shopping arcade, large roads, some pedestrianised areas and the odd brutalist structure. In short, it is a fairly typical German city.

Similarly, the clients for this project are, at first sight, a family firm fairly typical of the Mittelstand, the medium-sized businesses that form the backbone of the German economy. Founded in the 1970s by Franz Jacoby, and now run by his daughters Ellen and Yvonne, the firm is Germany’s biggest retailer for DIY arts and crafts materials and has around 1,000 employees, 85 per cent of whom are women. For the site of their new

company HQ, the Jacobys had acquired a plot of land near Paderborn’s old city centre.

On it stood a disused 1950s hospital building, built on the remains of a baroque convent for the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of Saint Vincent de Paul.

‘When we first saw the site,’ says project architect Frithjof Kahl, ‘nothing was visible of the old 17th-century building apart from the original chapel façade, the only part of the building that was listed.’ Kahl, along with his co-project architect Franziska Rusch, design lead Alexander Schwarz and practice partner Martin Reichert, originally planned to demolish and build anew, ‘but during our first site visit we began to wonder whether more of the original building remained than expected. We were then able to convince the clients to use the ruins as a foundation for the new project, despite it being a much more involved undertaking, and they trusted us,’ explains Kahl. ‘Great clients!’

The appreciation was mutual: ‘We loved what David Chipperfield Architects did with the Neues Museum in Berlin so much,’ says Ellen Jacoby, ‘that we just let them work their magic. I have never built a house before, but when you are building, you only have one chance to make it really good – so we wanted to make the best of this chance.’

A careful, almost archaeological, excavation of the site followed and, with the aid of a tiny historical sketch of the convent, the architects exposed the old walls, much of the former chapel, sacristy and cloisters. The original walls are limestone-rubble masonry work, typical for the area, but on top are also later layers and additions of 19th-century »

Above, the former convent’s baroque chapel is now a courtyard at the heart of a group of interconnecting low-rise office buildings with slim, recessed balconies, wood-framed sliding glass doors and roofscape gardens Right, the remnants of the chapel interior form a walled courtyard leading to the main entrance

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Left, located in the former sacristy, the large entrance foyer features an imposing concrete staircase that nods to the grand entrance of David Chipperfield’s 2009 Neues Museum in Berlin Below left, one of the office floors, featuring whitened oak wooden flooring

by Wimmer, another German family business, and polished concrete ceilings

‘When you stand in front of it now, it is like looking at layers of sediment in stone’

brickwork, which were also kept. New bricks filled any gaps. ‘When you stand in front of it now, it is like looking at layers of sediment in stone,’ says Kahl. Most of the historical elements form part of the external space.

The chapel, for example, is now an entry courtyard and the cloister became a roofless atrium at the heart of the complex. The foyer with its main staircase – an echo of the grand

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entrance of Chipperfield’s 2009 Neues Museum – is in the former sacristy. The office spaces are new buildings around it: concrete constructions with slim, recessed balconies and floor-to-ceiling sliding glass window façades in wooden frames, affording views towards the historical parts of the complex.

An arm of the river runs right past the building and the water supply has been

put to good use, harnessed for underfloor heating and cooling in the ceilings using a heat exchanger.

Some parts of the new buildings are twostorey, others three-storey. The third storey contains three penthouse-like office spaces for Franz and his daughters, surrounded by roofscape gardens, planted in different styles, from scree gardens to mini copses, by the Belgian landscape architects Peter Wirtz and Jan Grauwels, who also landscaped the garden surrounding the site.

The rooftop area is very private. Ellen loves working up there: ‘I always fancied a treehouse I could escape to from my work environment for a bit, so I added it as a requirement in the programme,’ she explains.

‘The architects turned this dream into my new office and gave me my beautiful space up in the treetops – overlooking blossoming chestnut trees in spring. Most importantly,’ she adds, ‘I can sneak over the roof to my sister’s office.’

