The Current, Vol. 6

Inside Front Cover:

THE CURRENT

After exploring the existential depths of legacy for volume 5, we’re narrowing our lens to focus on the little things, the details, often hidden in plain sight, more felt than seen, that, taken together, make a lasting impression. From the obsessive creatives whose singular vision extends to every aspect of their output to the iconic institutions that insist on the pursuit of perfection and ensure that no facet, whatever the size, is ever overlooked. To these attention-oriented individuals, the minutiae isn’t just a thing—it’s everything. And the commitment to its consistent execution is the ultimate form of expression.

THE EDUCATION OF ORLANDO ATTY

A Masterclass in the World of Robert Kime

THE CEREMONY OF JAPANESE TEA

A Culture Steeped in Tradition

THE CRAFT OF AN AUSTRIAN CASTLE

A Modern-day Medici at Schloss Hollenegg

THE WORLD OF LAPLACE

A Life in Great Detail

FOUNDER’S NOTE

FINELY TUNED

“In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the Gods see everywhere.”

From The Builders by: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

This old poem has long been a favorite of mine. Its resonant theme—that every detail matters, large or small, seen or not—has become, for me, something of a meditation on the honor of making things with integrity and the beauty inherent in fulfilling honest work.

It’s a lofty message that transcends era or occupation but is particularly relevant to our team in Charleston, where we obsess over what Longfellow referred to as the ‘unseen and the seen’ and continuously fine-tune each aspect in equal measure. After all, as we constantly remind ourselves, how you do one thing is how you do everything.

This holistic approach with an intense focus on both the granular and the grand is more than a mantra. It’s a worldview that extends from our craft benches to our drafting tables and was even the impetus for this very magazine, which goes to great lengths to celebrate kindred creatives who are just as unwavering as we are.

For the meticulous-minded, it all comes down to the fine grain, to the rich textures found in the subtle and

minute—an ongoing narrative woven throughout the stories highlighted in our sixth volume.

This year, we traced the syllabus passed down to the new guard at Robert Kime, a storied firm whose studied nonchalance belies a strict adherence to classicism. We headed across the English Channel to Paris, where the prolific founders of Laplace pour their passions into every aspect of their projects from the gardens to the graphic design. In Austria, at Schloss Hollenegg, we discovered a curator redefining what it means to live with art and shepherd its creation. And in Japan, we were enthralled by the reverence of a culture where all of life’s intricacies are contained in a humble cup of tea.

Each of these subjects has its own particular style, operating in a singular framework, but to see their work up close and experience the precision with which they perform it is its own kind of poetry in motion.

Something Longfellow, or any fellow practitioner of the form, would clearly recognize and admire.

Dave Dawson

May 2025

OUR WORK IS A REFLECTION OF WHO WE ARE COLLECTIVELY, NOT JUST AS CRAFTSMEN BUT AS COLLEAGUES WHOSE EARNED EXPERIENCES AND RAW TALENTS COME TOGETHER TO CREATE SOMETHING MUCH GREATER THAN OURSELVES. AT OUR FACTORY IN CHARLESTON, THERE ARE NO INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS—ONLY UNDENIABLE ORIGINALS, TRUE ONE-OFONES, WHOSE PASSION AND INGENUITY

DETAIL driven

ARE EVIDENT IN EVERYTHING WE DO. LOOK CLOSELY. ZOOM IN. ZOOM OUT. BEHIND EVERY SMILE, A QUIET CONFIDENCE, A STEELY RESERVE EMBLEMATIC OF THE CONSTANT STRIVING AT OUR CORE TO PUSH HARDER, WORK SMARTER AND DO JUST A LITTLE BIT BETTER THAN THE DAY BEFORE. THEY'RE THE KIND OF QUALITIES BEST CAPTURED ON FILM, IN ITS DYNAMIC REALNESS, FOR ALL TO SEE.

MARINUS NORTJE PRODUCT DESIGN

FRED HOUSER CRAFT

IOPHA WOMACK CRAFT

BETH

LAZER KOTOWICH-DOWNES CRAFT

CORINTHIA MINTZ PRODUCTION PLANNING

TULLE

INTERIORS BY JMORRIS DESIGN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACOB SNAVELY / STYLED BY ERIN TURNER

ESME

INTERIORS BY OF PLACE STUDIO / PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICOLE FRANZEN / STYLING BY BRITT ALBERT

DOUBLE BUBBLE INTERIORS BY SHELBY WAGNER DESIGN PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATHAN SCHRODER STYLING BY JENNY O’CONNOR STUDIO

WILLEM

MARY BETH WAGNER INTERIORS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATHAN SCHRODER

GALLERY

CHAUNCEY BOOTHBY INTERIORS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY READ MCKENDREE / JBSA

PHOTOGRAPHY

ALLISON ABNEY INTERIORS ARCHITECTURE BY DANIEL BECK BUILD BY GROSSMAN BUILDING GROUP PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER FRANK EDWARDS

AGNES

INTERIORS BY SERENA DUGAN STUDIO

PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTIAN HARDER

BATON

CHAD DORSEY DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN KARLISCH

STYLED BY JENNY O'CONNOR

PUSH

ANNIE DOWNING INTERIORS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LINDSAY BROWN

STYLING BY ADAM FORTNER

YVES

KATIE KIRBY INTERIORS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELLIOTT FUERNISS

CORSO

INTERIORS BY BY LIZZIE COX / PHOTOGRAPHY BY STACY ZARIN GOLDBERG

HEDGES

INTERIORS BY ZOE FELDMAN DESIGN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY STACY ZARIN GOLDBERG

A 17th-century Transylvanian Lotto rug from Orlando’s personal collection.

ORLANDO ATTY MANAGING DIRECTOR, ROBERT KIME LTD.

CHISBURY CHAPEL

Reflections: 6 DECEMBER 2021 and again around 18 AUGUST 2022 and lastly 27 JUNE 2024 England

Notes on Chisbury

12/06/21

08/18/22

06/27/24

The rig, a fairly simple one as some rigs go in that part of England, races along the road. To the left and right, rolling fields spread out. I’d flown in that morning, arrived at the Atty cottage, two strong cups of coffee later and now a windows‑wide open trip in the rig, we’re off to see something Orlando wanted to show me.

We swing onto a less-traveled road and then swing off again, this time to begin a gentle climb up a dirt lane that is signposted “English Heritage.” It’s 2021. We bump along. The cold, early winter days are short and this part of the path is shadowed so the ground never warms enough to smooth the frozen bits of this approach the ruts give us the ride. I see the end of a building, a peek of the thatch roof and the flint walls, and then the whole thing comes into view.

“It’s Chisbury Chapel,” Orlando says. “Robert took me here a long time ago. Sometimes we come here now. He loves it. 13th century. Medieval.”

Orlando pulls around the long side, and we hop out. Bailey, the working cocker spaniel, scrambles down too. A brick flashed opening acts as the doorway, and we step inside the building. A sense of “before” washes over. The low sun comes through the glassless windows (the Old Norse word for windows wind’s eye makes sense here). The openings with their stone casements of Gothic decorative tracery are reflected in shadows on the dirt floor. A very simple rope and stanchion set up creates a distinction between the nave end with its added wooden floor and the larger compacted dirt floor area facing east, with the largest, highest wall and window indicating what must have been the center attraction a primitive sanctuary.

We’re quiet. Bailey heads for an open Victorian metal gate at the west facing egress. This being Wiltshire, where the winterkill is slight enough to let some green leaves survive, I imagine summer and what must explode in the vines which envelop the back of the building. I am thinking what, in its day, some 1,000 years ago, was it like here? I ask Orlando.