The Jacobys worked closely with the architects and added their own touch with the interior details. A lot of the furniture Ellen bought is by Italian brand Azucena, part of B&B Italia. She also commissioned bespoke furniture, including tables, stools and sideboards, from her old Royal College of Art friend, designer Michael Sans, and added artworks, including two huge mural paintings by Christoph Ruckhäberle.

This building is not the cheapest option, but it is one that gives back much to the clients’ hometown, as well as providing a beautiful place to work. ‘It is so nice to work with people who are building for themselves,’ says Kahl. ‘The value of the building lies more in its use than the maximisation of profit. The clients also wanted to build something for the city and its future with a special piece of architecture.’

Ellen adds: ‘I think Paderborn really deserves this, and it would be great if we inspired others to take similar risks.’ davidchipperfield.com

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Legal Announcement

Annuncio Legale

Decision No. 1161/2020 publ. on 23/07/2020 RG No. 6983/2018 Docket No. 2429/2020 of 23/07/2020

Sentenza n.1161/2020 pubbl. il 23/07/2020 RG n. 6983/2018 Repert. n. 2429/2020 del 23/07/2020

No. R.G. 6983/2018

N. R.G. 6983/2018

ITALIAN REPUBLIC ON BEHALF OF THE ITALIAN PEOPLE

REPUBBLICA ITALIANA IN NOME DEL POPOLO ITALIANO

ORDINARY COURT OF VENICE Specialized Section in Enterprise Matters

TRIBUNALE DI VENEZIA SEZIONE Specializzata in materia di impresa

The Court, composed of: – dr. Lina Tosi President – dr. Lisa Torresan Judge – dr. Sara Pitinari Judge

Il Tribunale, nelle persone di: – dr. Lina Tosi Presidente rel.

– dr. Lisa Torresan Giudice – dr. Sara Pitinari Giudice

in chamber has collegially issued the following

riunito in camera di consiglio ha pronunciato la seguente

DECISION in the civil proceeding enrolled under No. R.G. 6983/2018, instituted with writ of summons

SENTENZA nella causa civile inscritta al n. 6983/2018 del Ruolo Generale, promossa con atto di citazione

BY Marsotto s.r.l. (01470390236) represented and defended by its counsel Mrs. Eulalia Malimpensa, domiciled being elected at Luca Vedovato’s office in Venice — Plaintiff

DA Marsotto s.r.l. (01470390236) con l’avv. Eulalia Malimpensa di Milano, dom. avv. Luca Vedovato di Venezia – Attrice

AGAINST Arnaboldi Angelo s.r.l. (00682670963) represented and defended by its counsel Messrs. Iacopo Destri, Arianna Ferrari, Anna Maria Lotto, domiciled being elected at Dimitri Guarino’s office in Venice – Defendant

CONTRO Arnaboldi Angelo s.r.l. (00682670963) con gli Avv. Iacopo Destri, Arianna Ferrari, Anna Maria Lotto di Milano, dom. avv. Dimitri Guarino di Venezia – Convenuta

[Omissis]

[Omissis]

FOR THESE REASONS

PQM

Definitively,

Definitivamente pronunciando,

1 ascertains that the three-legged round table, manufactured by the defendant Arnaboldi Angelo s.r.l. and subject matter of this cause of action, a sample of which was detected during the judicial description at the defendant’s premises (proceeding R.G. 9917/2017), counterfeits the multiple design model under italian registration No. 97320 dated 4/4/2011 of the right holder Marsotto S.r.l.

(Ndr: designed by Jasper Morrison);

1 accerta che il tavolino rotondo a tre gambe, prodotto dalla convenuta Arnaboldi Angelo s.r.l. e per cui è causa, di cui è esemplare il tavolino rinvenuto in sede di descrizione giudiziale presso la convenuta (procedimento r.g. 9917/2017), contraffà il modello multiplo di cui alla registrazione italiana n. 97320 del 4/4/2011 in titolarità di Marsotto s.r.l.