“Well, we should ask the birds,” Orlando suggests wryly, a momentary break from the awe I’m certain we share, with birds above us making the rafters home today. But we feel reverence too. It’s not heavy though. It’s light. This is a thrilling place.

We walk out in the land surrounding the chapel, where my borrowed Wellies get a run through the tracks, where the sun’s rays on this bright day have warmed the earth into mud. It’s mid afternoon, so we go to Marlborough to buy some groceries for supper, climbing back into the rig and heading through the fields to the local main road.

A minute or so later, another flash of levity. “Robert has a picture of Chisbury Chapel. He won’t sell it to me.” A smile. “He knows I want it.”

A couple of days later we’re with Robert at the London showroom on Ebury Street. The city is festive in December, but all I can think about is Chisbury Chapel. Robert’s sitting in his office in his green striped chair, flipping through sale catalogs.

Orlando comes in. “We went to Chisbury Chapel, Robert. Now, how about selling me that picture?”

Robert looks up, playfully avoiding the question. “It’s marvelous, isn’t it?”

So many things to discuss. How cold it must have been. What was life like? Robert muses that they likely had animals living with them for heat and skins at the windows. We debate whether they would have had a fire going? What danger was there with the thatch roof? How, at the edge of the downs, the church must have been the absolute center of life for everything that went on through the tempo of the year. The chapel for an old fort at the top of the rise. In the coming months, we’d talk and wonder about it again.

By the next summer, though, Robert is gone. I speak to Orlando in those first hectic hours after his passing he’s in shock. We’d all just been together on a very hot for London afternoon in Robert’s Warwick Square flat a couple of days before.

“I drove to Chisbury today, Orlando says.”

Of course he did. The touchstone.

A lesson with Robert was a trip to Chisbury to an intersection of place and interest, where an appreciation for atmosphere could be developed. Robert was the teacher. Orlando the student. Neither the typical version of the role. Chisbury is both a place and an incalculable sentiment that one could return to again and again.

Fast forward. It’s June 2024. The rig has since been fixed up and given a name. The Atty kids ask to take it, the “Bumpy Bumpy,” up to Chisbury. Bailey runs, the kids jump and we wander in.

The beat of Chisbury goes on. Robert gave Orlando the experience of that place, and everything that came with it. And Orlando is passing it on.

And Robert’s picture of Chisbury Chapel? It hangs now at Orlando’s house. Telling its story. Suggesting appreciation, interest and atmosphere. Just like the place. A lesson. From Robert to Orlando. We talk now of the light. Ever available. Also for the passing on.

Orlando in his rig, headed to Chisbury Chapel.

This spread:

The Attys explore the 13thcentury Chisbury Chapel.

1946—2022

ROBERT KIME

FOUNDER, ROBERT KIME LTD.

Robert Kime Portrait © 2021, Catherine Goodman CBE

The life of the late decorator and dealer,

Robert

Kime, has been well chronicled.

There was the 16-year-old Kime answering a newspaper advertisement for an archaeological dig at Masada. The Kime who was the decorator to the King (then Prince of Wales). The Kime who turned a Christmas carol service at his village church into a still-talked-of-evening by throwing pine branches down on the path so that as people arrived, their steps released the heady scent of the boughs. It was always ‘show don’t tell’ with Robert. But he also had an encyclopedic knowledge, and it turns out he was quite an affable mentor, too. It was the ‘seeking meaning’ and the ‘discovery,’ in what surrounded him at any given time that underpins much of what you need to know about Robert Kime, the teacher. How Robert approached what was interesting and the way he guided the young Orlando Atty who would one day succeed him. g

In 2010, a 22-year-old Orlando Atty arrived at his first job at the ‘offices’ of Robert Kime.

A group of old farm buildings in Marlborough that also served as Kime’s antique store greeted him. Orlando commuted a short distance across the English countryside to spend the days cataloging and then managing the vast array of items Robert had on offer. A year or so later, his role moved to town. His days would now be spent at the Kime headquarters in London—a splendid Georgian building around the corner from Bloomsbury’s British Museum. Referred to simply as Museum Street, it housed Robert Kime’s then shop, which seamlessly blended with the upstairs living accommodations for Kime and his wife Helen. In 2016, Orlando took on more responsibility as the business expanded to its present London location on Ebury Street. Each day, the layers, the details of the world according to Kime, were peeled back. g

Student and teacher.

Robert Kime's Ebury Street shop.

Words of Wisdom

In Orlando Atty’s telling, the lessons imparted from working alongside Robert Kime were as subtle as they were significant. Here he reveals the elements of an education rooted in shared experiences and admiration.

Genuine Interest

Robert taught the way that I learn best: by experience. If Robert thought someone was genuinely interested in an item and not, say, choosing it because they thought they ‘should’ have it, then you could learn a lot. About eight years ago, after I’d been working there for a while, Robert handed me a stack of sale catalogs, and said, ‘you pick.’ As in, pick what we might buy next. Would I get it right? What was right? If I got it wrong, how wrong would it be? I marked various things that appealed to me and caught my eye, finding a rhythm. I handed the catalog back to him. He opened it, turning the pages to find my picks. Quietly, he said,‘well done.’ g

Antiques at Robert Kime.

A jib door, framed by arches and papered in de Gournay, at a Kime project in London.

Photography by Simon Upton

Robert’s Eye

People called Robert’s eye ‘unmatched,’ ‘extraordinary’ and ‘unparalleled.’ I think it was all of those things, but it was something more simple too. Robert liked, bought and surrounded himself with what interested him or what he was keen to learn more about. His ‘eye’ was simply the purest form of what he responded to, so it never switched off. g

In Kime's "Marble Barn," stone fragments and salvaged architectural details lay in waiting for their next destination.

Nuance & Detail

I bought a rocking horse at the French fairs last summer. It caught my eye, and when I looked at it, really inspected it, I realized it was special, with great history with the paint and the way it’d been carved. It’s interesting, and it looks good. You could put this rocking horse in a hallway or a room where it is the one thing that draws your eye. You think ‘Oh that’s intriguing, that is a bit mad,’ but that makes it quite fun. It’s about the detail of the piece, but also about the intention, the plan, the point of something. Robert used to talk about that a lot. Either way, it might be nuanced, or it might be much more straightforward, but it’s about the point of it, which you can usually see if you look closely. g

A medley of antiques, some brought back from the summer fairs in France.

THE USE OF ANTIQUE TEXTILES IN A ROBERT KIME INTERIOR IS A WELL-PRACTICED EXERCISE. CLAIRE JACKSON, HEAD OF PROJECTS AND A 25-YEAR VETERAN OF THE FIRM, EXPLAINS THE APPROACH, ROOTED IN ROBERT’S PERSONAL INTEREST IN ONE-OF-A-KIND FABRICS.

OF PROJECTS, ROBERT KIME LTD.

CLAIRE JACKSON HEAD

DOCUMENT DETAIL

Robert was a lifelong collector of textiles and, by example, he taught us how using them adds great depth to a room’s palette. As with a rug, an antique textile draws the eye to something old and generally something beautiful.

The Anatolian and Persian weaves, Greek embroideries, French linens, Indian silks and Bakaras all bring a 3D texture that helps to soften a room’s crispness. I think of it like an instant feeling of comfort, particularly the old velvets, the tassels, the trims. What you notice about them might be the luster of a tiny bit of gold thread, or it could be the wear that gives it a power. The quirks and fades, areas that have rubbed out or been patched and mended. Robert would make a mental map of how he might use them in a room. Then we might change it all around, adding to the curation and layering of comfort.