(Ndr: design di Jasper Morrison);

2 inhibits the company from advertising, manufacturing, offering, marketing and any other commercial use of products in violation of the design model under italian registration No. 97320 dated 4/4/2011;

2 inibisce alla convenuta la pubblicizzazione, produzione, offerta, commercializzazione, ed ogni altro uso commerciale dei prodotti costituenti violazione del modello di cui alla registrazione italiana n. 97320 del 4/4/2011;

3 orders the cancellation, from the defendant’s website and, however, from the websites www.arnaboldimarmi.com and www.neutradesign.it, and from the defendant’s catalogues and advertising materials, of any image and reference to the counterfeited products referred to under points 1) and 2) above;

3 ordina la cancellazione, dal sito internet della convenuta e comunque dai siti www. arnaboldimarmi.com e www.neutradesign.it, e dai cataloghi e documenti pubblicitari della convenuta, delle immagini e di ogni menzione dei prodotti contraffattivi di cui ai punti 1 ) e 2);

4 orders the defendant to recall from the market the infringing products referred to under points 1) and 2) above;

4 ordina il ritiro dal commercio da parte della convenuta dei prodotti contraffattivi di cui ai punti 1 ) e 2);

5 condemns the defendant to compensate the plaintiff for the suffered damages equal to Euro 462,00, plus interests accrued from the due date to balance, for economic damages, and Euro 30.000,00, in total, for immaterial damages;

5 condanna la convenuta al risarcimento del danno a favore dell’attrice, per euro 462,00, oltre interessi dal dovuto al saldo, per danno patrimoniale, ed euro 30.000,00 onnicomprensivi per danno non patrimoniale;

6 orders the defendant to publish the heading and the final ruling of this decision, at the defendant’s expenses, on the website www.arnaboldimarmi.com, also in English language, for 30 days in noticeable font size;

6 ordina la pubblicazione della presente sentenza, nella intestazione e nel dispositivo, a cura e a spese della resistente, sul sito www.arnaboldimarmi.com, anche in lingua inglese, in prima schermata, a caratteri evidenti, per 30 giorni;

7 orders the publication of the heading and the final ruling of this decision, by the plaintiff at the defendant’s expenses, with normal font size and on double column, also in English language, on the magazine “Wallpaper”, both on the printed and on-line edition, for two times, mentioning the parties’ and the designers’ names;

7 ordina la pubblicazione, a cura di parte attrice e a spese della convenuta, della presente sentenza, nella intestazione e nel dispositivo, a caratteri normali e su doppia colonna, anche in lingua inglese, sulla rivista “Wallpaper” sia nella versione cartacea che online, per due volte, con i nomi delle parti e dei designer dei modelli;

8 establishes the payment of the following liquidated damages: – Euro 500,00 for each day of delay in the cancellation from websites and any printed material, and in the recall from the market; – Euro 1.500,00 for any further violation, to be intended as referring to the manufacturing or commercialization or any single product; – Euro 500,00 for the case of future publication of advertising images depicting the counterfeited products;

8 fissa penali: – di euro 500,00 per ogni giorno di ritardo nella cancellazione da siti e materiale cartaceo, e nel ritiro dal commercio; – di euro 1500,00 per ogni nuova violazione, intesa come realizzazione o commercializzazione o di singolo pezzo; – di euro 500,00 per ogni futura pubblicazione di immagini pubblicitarie ritraenti i prodotti in contraffazione;

9 rejects any other plaintiff ’s requests;

9 rigetta per il resto le domande di parte attrice;

10 confirms the litigation costs as settled in the interim ex parte proceeding, and, for the merit, condemns the defendant to pay 50% of the plaintiff ’s legal cost totally amounting to Euro 18.000,00 for professional fees, Euro 3.399,00 in disbursements, overhead costs equal to 15%, plus VAT and CPA.

10 conferma le spese come regolate in sede cautelare, e, per il merito, pone a carico della convenuta per il 50% le spese di parte attrice, che liquida, nell’intero, in euro 18.000,00 in compensi, 3.399,00 in esborsi, oltre 15% spese generali, oltre iva e cpa.