Of course, using an antique textile in the workroom is like working on a jigsaw in reverse. You start with something that’s finished and you kind of have to work out where you can use it, how you can use it, and what to add in to make the quantity work. There were many moments when Robert insisted we could figure out how to take a finite piece of fabric and make it work. All kinds of tricks were employed and still are— false pelmets, ribbon detail to hide a fray. But the most important thing was watching how Robert approached these textiles with ease. He’d say, ‘Don’t work against it. Don’t force it.’ And his Golden Rule: ‘Never cut an old textile, just make the element fit it.’

There are so many times I wonder what he’d say about this or that. Robert’s voice is still in all of our minds and with us in what we do.

—CLAIRE JACKSON

An ottoman and pillows covered in antique textiles at a house recently completed by Orlando for the new owners of Robert Kime’s first decoration project.

Photography by Simon Brown

The genesis of the Tree of Life pattern from an original document fabric to its thoughtful reproduction in the Kime collection.

A pair of Japanese indigo work trousers hang in the Kime document library.

“IT’S ABOUT THE DETAIL OF THE PIECE, BUT IT’S ALSO ABOUT THE INTENTION, THE PLAN, THE POINT OF SOMETHING. ROBERT USED TO TALK ABOUT THAT A LOT.”

-ORLANDO ATTY

Objects & Placement

Robert loved history. As a child he’d ride his bike into the countryside looking at the English houses and he’d play in the garden shed where his mother kept things she bought on her frequent trips abroad. Robert could place an object in historical context, and this was useful. My taste is entirely inspired by Robert’s look and feel and the things he liked, and I think my work is mostly inspired by him too, with my own personality in there as well. For a long time at Kime, I thought, ‘Well, why did Robert buy this broken pot or this chair with all the stuffing falling out, and why did he pay so much money for a vase in about eight pieces?’ But over time, shopping with him and watching him and Claire Jackson, [Kime's Head of Projects] place it all, it started to make sense. He had a vision when buying the chair or the pot. He wasn’t a traditional decorator. Robert was an antiques dealer who liked to give objects a new life in a space where they would be connected to a greater narrative. He’d pick something special, something he was interested in. Not always the most unique, expensive thing but it had style and he saw something in it. I learned you had to know what something was saying to you, why it was calling out to you. And you needed to be able to place it. g

“ROBERT WAS AN ANTIQUES DEALER WHO LIKED TO GIVE OBJECTS A NEW LIFE IN A SPACE WHERE THEY WOULD BE CONNECTED TO A GREATER NARRATIVE.”

-ORLANDO ATTY

horse blanket sits below

client’s childhood collection of miniatures at a house in Wiltshire.

Photography by Simon Brown

A client’s collection of Japanese prints hang in a colorful family room in London.

Photography by Simon Upton

Shopping

It’s funny when someone says, ‘buy what you like’—it’s so obvious. And Robert always told me to buy things that way ‘because if you can’t sell it, at least you’ll enjoy having it.’ Simple. If you’re not interested in the thing you’re buying, you won’t be able to sell it, and you won’t care about having it, either. At fairs, I had to run to keep up. I learned how to sweep a fair, and together we would shop everywhere we went. Robert loved shopping, and I remember a few years ago telling him, ‘You’ve got to stop because you just keep buying stuff, so we’re not going to buy anything else until you sell that Victorian washstand you just bought.’ He sold that washstand almost immediately so he could get back to shopping as soon as possible. g

L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a picturesque French town near the summer antique fairs.

Orlando shops textiles in Avignon.

At Kime’s warehouse in Marlborough, antiques await placement in their new homes.

“HE’D PICK SOMETHING SPECIAL, SOMETHING HE WAS INTERESTED IN. NOT ALWAYS THE MOST UNIQUE, EXPENSIVE THING BUT IT HAD STYLE AND HE SAW SOMETHING IN IT.”

-ORLANDO

Words of Wisdom

ORLANDO ATTY

Practicality

Robert’s route from dealing and decorating into product design was initially based on need. In the 1990s, Robert was decorating an apartment for the Lloyd Webbers in New York City, and he’d always used antique textiles for the curtains and upholstery. But this project was big, and it coincided with a dwindling supply of good antique textiles. So Robert asked his best friend, Gisella Milne-Watson, to help him make a fabric so that they would have enough for the project. Their first design was based on an 18th-century embroidered textile that Robert had been given by another friend, a man who owned the very first house Robert had decorated—very full circle! It worked and that was the very first Robert Kime fabric, which they called ‘Tree of Life.’ We have lots of fabrics now in addition to wallpaper, furniture, lighting, all of which are based on something in the archive or some experience of something we’ve seen. The originals are hugely important because they are the beginning, and our designs must reflect that provenance. They have a bit of life to them, and that’s what we want in the new fabrics Gisella and I are making now, that they look collected and not just stamped out. We like making new things, but for us, it is all in the detail. We want to feel like it’s been around awhile. And that’s the same for everything we make, or do, actually. g

The garden of Robert’s first decorating client, which Orlando recently refreshed.

Photography by Simon Brown

Inside & Out

When we’re working on a house, we’re talking about the interiors and the antiques and the textiles, of course. How will you live in this house and what will be the ongoings? But it must relate to the surroundings as well. The gardens shape the space around the house, and how you use the house will inform how the gardens are set up. Robert showed us this again and again: the inside is not more important than the outside. Even at my house, we’ve spent so much time trying to make our garden work for the way we want to live in the house. Because if you’ve just got the house and you haven’t really got the outside sorted, it’s just going to be incomplete. g

Friends & Family

It was always about creating ‘safe houses’ or sanctuaries with Robert, which is how he also described being a decorator. He put comfort and interest above everything else. He said a room should be beautiful, but it also must work and make you feel ‘at home.’ He liked when clients were involved and interested, when they became students. We’d often learn together. After Robert did the home of Tory Burch and her husband Pierre-Yves Roussel in Normandy, we decided to all go to Japan, a journey that inspired the NARA collections we’ve done with Tory. Gela Taylor at South Wraxall Manor became a great student of rugs. Jen and Dave Dawson too. Pinbury Park, their 16th-century house in the Cotswolds, is now a family home. They really embraced the home’s fine Arts and Crafts history and became comfortable mixing a wide range of periods and styles, because Pinbury had evolved too. This kind of shared experience with clients keen to collaborate as we work together is the magic that makes one personally invested in a project. We are always learning from each other and able to pass a little bit more on. g

From top: Orlando and Dave Dawson; vibrant vintage textiles brighten the morning room at Pinbury Park.

A small painting, procured through the auction of Robert’s personal estate, hangs above an antique French armchair covered in needlework.

A colorful rug and layers of antique textiles soften a wood-paneled sitting room.

Where to Start

The expression ‘you must start with a rug’ is often associated with Robert, who was well known for saying it. For him, the rug was the layer that creates the warmth and direction for the room, which continues to be a guiding principle for us. The rug grounds the room. It sets up what is to follow and provides a tremendous impact. We buy antique rugs for projects and to sell in our shop. Learning about them has been amazing for me, a little knowledge at a time. We’ve recently reintroduced several traditional English wool carpets that Robert had originally designed for projects—really special designs, made today in the north of England, that can be used in small spaces or at scale. The thing about a good rug is if you take it out of a room, you’re immediately aware that the room is not finished, that it lacks warmth. And once you add it, the anchor is in place. g

This page: Antique rugs at the Kime warehouse in Marlborough.

Opposite:

A modern Transylvanian rug in the Kime collection.

THE BLACK CHURCH

Reflections: 19 NOVEMBER 2024 and back again on 20 NOVEMBER 2024

Romania

Notes on the Black Church

11/19/24

11/20/24

It’s November. We hear it’s snowing at Chisbury Chapel, which feels a bit early for England. We’re in a different rig this time, a hired one. In a different country, too, but Orlando is again racing along a road, this time from Bucharest, away from that city’s quiet, radical mix. The glorious Belle Époque in decline side-by-side with graffitied Soviet-era blocks. It’s 2024, and we are back to climbing hills, headed for Transylvania and Brasov’s Black Church. There’s a soft glow of pilgrimage about this journey; a brilliant blue sky hangs above.

“Robert and I wanted to go to Romania together,” Orlando says. “He wanted to see the Transylvanian rugs. We never made it.”

These prized rugs, woven 400 or 500 years ago and destined for Europe, now hang off choir lofts in Romania. Pious gifts along the Silk Road, Transylvanian rugs are really 16th and 17th-century Anatolian rugs, found now, prolifically, in Romania’s Protestant churches. These churches often rose from humble chapels and were walled in to be citadels; interestingly, the Ottomans were near but never occupied this part of Transylvania. The story goes that in 1526, Sultan Süleyman summoned the new Hungarian king to his camp. The king’s journey took him across a mile or so of Turkish and other fine carpets laid on the ground as far as the Sultan’s tent. It made quite an impression, and trade then flourished between Europe and the Ottomans as the Saxons coveted these elegant rugs for their homes.

Our questions: after the Reformation did these churches need new decor? Were the rugs decoration? Or were they status pieces for wealthy Saxons who then donated them? Or both? The rugs are tidy in their presentation, measuring maybe 3 x 5 feet hanging on simple metal rods.

The next morning in Brașov’s buzzy town square, we set off for our appointment at the mecca for Transylvanian rugs, Biserica Neagră, the Black Church. A few things are quickly established, as our guide Sabine explains: there is a debate on how this impressive Gothic style monument got its name. It may not have been the 1689 fire that dubbed it the Black Church, it may have been 19th-century pollution. And secondly, the 50 Transylvanian rugs on display represent only a quarter of the entire collection, considered one of the most important assembleges in the world.

We step inside. The buttressed ceiling soars, and again, just as at Chisbury Chapel, the light. It pours through the windows illuminating rug after colorful, patterned rug, that hang from the upstairs choir lofts and are displayed among the ground floor pews highly decorated, hierarchical spaces crafted by the guilds they represented. The carpenters built one up front that is finely detailed with a beautiful rug on the back wall. Of the three organs, the most simple one, with a wooden box as a seat, is the oldest in Transylvania. “Robert and I didn’t know much about these rugs. They’re pretty rare. We’d seen one in Turkey and I’d seen one come through the shop years ago,” Orlando mentions. “I got really interested after Robert died, and then I bought two for my office.” Orlando quickly picks his favorite “The one with the birds.” No surprise at all.

We walk the long aisles all around the church looking at rugs. Single niche, double niche. Orlando, who has quite a grasp on it all, tells our guide Sabine why we’re there, “I wanted to come here to learn a bit more about Transylvanian rugs and see where they started. My boss and I we’d worked together for 12 years and he was very interested in rugs would go to Turkey often, and we’d buy rugs to sell. Still do. He taught me a lot about rugs. We were going to come and see them in Romania but sadly, he never had the chance. This trip was inspired by all we’d learned, and I wanted to know more, so this pilgrimage became a kind of quest. I just had to see them for myself, and for Robert.”

Orlando excuses himself to take a call. It’s his rug dealer in Turkey, a fellow connoisseur and perhaps one of the few people who would understand and appreciate the significance of the priceless relics surrounding us. There’s the usual boasting of having made it to the Holy Grail, but mostly it’s a scholarly exchange, a cross-country knowledge transfer comparing notes on ‘lazy lines’ and ‘weft changes’ in these Transylvanian rugs and reflecting on their winding journey from the parlor to the altar.

I’m thinking now, too, of how a student becomes a teacher. Of this trip to Romania. Of Orlando teaching us. Of this journey without Robert. Of appreciation, interest and atmosphere. Of the light here, too. Of the story. Also ever available for the passing on.

Illustration by Carlisle Burch

A double niche Transylvanian rug hangs from an upper balcony of the Black Church.

Pews built by various Saxon guilds are adorned with Transylvanian rugs.

Clockwise, from top left:

Our guide, Sabine; a double niche rug; amidst modern art and painted pews, an original fresco was discovered; a fine wool fringe.

Opposite:

One of several rugs that hang in the back of tiered pews throughout the church.

The Black Church, Brasov, Romania.

Orlando among the pews. Rugs punctuate the pointed arches.

Pews and rugs line either side of the soaring sanctuary.

“There is a constant balance between having a plan and tapping intuition. You almost do it by feel. Over a period of time, a room reveals itself.”

–ORLANDO ATTY

POSY INTERIORS AND BUILD BY HEDGEWOOD HOMES

CRANE

ECHE MARTINEZ INTERIORS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DREW KELLY

HILLGATE

ANNE PULLIAM INTERIORS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY GORDON GREGORY

COBE / CHILTERN ON BRACKET

INTERIORS BY NICOLE FORINA / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREW FRASZ

CRANE INTERIORS BY GEORGIA TAPERT HOWE

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KIRSTEN FRANCIS

STYLING BY BENJAMIN REYNAERT

QUAD ARM BELDI

INTERIORS BY KELLY NUTT DESIGN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAM FROST

INTERIORS AND STYLING

MATCHSTICK

BY MIEKE TEN HAVE PHOTOGRAPHY BY FRANK FRANCES / OTTO

BIRGER

BROOKE WAGNER DESIGN PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOSHUA CALDWELL

INTERIORS BY MOLLY SINGER DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY STACY ZARIN GOLDBERG

INTERIORS BY ELLEN

BY

BELLE MEADE

HYDE

KAVANAUGH

PHOTOGRAPHY

CARMEL BRANTLEY

GRAYFOY

INTERIORS BY STEVEN GAMBREL

ARCHITECTURE BY ARCOLOGICA

PHOTOGRAPHY BY DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN

LONSDALE

INTERIORS BY KELLY ROSEN DESIGN / VANDERHORN ARCHITECTS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROBERT BENSON

Inside the Sugimoto-designed tunnel facing the sea beneath the Shinto Go’o Shrine, Naoshima.

A HOUSE OF PEACE

DISCOVERING JAPAN BEGINS WITH A CUP OF TEA

The sun rises fast along Kyoto’s Kamogawa River. At 6:15 in the morning, Masayuki Inaida is already wiping sweat from his brow as he pieces together the 30 bamboo slats that he carried, neatly tied in a backpack bundle, down to this riverside park. Bicyclists, dog walkers and early morning joggers pass by, watching curiously as Inaida lays two woven tatami mats on the dew-damp grass, then assembles the bamboo poles, one by one, into a rudimentary, open-air tea house. Herons swoop by, landing along the river’s edge to fish for their breakfast.

On a nearby park bench, Seizan Toda, abbot of the Daiji-in temple of Kyoto’s ancient Daitoku-ji temple complex, considered the heart of tea ceremony and the heart of Zen, takes his tea accoutrements—a cold water jar, kettle, tea caddy, bamboo whisk

and bowl—out of the crate he’s lugged down here. With tender care, he hangs a freshly picked yellow squash blossom in a narrow bamboo vase beneath a scroll of elegant calligraphy. “Relief will come without fail, from the heat or from any worry,” it reads. Then, after all is ready, Toda and Inaida hang a small banner on the side of this Pick-Up-Stix-like structure. The banner announces “the water is hot”— basically the tea ceremony equivalent of “We’re Open!”

This portable Kian Tea House is indeed open: open to bird song and the warm August morning sun, open to those from all walks of life, including a passerby in a Baltimore Orioles t-shirt who wanders up inquisitively, bows, kneels and takes part in the ritual serving of tea cakes and matcha.