Venice, 15/07/2020

Venezia, 15/7/2020

The President Dr. Lina Tosi

Il Presidente rel. dr. Lina Tosi

Officepaper*

Heavy lifting Greek architect Georges Batzios squares up to the renovation of a landmark brutalist office block in Athens

PHOTOGRAPHY: GIORGOS SFAKIANAKIS WRITER: ELLIE STATHAKI

On a generous, green site in one of Athens’ smarter northern residential suburbs, a strange concrete presence rises. The long, relatively low structure features unusual, almost retro-futuristic forms, screens that frame large openings and exposed textured concrete that make it clearly stand out from its neighbours. Locals know it well. This is not your typical Greek office building; it is the former headquarters of AGET Iraklis, one of Greece’s best known cement manufacturers. It was designed in 1972 by one of the country’s most celebrated 20thcentury architects, Alexandros Tombazis (see W*138).

The architectural landmark is emblematic of its creator’s style and early explorations of concrete and Metabolist principles, such as the use of modular design and technology – this part of Athens also features his Iliako Chorio (meaning ‘Solar Village’, a 1980s experiment in environmental architecture) and his own office. The AGET building was left empty for seven years after the company moved out in 2010, but it has now been given a new lease of life by local architect Georges Batzios.

‘I was on the island of Kythnos for work and the client called me up out of the blue,’ recalls Batzios, who set up his boutique studio in the central Athens neighbourhood of Petralona in 2013, following an international career that included stints with »

Designed by Greek architect Alexandros Tombazis in 1972, the former HQ of cement manufacturer AGET Iraklis has been renovated for a new owner, restoring as much as possible of the original

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Officepaper*

Left, the building’s central axis is a long passageway clad in grey Evoian marble that reflects the structure’s striking concrete coffered ceiling Below, the main lobby sports a series of fully glazed lounge areas arranged around a large central water feature

‘The building is a rare example of brutalist architecture in Greece,’ says Batzios. ‘Our aim was to respect and restore as much as possible the existing design’s intention, and maintain key features, its “bones” and textures. However, in terms of the interior, we didn’t want to create something that gets completely lost in the original. Instead, we took drastic, confident steps to bring to the surface a sequence of spaces that we feel were always there, in the original building’s “subconscious”.’

The architect studied Tombazis’ original drawings, and his interventions blend effortlessly with the old design. He first gutted the building and cleared any additions that compromised the original design’s conceptual strength. While the main concrete frame was of great quality and in excellent condition (‘Tombazis was a master in his use of concrete,’ Batzios points out), its surface was less so. Batzios analysed the concrete mix to produce a treatment with local specialist Poriotis that would cover damage, while recreating a surface texture as close to the original as possible (this treatment also helped with temperature management and energy efficiency for the project). He reworked the main entry to expand the original lobby, restore its water features and » David Chipperfield in London and Jean Nouvel in Paris and New York. ‘The client and I hadn’t met before, but he’d seen my work, especially my work with concrete, and liked it, and he wanted to invite me to submit a proposal to a competition for the office building’s renovation. It was a lovely surprise.’

The client, part of a private company, was searching for the right architect to bring the structure into the 21st century without compromising its design intention and integrity. Batzios entered the competition and won, presenting a proposal that would work with the building’s strengths and concrete character, which over the years had been undermined, painted over and added to. The architect often uses naked concrete in his studio’s mix of commercial and cultural work, and he was delighted that a celebration of the material was central to the brief. ‘It’s not common in Greece for a client to ask for exposed concrete,’ he says. Renovation works started on site in 2017.

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C R A F T E D T H E O L D W AY I N I TA LY F O R Y O U R E V E R Y D AY M O M E N T S

lucafaloni.com

Officepaper*

Left, the 13,000 sq m building is surrounded by a tree-filled campus with outdoor sports pitches and a company gym.

The concrete façade was renovated by local specialist Poriotis, which helped recreate a surface texture as close to the original as possible Below, concrete columns, holding metal shafts that house mechanical, electrical and plumbing elements, are a distinctive feature of Tombazis’ building

create a dramatic entrance. The building’s conference hall has also been expanded, with a service room to accommodate modern technologies.

Guided by the ceiling’s concrete grid, a new internal route was plotted through the double-height ground level, which also includes management areas and meeting rooms. This trajectory is arranged around a central axis, named by Batzios the ‘Golden Way’, and incorporates a striking, redesigned circular staircase of grey Cretan marble that connects all levels. Terra grey and grey Evoian marble have been used on all the vertical surfaces of the central axis, creating a sleek but tactile finish. The 13,000 sq m building spans two more floors of office space – the slightly recessed second floor was added in 1978. The building’s new tenants have access to outdoor sports pitches on the tree-filled campus grounds, and an old heliport facility has been converted into a company gym.

Everything has been executed with meticulous attention to detail, from the way the marble slabs were cut, so that the veins appear continuous in large surfaces, to the concrete’s exact hues. ‘In fact, one of the biggest challenges was that the original grid, around which the building was designed, was not very precise, so we had to redesign everything in CAD in great detail so that our interventions fit exactly and the alterations are seamless,’ says Batzios. Leading both the design and project management helped him get through this. ‘We got involved in all aspects of the project. This allowed us to have great quality control over the result, but also meant that everything went through us. I’m not sure I’d like to do that again!’ he says, laughing. Now fully refreshed and open for business, this piece of experimental Greek 20thcentury architecture is ready for its next chapter. georgesbatzios.com

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‘The building is a rare example of brutalist architecture in Greece.

Our aim was to respect its key features’

Your passport to global style More than 60 compelling cities refined into essential travel-sized guidebooks and apps at www.phaidon.com/wcg

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NOVEMBER IS ALL ABOUT...

BREEZY LIVING p146 AIR APPARENT Interiors with breathing space p156 RAKISH CHARM Beaus with bouquets p170 SNORTY BUT NICE Frank Bowling’s pig’s trotters in vodka and beer ∑

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Space From left, ‘Bramante’ storage unit, £4,555, by Kazuhide Takahama, for Cassina. ‘Taru’ one-armed sofa system, from £3,077; footstool, from £883,

both by Sebastian Herkner, for Ligne Roset. ‘Shia’ vase, €290, by ClassiCon. ‘Solid’ coffee table, £4,190, by Rodolfo Dordoni, for Minotti. ‘Margo’ tray,

£86, by AYTM. ‘LUM’ floor lamp, from £615,

by Ulf Möller, for Thonet.

‘Dishes to Dishes’ bowl, €60, by Glenn Sestig, for Valerie Objects.

‘Fudge’ chair, £7,600,

by Toogood. ‘Camaleonda’ sofa system, from £18,792, by Mario Bellini, for B&B Italia. ‘Ruffle’ planter, $3,500, by Bzippy

FIELD STUDIES Fresh thinking for mind, body and home

Visual artists Charlotte Taylor and Joe Mortell Interiors Hannah Jordan

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Space

From left, ‘Bulè’ table, £6,370, by Chiara Andreatti, for Lema. ‘Beak’ water carafe, £77; glasses, £34 for two, all by Tomas Kral, for Nude. ‘Alev’ bowl, £77,

by Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye, for Raawii. ‘Plexi Case’ cylindrical box, £492, by Simona Cremascoli, for Poltrona Frau. ‘Again’ chairs, €371 each, by Alexander Gufler, for TON. ‘Cloud 1’ rug, €18,480, by Jan Kath. ‘Lyn’ cabinets, from €1,555 each, by Visser & Meijwaard, for Pulpo. ‘Kuru’ bowl, £115, by Philippe Malouin, for Iittala. ‘10th’ kitchen, price on request, by Massimo Castagna, for Exteta. ‘Ceiling Lamp No.4’, €1,023, by Muller Van Severen, for Valerie Objects.

‘Edition 2020’ plates, price on request, by KPM, for New Tendency. Boiled leather vase, £2,000, by Simon Hasan, for Berluti

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From left, ‘Becca’ sofa, price on request, by Terry Crews, for Bernhardt Design.

‘Bebop’ low table, €319, by Tristan Lohner, for Fermob.