Kian roughly means “the hut of return” or

returning to nature, or returning home. Toda and Inaida, a fourth-generation architect and carpenter who specializes in tea houses, designed this bare-bones version to strip away barriers and immerse people in nature and in the vulnerable and intimate experience that is the tea ceremony. The Kian’s nimbleness allows the monk and the architect to bring this 450-yearold Japanese tradition, pop-up style, to radically new places, including this riverside as well as patients inside medical centers, tourists on the grounds of the Eiffel Tower and sunset revelers on a crowded Los Angeles beach. Toda’s cheerfully chill demeanor makes him the ideal jolly Buddhist to pull this off. Under his orchestration, the tea ritual remains reverent and true to the exacting, prescribed formality of the tea tradition, yet also fresh, playful and joyfully unencumbered. g

MASAYUKI INAIDA

The Abbot, at his place of worship, in the Daijiin Temple of Kyoto’s ancient Daitokuji Temple Complex, which is considered the heart of tea ceremony and the heart of Zen.

ABBOT SEIZAN TODA

That is the beauty, the magic, the allure of tea. Just as the bare bamboo skeleton of the Kian Tea House allows one to peer in and through, so too, the ancient tea tradition itself is a prism, a portal, into Japanese culture. As both performance and prayer, a mélange of manners, meditation and matcha, the tea ceremony embodies the yin and yang of a country shaped by volcanoes and samurai fierceness, yet softened by Shinto and Buddhist beliefs. A country, and a people, wholeheartedly devoted to restraint and refinement.

Steeped in Japan’s past, the study and practice of tea ceremony is still very much part of its present, as evidenced by our guide, Mimi Durand Kurihara, the 40-year-old Parisian founder of Arts & Patrons, a business consultancy in culture, mother of five-year-old (adorable) Theodore and wife to gallerist Alexandre Devals. Mimi grew up in the United Kingdom, France and Japan, and is a disciple of tea, studying the ancient art of tea ceremony under the tutelage of her Parisian tea master, Yuki Kani. “Tea is a portal site of Japanese culture,” she says, quoting Zabosai Oiemoto, 16th grand master of the ‘Urasenke’ tea school. “It encompasses poetry, calligraphy, art, flower arranging, ceramics, architecture, incense, even dance.” The tea ceremony, she explains, also embodies the essence of Zen and the otherworldliness of animist-like Shintoism with its measured and spare choreography, its focused, contemplative, and to the outsider, slightly bewildering aura. Or, as Okakura Kakuzo put it in his 1906 classic, The Book of Tea, “Tea is the religion of the art of life,” Okakura also wrote, “Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea…Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.” That is what we are here to do—to drift toward beauty and new discovery. g

Raku Kichizaemon XV Jikinyū designed a vertical, cylindrical water garden as the passageway to his tea room at Sagawa Art Museum.

THE ART OF TEA ENCOMPASSES:

POETRY, CALLIGRAPHY,

ART, FLOWER ARRANGING, CERAMICS, ARCHITECTURE, INCENSE, EVEN DANCE.

MIMI DURAND KURIHARA

Matsui Sensei on his way to start a formal tea ceremony.

PRACTICE & PRINCIPLE

Mimi does her best to explain the intricate mechanics of the tea ceremony and Japanese decorum: replacing one’s shoes with clean white socks; shuffling one’s feet on the tatami; kneeling seiza-style; properly receiving the tea bowl by turning it 45 degrees to the right, two times, in deference to how the host presents the bowl’s prettiest side, and so forth and so on. “When in doubt, bow,” she says with a wink.

There’s plenty of self-doubt, and so much to practice, but frankly, the detailed minutia, the mastering of choreographed movements, of do-this-not-that, is not what drives Mimi’s years-long deep dive into all things tea. Rather, the history, symbolism and purpose of sharing tea captivate her. The story of how Sen no Rikyū in the 16th century, head of protocol for feudal lord Taiko-Hideyoshi, radically transformed what had been an elite practice borrowed from the Chinese monks and reserved for nobility and the privileged, by taking tea ceremony, or chanoyu (hot water for tea), out of gilded palace rooms and performing it instead outside, where a garden stone path led to a small, dim-lit, mud-walled hut, a humble space graced by shadow. Revered as the greatest of all tea masters, Rikyū invited the mighty samurai, the Shogun, in through a 3-foot-tall door, “so they had to relinquish their swords and bend down, putting everyone on the same level, at arms length of each other,” Mimi says. “There’s immense vulnerability in sharing this space and imposing this new protocol in human relationships to the samurais at the top of a then chaotic and violent Japanese society.”

A tea ceremony in the tradition of Rikyū demands that participants communicate by being fully present to each other in that particular space and time, in which the

host has chosen every object—the art, the flower, the bowl—just for that guest, in that specific season. “It requires a rigor of exactness in deliberate movement with intention. It’s the graciousness of the weight of that intention with the lightness of simply offering a wagashi (cake) with a bowl of tea, but that can be everything you need to express in that relationship,” Mimi adds.

The four principles of tea ceremony—harmony, respect, purity and tranquility—guide all aspects of the ceremony, and extend as well to the tea master and the tea student’s life outside the tearoom. “The principle of harmony requires that no objects, designs, colors or motifs are repeated. There’s also no symmetry in the Japanese garden. This honors the fact that everyone has a unique story and experience. We can live harmoniously by offering dignity to every single encounter. You can create harmony in the world because you’ve managed to create it in the tearoom with your guests,” Mimi explains. The principle of respect is symbolized by how the tea objects are handled, and our demeanour outside of the tea room. “Every movement is designed to care for that object, symbolizing how we should care for one another, carrying them with equal weight and consideration.” Purification is about purifying one’s heart and our intention being directed entirely towards the relationship we are fostering, as well as cleaning and purifying all the instruments, “which shows your dedication to meeting the needs of the guest you are receiving,” she adds. And finally, the idea of tranquility acknowledges that the unexpected can, and typically will, happen, but “despite mishaps or sudden changes of events or weather you still expect and receive your guest with utmost kindness and good intention,” Mimi says. Above all, the tearoom is an oasis of generosity and calm, a house of peace. g

“THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF TEA CEREMONY—HARMONY, RESPECT, PURITY AND TRANQUILITY— GUIDE ALL ASPECTS OF THE CEREMONY, AND EXTEND AS WELL TO THE TEA MASTER AND THE TEA STUDENT’S LIFE OUTSIDE THE TEAROOM.”

COSMOS IN A TEA BOWL

RAKU KICHIZAEMON XV JIKINYŪ | MASTER CERAMICIST

In the countryside outside Kyoto, rice fields spill out in lush swaths of green. Gentle mountains frame the valleys dotted with thatched-roof farmhouses and busy little villages. Crossing the bridge over Lake Biwa enroute to the Sagawa Art Museum, the principle of “harmony” transfers from the tearoom directly to the roadway. All of a sudden, music rises, as car tires hum over grooves cut into the asphalt at specific intervals creating vibrations that transform a mundane drive into a surprise symphony. This is one of 30 “melody highways” in Japan—a country that savors hidden joys and tucks sensory delights into daily life. Instead of a jarring school bell or brash loudspeaker announcing closing time, for example, Japanese institutions softly play “Auld Lang Syne.” To our delight, at an Onsen village south of Tokyo, we wake to a gentle community-wide broadcast of a morning poem.

At the Sagawa Art Museum, a special wing designed by a master ceramicist presents another hidden, or rather, submerged and immersive celebration of wonder. Raku Kichizaemon XV Jikinyū, served as the fifteenth Raku master of the legendary family founded by Chōjirō some 450 years ago (he recently passed the baton to his son). The Raku collection at the Sagawa displays works by Jikinyū only, all displayed in galleries specially designed by the artist himself. In contrast to delicate Chinese porcelain, Raku bowls appear primitive, the clay deliberately rough and thick, conjuring the essence of the earth as alive, visceral. The unique firing method renders cracked glazes of evocative red and black monochrome. “Can you imagine the rude shock when Rikyū first chose to serve tea from a pitch-black abstract bowl in a small, dark tearoom? It was truly avant garde, a wildly radical reimagination of beauty and relationships,” Mimi says.