‘Tokio’ glasses, £43 for six; bottle, £20, all by Mist-O, for Ichendorf Milano. ‘Rail’ sun lounger, €1,029, by Pedrali. Towel, €55, by Tekla.

‘Hopi’ poufs, from €920 each, by Paola Lenti. Metal table, €490, by Tine K Home.

Wonders, C$24 ($18),

by Karim, designed by Studio Monozygote

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Space

This page, from left, ‘Julep’ sofa, €3,873, by Jonas Wagell; ‘Matera’ ottoman, from €1,034, by Gordon Guillaumier, both for Tacchini. ‘Sistema Parere Madia’ unit, €4,757,

by Anton Cristell and Emanuel Gargano, for Amura. Sculptural object, €105, by Helena Rohner, for Ferm Living. ‘Ruff’ armchair, price on request,

by Patricia Urquiola, for Moroso. ‘Lantern’ floor lamp, CNY4,800 ($702),

by Kun Design

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Opposite, from left, ‘Roll’ chairs, from €440 each,

by Mut Design, for Sancal.

‘Fade’ coffee table, €175,

by Marco Gregori, for Plust. ‘Kullar’ cups, £50 each, by Ikkis. ‘Terra’ jug, £30, by L’Abitare.

‘Vineyard’ daybed, €8,000,

by Ramón Esteve, for Vondom. ‘Carla’ duvet cover, €103, by Schramm.

‘Labyrinthe’ bath towel, £230, by Hermès

Space

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Space

From left, ‘Tommy’ seating series, from £220, by Basaglia + Rota Nodari, for Viganò. ‘PC Portable’ lamp, £69, by Pierre Charpin, for Hay. Pen pot, £710, by Carl Auböck, for Berluti.

‘Logarithm’ notepad, £5.50, by Monograph, for House Doctor, from SCP. ‘Anything’ stapler and tape dispenser, £13 each, by Michael Sodeau, for Hay.

‘Verba Volant Slim’ desk, price on request, by Roberto Lazzeroni, for Baxter. Panama A4 writing folder, £475, by Smythson.

‘Lyz’ chair, £1,120, by Mario Ferrarini, for Potocco.

‘W182 Pastille’ lamp, £242, by Sam Hecht and Kim Colin, for Wästberg For stockists, see page 169

Fashion

HOTHOUSE

FLOWER

Our dandy dresser is a haughty culturalist Photography Maxwell Granger Fashion Jason Hughes

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This page, jacket, £2,360; shirt, £860, both by Berluti. Hat (worn throughout), £95, by Paul Smith. Scarf, £300, by Hermès.

Opposite, coat, £5,500, by Lanvin. Basket, £280, by Lorna Singleton, from The New Craftsmen

Fashion

This page, coat, £9,050; coat (underneath), £4,500; trousers, £545, all by Dolce & Gabbana.

Basket, £280, by Lorna Singleton, from The New Craftsmen. Opposite, coat, £1,475; trousers, £410, both by Paul Smith. Scarf, £300, by Hermès. Boots (worn throughout), £465, by Bottega Veneta

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Fashion

This page, jacket, £2,150; shirt, £510, both by Dior. Scarf, £300, by Hermès.

Opposite, coat, £2,490, by Balenciaga. Scarf, £300, by Hermès

Fashion

Top, coat, price on request, by Loewe. Scarf, £300, by Hermès. Socks, £18, by Falke. Basket, £75,

by Sarany Shop, from The Conran Shop. Bottom, jacket, £2,500, by Celine by Hedi Slimane

Top, jacket, £1,590; trousers, £490, both by Fendi. Hogla storage basket, £120, from The Conran Shop.

Bottom, coat, £1,550; shirt, £130, both by Emporio Armani

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Fashion

This page, coat, £2,750; shirt, £465; trousers, £655, all by Bottega Veneta. Scarf, £300, by Hermès.

Opposite, coat, £1,165, by JW Anderson. Shirt, £130, by Emporio Armani

This page, jacket, £995, by Drakes. Scarf, £300, by Hermès. Opposite, jacket, £2,145; shorts, £440, both by Salvatore Ferragamo. Vest, £32, by Sunspel. Socks, £18, by Falke For stockists, see page 169

Model: Patrick Waldron at Kult London. Casting: David Steven Wilton. Grooming: Chris Sweeney at One Represents using Augustinus Bader.

Prop stylist: Lianna Fowler Studio. Interiors: Jacqui Scalamera. Photography assistant: Benjamin Bill. Fashion assistant: Aylin Bayhan.

Shot on location at McBean’s Orchids, East Sussex, mcbeansorchids.com. Special thanks to Rose Armstrong and Tom Dixon

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Fashion

Shop now at store.wallpaper.com

‘Rota’ pendant lamp, Minimalux —— €492 ——

‘Gila Monster’ vase, L’Objet —— €385 ——

‘Potte Present’ vase, Michael Verheyden —— €247 ——

‘Tadao’ console table, Forma & Cemento —— €384 ——

‘Bavaresk’ chair, Dante Goods And Bads —— €840 ——

‘Cross’ side table, Case Furniture —— €510 ——

‘Carved’ vase, Tom Dixon

Swan statuette, Pulpo

—— €300 ——

—— €140 ——

‘Neptune’s Cup’ vessel, House of Today ‘Triple Slinkie’ rug, CC-Tapis —— €9,142 ——

—— €300 ——

‘City’ vase, Rosenthal —— €429 ——

‘Foresta’ tabletop stand, Alias —— €200 ——

Stockists

A

Celine by Hedi Slimane Tel: 44.20 7491 8200 (UK) celine.com

Amura Tel: 39.080 618 01 21 (Italy) amuralab.com

ClassiCon Tel: 49.89 74 81 33 0 (Germany) classicon.com

AYTM Tel: 45.8678 2620 (Denmark) aytm.dk

D

B

Dior Tel: 44.20 7355 5930 (UK) dior.com

B&B Italia Tel: 39.031 795 111 (Italy) bebitalia.com

Dolce & Gabbana Tel: 44.20 7659 9000 (UK) dolcegabbana.com

Balenciaga Tel: 33.1 56 52 17 17 (France) balenciaga.com

Drakes Tel: 44.20 7734 2367 (UK) drakes.com

Baxter Tel: 39.031 35999 (Italy) baxter.it

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Berluti Tel: 44.20 3901 2683 (UK) berluti.com Bernhardt Design bernhardtdesign.com Boss Tel: 44.20 7734 7919 (UK) boss.com Bottega Veneta Tel: 44.20 7629 5598 (UK) bottegaveneta.com Bzippy Tel: 1.323 366 5594 (US) bzippyandcompany.com

C

Cassina cassina.com

Emporio Armani Tel: 44.20 7491 8080 (UK) armani.com

H

L

Hermès Tel: 44.20 7098 1888 (UK) hermes.com

Lanvin Tel: 44.20 7491 1839 (UK) lanvin.com

I

Lema Tel: 39.031 630990 (Italy) lemamobili.com

Hay Tel: 45.4282 0282 (Denmark) hay.dk

Ichendorf Milano Tel: 39.02 50 99 421 (Italy) ichendorfmilano.com Iittala Iittala.com Ikkis Tel: 91.11 2665 8144 (India) ikkis.in

J

L’Abitare Tel: 39.02 509 9421 (Italy) labitaremilano.com

Ligne Roset ligne-roset.com Loewe loewe.com

M

Minotti Tel: 39.03 62 343 499 (Italy) minotti.com Moroso Tel: 39.0432 577 111 (Italy) moroso.it

Exteta Tel: 39.031 351 9027 (Italy) exteta.it

Jan Kath Tel: 44.20 7495 0740 (UK) jan-kath.com

F

Jil Sander Tel: 39.028 069 131 (Italy) jilsander.com

N

JW Anderson Tel: 44.20 7199 5920 (UK) jwanderson.com

Nude nudeglass.com

Falke falke.com

Fendi Tel: 44.20 7927 4172 (UK) fendi.com Ferm Living Tel: 45.7022 7523 (Denmark) fermliving.com Fermob fermob.com