While the Raku dynasty has carried forth the distinctive technique of creating charcoal- or wood-fired tea bowls and other tea vessels over the centuries, Jikinyū, who studied philosophy and fine arts at Toronto University, is the first in his esteemed lineage to embrace his avant garde DNA and experiment with modern shapes, inspired by his artistic-philosophic interrogation of the tea ceremony. “Tea bowls serve a far more profound purpose—they have the capacity to contain the fervor of the artist’s quest to influence the world and his inner striving—a world where the ritualistic and the ordinary meet, a world situated at the

point of contact between the usual and the extraordinary, the inner adventure of the individual leaping towards totality yet remaining within the mundane. Such are the strange qualities of chanoyu (tea ceremony),” Jikinyū wrote for a 2024 London exhibition of his works. He titled a 2015-2017 international exhibition of his work “The Cosmos in a Tea Bowl,” again suggesting the expansive artistic and metaphysical evocativeness of tea.

When invited to design the museum building to exhibit his works, which now includes two teahouses at the Sagawa, Jikinyū’s imagination leapt even further. For his first foray into architecture, “I wanted to explore verticality and horizontality, tension and dispersion, yin and yang, shadow and light. Looking at the purpose of the teahouse and determining what principles had to be unchanged, what could be reinterpreted and which elements could be superfluous,” he says. His teahouse journey begins two floors underground and underwater (hidden under the Sagawa’s courtyard pool, with light dancing and filtering through the water) and moves upward toward the light. “Like the pyramids, where deeper parts are a center of energy, and closest to where the bowls come from and will return to,” he explains, leading us across old pine railroad ties, worn and rough—representing industry and civilization—to the “waiting room” where one pauses, disconnecting from daily life, before being invited onward. The next space is a vertically oriented cylinder of concrete, open to the blue sky. In stark contrast to a traditional teahouse’s green garden, here Jikinyū immerses you in extremes of only stone, sky and the sound of water—creating a space for preparation and purification. From there you ascend, ultimately to a tearoom, obscured from view by tall Yoshi grass and the building’s deep roof overhangs. “Like a hidden secret of the heart,” Mimi says.

When Jikinyū finally slides the delicate rice paper doors open, all you see is the vastness of water and green reeds of grass swaying in the wind. “As if you’re sitting on the water,” the Raku master says, “a human, sitting at the same level as nature, not apart from it.” It’s the kind of tearoom you imagine the Zen master and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh envisioned when he wrote, “Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.” g

“TEA BOWLS SERVE A FAR MORE PROFOUND PURPOSE—THEY HAVE THE CAPACITY TO CONTAIN THE FERVOR OF THE ARTIST’S QUEST TO INFLUENCE THE WORLD AND HIS INNER STRIVING—A WORLD WHERE THE RITUALISTIC AND THE ORDINARY MEET, A WORLD SITUATED AT THE POINT OF CONTACT BETWEEN THE USUAL AND THE EXTRAORDINARY, THE INNER ADVENTURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL LEAPING TOWARDS TOTALITY YET REMAINING WITHIN THE MUNDANE. SUCH ARE THE STRANGE QUALITIES OF CHANOYU.”

A perfectly imperfect earthenware Raku tea bowl on display at the Sagawa Art Museum.

The Raku Master, Jikinyū, designed his tea house to create the sensation of sitting, or almost floating, in nature.

Scenes from Jikinyū’s thoughtfully designed space at the Sagawa Art Museum.

Jikinyū designed his eponymous pavilion at the Sagawa Art Museum with underground galleries constructed below the water garden. Light filtering through the water above dances and shifts with the sun.

RAKU

Chōjirō’s monochromatic bowls had “an unfettered freedom about them,” Jikinyū says. Their starkness challenged the conventional wisdom of what is considered beautiful. “They confront you with extreme intensity. Everything extraneous is carved away,” he adds. This bold coarseness, the nuanced shapes and the subtle distortions of hand-molded vessels, remain the essence of Raku ware. “The irregularities make room for thinking about finding harmony and unity with nature,” he adds. “People are more comfortable opening their hearts to something that’s imperfect.”

For Jikinyū, creating tea bowls and tea-related accoutrements feels like a spiritual exercise, a letting-go. “Ceramics is an art that transcends the artist’s ego and enters the realm of prayer,” he explains. “You express yourself by shaping the clay and choosing the glazes, but the variables in the kiln produce unexpected, even surprising results. When you put it in the fire, you’re trusting the final outcome to the power of nature.”

“THEY CONFRONT YOU WITH EXTREME INTENSITY. EVERYTHING EXTRANEOUS IS CARVED AWAY.”

“THE IRREGULARITIES MAKE ROOM FOR THINKING ABOUT FINDING HARMONY AND UNITY WITH NATURE.”

OF FIRE & FIRMAMENT

The flame itself is craftsmanship. Not just any fire, the inferno that turns clay into coveted art objects at the Raku family’s workshop near the former Imperial Palace in central Kyoto is nurtured by a skilled team feeding select oak charcoal into a blaze that burns nearly non-stop, as it has on this site for 450 years. Another worker pumps the fuigo, a bellows that breathes air into the kiln to achieve the high temperatures required for yakinuki, Raku Kichizaemon’s distinct firing process, where inside the uchigama, an inner kiln, he fires only one tea bowl at a time. No mass production here.

One by one, each hand-built bowl, shaped of special clay his grandfather sourced from the grounds of Yakushiji Temple in Nara, is brought quickly to a high temperature, then removed while still red hot and glowing, to cool in the air. The yin/yang shock of rapid heat and bracing cooling creates the unique glazes and uneven, raw textures of Raku Kichizaemon’s avant-garde bowls. It’s all about precision, this playing with fire, yet equally about imperfection and chance.

“PEOPLE ARE MORE COMFORTABLE OPENING THEIR HEARTS TO SOMETHING THAT’S IMPERFECT.”

Without modifying the exacting technique his clan has used for 450 years, Raku Kichizaemon XV– Jikiny ū creates bowls in a style all his own, as has each of the 14 Raku masters before him. His work is modern and abstract— some bowls are inspired by minimalist musician Alban Berg, while others reflect a French sensibility, created with white clay from Limoges where he lived briefly in France. Each work is named like a poetic koan to Mother Earth: “Radiant Plum Blossom,” “Moon Rising Over the Mountain Pass.” But despite the artistic freedom he takes, his approach remains directly tied to the lineage of Chōjirō, the founding Raku master and creator of the first radically earthy black bowl for Sen no Rikyū. In 1598, Chōjirō received a gold seal engraved with the ideograph for Raku, meaning pleasure, presented to him by the ruler Hideyoshi, thus establishing the Raku family title.

Jikinyū designed his eponymous pavilion at the Sagawa Art Museum with underground galleries constructed below the water garden. Light filtering through the water above dances and shifts with the sun.

The skilled brushwork of 7th-generation lacquer master Jihei Murase.

QUEST FOR PERFECTION

JIHEI MURASE | LACQUER MASTER

Meditation and spirituality are turned towards others, in continuous regard towards the impact we have on our surroundings. In Japan, Mimi explains, an object is “considered beautiful only if it is useful and has a place in someone’s life. Everything should have an intention or use.” And thus a Raku bowl is never created as a piece of stand-alone art. “It is not complete without tea in it,” she adds, noting the glazes in particular complement matcha’s signature vivid, spring green. Similarly, in the Tokyo atelier of lacquer master Jihei Murase, and his daughter Rei, each sensuously curved piece of glossy lacquer ware— some finished in glossy obsidian, some a rich kiss of vermillion, some in matte silver lacquer—has a function.