K

Kun Design Tel: 86.20 3899 1108 (China) kundesign.com

NEXT MONTH

Entertaining Special We’re dining in with a perfectly prepared Portuguese feast, serving drinks from the best new trolleys, and inviting Georgie Hopton and Gary Hume to share their favourite dish. Plus, contemporary takes on classic watches; our pick of the Cruise collections, a tux redux, and optimal outerwear; Nicholas Daley’s multisensory installation at Greenwich Peninsula; Sarah Coleman’s Fendi takeover in Miami; Vipp’s colour injection; Zanat’s lockdown objects; and beautiful boltholes in Mexico and London

New Tendency newtendency.com

P

Paola Lenti Tel: 39.011 562 4259 (Italy) paolalenti.it Paul Smith Tel: 44.20 7493 4565 (UK) paulsmith.com Pedrali Tel: 39.035 83588 (Italy) pedrali.it Phaidon phaidon.com Plust Tel: 39.0444 788200 (Italy) plust.it Poltrona Frau poltronafrau.com Potocco Tel: 39.0432 745111 (Italy) potocco.it

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Salvatore Ferragamo ferragamo.com Sancal Tel: 34.968 718 074 (Spain) sancal.com Schramm Tel: 49.6302 9236 0 (Germany) schramm-werkstaetten.com SCP Tel: 44.20 7739 1869 (UK) scp.co.uk

Smythson Tel: 44.20 7629 8558 (UK) smythson.com Studio Monozygote Tel: 1.514 730 1636 (US) studiomonozygote.com Sunspel sunspel.com

T

Tacchini Tel: 39.02 39 62 44 50 (Italy) tacchini.it Tekla Tel: 45.287 287 03 (Denmark) teklafabrics.com The Conran Shop Tel: 44.20 7723 2223 (UK) conranshop.com The New Craftsmen Tel: 44.20 7148 3190 (UK) thenewcraftsmen.com

Thonet Tel: 44.7980 019194 (UK) thonet.de Tine K Home Tel: 45.70 70 74 48 (Denmark) tinekhome.com TON Tel: 420.573 325 111 (Czech Republic) ton.eu Toogood Tel: 44.20 7226 1061 (UK) t-o-o-g-o-o-d.com

V

Valerie Objects Tel: 32.3 600 21 43 (Belgium) valerie-objects.com

Prada Tel: 44.20 7235 0008 (UK) prada.com

Vigano Tel: 39.0362 903531 (Italy) viganooffice.it

Pulpo Tel: 49.7621 168 01 03 (Germany) pulpoproducts.com

Vondom Tel: 34.96 239 84 86 (Spain) vondom.com

R

W

Raawii Tel: 45.23 35 87 31 (Denmark) raawii.dk

Wästberg Tel: 46.42 284 440 (Sweden) wastberg.com

ON SALE 12 NOVEMBER

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169

Artist’s Palate

FRANK BOWLING’S Pig’s trotters in vodka and beer

#115

He is one of Britain’s foremost abstractionists, but Frank Bowling is also renowned for his love of pig’s trotters, a dish that reminds him of his childhood in Guyana. During a career that has lasted more than six decades, he has been so immersed in his exuberant, large-scale canvases, it has left little time for preparing food. ‘The use of an electric slow cooker was a practical solution to this problem,’ explains Bowling’s wife, textile artist Rachel Scott. ‘This recipe became a staple of his diet. It supplied him with an instant warm and hearty dish after a long day at the studio. To date, it remains one of his favourite dishes.’ frankbowling.com. For Bowling’s recipe, see Wallpaper.com ∫

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PHOTOGRAPHY: BOBBY DOHERTY FOOD AND PROP STYLING: MICHELLE GATTON WRITER: TF CHAN

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HAUTE NATURE

Cristallo Rosa “Wow” (Natural Quartz)

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Designed by nature, perfected in Italy. antolini.com

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