The tearoom garden path outside Murase’s home is still damp, having been freshly watered for our arrival. This, too, is part of the ritual of tea—a supreme thoughtfulness, with no detail overlooked, no garden stone unswept or unwashed, and yet just enough moss and fallen leaves remain to evoke the passage of time, the inevitable movement of life. Beyond these bamboo garden gates, the surrounding Tokyo neighborhood is bustling, but here, all is serene. Murase designed the third tearoom of the house after those of his illustrious father and grandfather. It is centered around a table he made from a 1,000-year-old sugi cedar tree, on which sits a Murase water container and tea caddy in the Ryurei style of tea ceremony where guests can sit on chairs. Like Jikinyū, Murase upholds a legacy of tea-related craftsmanship as a seventh-generation woodworker and lacquer master. He has garnered international acclaim for his tea caddies, tea containers, trays, vases and incense holders, examples of which are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art, among other museums and galleries around the world such as Ippodo Gallery and Pierre-Marie Giraud. With intense precision he turns the wood, carving and transforming fine-grain chestnut, cypress, cherry and cedar into a delicate lightness before applying a natural urushi lacquer. A calligraphy scroll in his studio reads, “to write one kanji, you need to write five thousand.”

“This is true for me,” Murase says with a laugh. “To make one bowl, you need to have made five thousand. Or more.” He builds on his depth of experience and mastery of traditional techniques by introducing innovative curving methods and inventing new forms. “It’s my great joy to make these objects,” says Murase, whose artistic impulse is modern, even as his technique is deeply rooted in the past. “I try to imagine the world 10 years from now and create for that.” g

Jihei Murase shares family heirlooms.

JIHEI MURASE

Sugimoto’s Glass Tea House Mondrian that first debuted at the Venice Architecture Biennale now resides at the Benesse Art Site in Naoshima.

PLAYFUL PLAY

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO | MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST

Perhaps no one has brought the ancient Japanese tea ceremony tradition into the realm of contemporary art more than the multidisciplinary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Tokyo-born Sugimoto, who moved to the U.S. in 1970 and called New York City home for decades, is world renowned for his photography, especially his immutable “Seascapes” series spanning five decades, as well as for his sculpture and performing arts productions, all of which explore concepts of time, metaphysics and temporal existence.

But his Glass Tea House Mondrian—a sleek, modernist glass cube floating in a reflecting pool, which Sugimoto debuted at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, is one of his first architectural forays, and an ode to exploring the modernist abstraction that he believes Rikyū in the 16th century brought to the tea tradition.

“I found a spiritual similarity to Mondrian, who was the starting point of abstract painting in the West, and Sen no Rikyū’s tea house design,” Sugimoto explains. “Rikyū’s design of his most famous teahouse, Taian, predates Mondrian by 400 years, but it too is minimal, with simple horizontal and vertical lines, very Mondrian in concept and design, paying attention to the best balance of every space.” Sugimoto’s Glass Tea House, which traveled as a site-specific art installation to Versailles and then Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art before finding its permanent home on the Seto Inland Sea Island of Naoshima as a centerpiece of the Benesse Art Site, emphasizes the surrounding nature as the only decoration (there’s no room to hang a scroll, nor any need), while the tea ceremony performed within becomes art itself—a traditionally intimate and private experience now exposed, demystified, visible to all. g

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO

The Glass Tea House Mondrian at sunset, overlooking the Seto Inland Sea Island and beyond.

This page:

The 100-Meter Gallery at Odawara Art Foundation Enoura Observatory is 100 meters long and stands 100 meters above sea level, oriented so that the summer solstice sunrise illuminates the full gallery length.

Opposite:

The Observatory campus includes ancient sacred stones, amphitheaters and a winter solstice light-worship tunnel.

A tea house designed by Sugimoto where he recreated the “sacred simplicity” of Rikyū’s Taian Tea House secluded deep in the mountains, with the addition of a tin roof that he repurposed from a nearby fruit shed.

“Ibegan studying tea ceremony after I arrived in New York in the hippie era of the seventies,” Sugimoto says. And while not a tea master, he appreciates how tea ceremony is integral to understanding Japanese culture, and he revels in the performance art aspect of the ritual—the way the host sets the stage anew for each ceremony, selecting the art, the flowers, the utensils for his/her particular guest in a particular season. “My interest is as a contemporary artist,” he says. At his Odawara Art Foundation Enoura Observatory overlooking the sea, Sugimoto designed and built another tea house, this time recreating the “sacred simplicity” of Rikyū’s Taian Tea House secluded deep in the mountains, copying Taian’s exact two-tatami mat dimensions and wood and wattle form. The only variation is that Sugimoto repurposed an old tin roof from a nearby fruit shed—“as Rikyū would do. He was a common craftsman, used cheap materials. He re-established, re-standardized what beauty can be.” The sound of

rain drops on the rusted tin roof inspired the name Uchōten, which means “listen to the rain.” He also oriented Uchōten so that the sun shines through the crawl door at dawn on the spring and autumn equinoxes. For the artist, nature is a most honored tea guest.

To Sugimoto, the spatial, aesthetic experience is as integral to the tea ceremony, if not more so, than the highly ritualized choreography around heating water, cleaning and preparing bowls, whipping matcha and serving it. “If you’re well-trained, the hand movements are smooth, like dancing, like performance,” he says. But Sugimoto is not concerned about the mechanics of turning the bowl clockwise or how you hold the bowl, or following the intimidating rules of formal tea ceremony. “To me, tea (ceremony) is not philosophical, not serious or deep at all. It’s playful. A playful play. A performance art. It’s just about how to enjoy your time. g

THE ART OF NOH: “SO LITTLE, SO MUCH”

ŌTSUKI KŌKUN | MASTER MASK MAKER

Noh masks are central to the traditional Japanese art form of Noh theater, which dates to the 14th century. Like tea ceremony, the essence of Noh is simplicity, yet that simplicity conveys immense depth. “With so little, one says so much,” an old saying goes. The theatrical form is highly prescribed: the stage structure is always the same, and the stories typically involve ghosts or the supernatural, with plots drawn from legend, history or literature. The masked Noh actors (mainly male) move slowly and precisely. Their chanting is poetic and monotonous—their costumes layered and rich. And the Noh masks are an art unto themselves, as we learned in a visit to master mask maker Ōtsuki Kōkun’s Kyoto studio.

Just a few doors down from Raku Kichi-

zaemon’s home in Kyoto’s Kamigyō ward, Ōtsuki Kōkun climbs the narrow stairs from his living quarters to his second-floor workshop: part library, part carving/painting studio, part gallery showcasing his personal collection of ancient Noh masks and those he has become famous for. “The essence of the Noh mask lies beyond their physical shape. We can show Noh masks, but not display their essence,” he says. It is the actor who breathes life into it, and who, with the slightest movement, alters the fixed mask’s expression. Turning a happy, “sunny” face into a sad, “cloudy” one, for example. “Each expression is a flower that blooms at a particular moment—the same flower never blooms twice—the fusion of the spirit instilled in the mask by the carver and the spirit of the actor,” he explains.

To Kōkun, the beauty of the mask is its yūgen or mysterious profundity, which is fitting, given that he first began carving at age 19 after meeting a sculptor of Buddhist statues. The artist suggested Kōkun try masks first, as it would be an easier starting place. “I learned the joy of carving wood,” says Kōkun, who, five decades later, has had his masks showcased in museums, galleries and on Noh stages around the world.

Like his friend Raku Kichizaemon, he too trained and studied under master carvers, replicating the traditions and disciplines of Noh and has now gone on to innovate his own unique techniques and introduce new masks into the ageold casts of characters. g

Mimi Kurihara taking her first steps towards the (name of the waiting area to clean your hands in the garden before entering the tea house).

This spread: Ōtsuki Kōkun and his secondfloor workshop: part library, part carving/painting studio, part gallery showcasing his personal collection of ancient Noh masks and those he has become famous for.

A PEACEFUL HEART

MATSUI JUZAN S Ō K Ō | TEA MASTER

Master Matsui, known in Japan as Matsui Juzan Sōkō, might differ with Sugimoto regarding the seriousness of carefully orchestrated movements, order and decorum in the tearoom. After all, his livelihood is that of tea master, with students, like Yuki Kani, coming to study with him from as far away as Paris. In the tearoom adjacent to his home outside of Tokyo, Master Matsui performs chanoyu with the gentle intensity, the sublime gracefulness and utter, meditative concentration of Yo-Yo Ma playing cello—every gesture measured and mindful. A former professional bamboo flute player with The Vancouver Symphony, Master Matsui returned to his homeland 30 years ago to open his tea school, alongside his wife, also a tea master and culinary professional, who has prepared the food for our Sinal chaji, or complete tea ceremony, which includes the original kaiseki course meal.

“Master Matsui is a professor of life more than of tea ceremony,” says his student Yuki Kani. “As we learn tea ceremony, we learn a whole philosophy of life, of how we can live harmoniously. The study of tea is all about being a good person.” The objects and beautiful antiquities incorporated in the tea ceremony—the Raku bowls, for example, the lacquer tea caddies and intricately carved spoons—are integral, not ancillary, Yuki Kani explains. “They embody the thought, the beauty of our ancestors. You must learn the vision of our ancestors to have a vision of beauty for yourself.”

Even though Master Matsui is an esteemed tea master, his own study and practice continues. “Tea is the way, the path,” he explains. “But there is nowhere to arrive. You have to do it until you die. It is the heart that is most important.” To Master Matsui, the principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquility all distill to one quality:

“Not peace, but peacfulness,” he says. One feels this peacefulness as Master Matsui prepares and serves tea, his attentiveness complete, his focus both fierce and calm. “Tea ceremony is a way of worshipping the beautiful and the simple. All one’s efforts are concentrated on trying to achieve perfection through the imperfect gestures of daily life,” wrote Kakuzo in The Book of Tea.

If there’s anything imperfect in Master Matsui’s tea ceremony, it’s not evident. But nor is there anything rigid or proud. An air of gracious humility surrounds his being and his tearoom, as if it’s another kimono tied just-so, in that Japanese way of melding impeccable order, function and beauty, all in a silk robe. “I don’t mean the act of making peace, but the philosophic peacefulness of your mind,” the master continues. “In our world, we have many conflicts and wars, but what is the result? Nothing but destruction. Instead, we must have peacefulness of spirit.”

It’s a tall order for a bowl of tea. But in Sen no Rikyū’s day, chanoyu brought the great samurai to relinquish their swords, to bow down and find themselves greatly honoured but just as everyone else. Matcha may have been served but so was humility, harmony, respect, purity, tranquility. The ancient act of offering and receiving tea endures all these centuries later, because it’s not about the tea. It’s an act, a gift, of being present to others. By honoring one’s guest, by being receptive and attune to nature as well as the simple gesture and sublime act of sipping green matcha in a dark earthenware bowl, in a modest space laced with the mysteries of light and shadow, the heart breaks open a little wider. The world’s rancor subsides, and peace, if only for a moment, prevails.

Master Matsui and his wife, preparing and serving a complete tea ceremony in the formal teahouse attached to their home.

Matsui Sensei at home beaming with pride, peace and gratitude.

“As we learn tea ceremony, we learn a whole philosophy of life, of how we can live harmoniously….It is the heart that is most important.”

–MATSUI JUZAN SŌKŌ

STAMP TRIPLE / EDINA

PALMER WEISS INTERIOR DESIGN / ARCHITECTURE BY CHARLIE BARNETT

ASSOCIATES / PHOTOGRAPHY BY READ MCKENDREE / JBSA

ESME

INTERIORS BY HAMILTON GRAY STUDIO / PLATT

DANA

ARCHITECTS / REAGAN WOOD PHOTO

COUPE

INTERIORS BY BASIC PROJECTS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER FRANK EDWARDS

CHILTERN ON BRACKET

BETSY WENTZ INTERIOR DESIGN

SARGENT ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY

MAYFIELD

INTERIORS BY BASIC PROJECTS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER FRANK EDWARDS

ABNEY

INTERIORS BY J. ALLEN DESIGN PHOTOGRAPHY BY CASSANAS

KARDAMYLI

SARAH STACEY INTERIOR DESIGN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY STEPHEN KARLISCH / STYLING BY FRANCES BAILEY

GALLERY

MARY BETH WAGNER INTERIORS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATHAN SCHRODER

VIENNA OPERA HOUSE

At Schloss Hollenegg in southern Austria, the castle communes with nature as it has since the 12th century.

Vines shelter

exterior corridors of the family quarters (a 19th-century

ALICE STORI LIECHTENSTEIN

SCHLOSS HOLLENEGG, AUSTRIA

IT’S THE STUFF OF FAIRY TALES

For Alice Stori Liechtenstein, Schloss Hollenegg—the storybook pile of tiled towers cradled by forests and vineyards where she lives and works—is a magic kingdom of her own creation largely because she may well be Austria’s hardest working chatelaine.

A trio of oval windows hint at a special space inside: the upper level of the two-story ballroom. Otherwise, exterior walls of plain stucco offer no clue to the beauty that lies within.

ALICE STORI LIECHTENSTEIN IS THE FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR OF SCHLOSS HOLLENEGG FOR DESIGN, A RESIDENCY PROGRAM AND CREATIVE COMMUNITY FOR EMERGING DESIGNERS.

The program has turned this 900-year-old castle into an energized exhibition space and lively forum for exploring heady design issues and discussions. Alice recruits the artists, she nurtures them—she manages, engages, hustles, guides—all with one singular desire: to bring to the Schloss and a wider audience “objects that first and foremost tell a story.”

As her maiden name suggests, Alice is a natural storyteller with a narrative inclination steeped in art, thanks to her art collector mother and art dealer father (though he died before she was born.) “There was a family tradition, soaked up in the milk as they say, of collecting art and helping artists,” she explains. After growing up in Bologna, she studied architecture in Italy and Spain before specializing in contemporary exhibition design, creating exhibitions for Milan’s annual Furniture Fair. From exhibition design she moved on to curation. “I have always felt that art history is such an interesting way for people to understand history in general because it brings in every single aspect of what is happening at a particular time. For me, museums are kind of like the Holy Grail. Better than going to church.” And with Schloss Hollenegg, Alice has married into a magnificent museum-like platform. g

From Entropy to Enchantment

Alice first met her future husband, Alfred, when she was a graduate student in Barcelona, happily ensconced in a onebedroom apartment in the heady mix of Barcelona’s edgy urban energy. The thought that the two of them would eventually end up moving to the densely wooded and rural Liechtenstein family estate—the ancient and slightly crumbling Austrian castle that Alfred inherited at age 26— was not in the game plan. The castle had been in the Liechtenstein family for 200 years, but was last “modernized” in the mid-1970s and had not been occupied since Alfred’s grandfather died in 1991.

With towers and turrets, frescoed vaulted ceilings and grand galleries, ballrooms and libraries and 52 rooms brimming with Rococo moldings, ancestral portraits, hunting trophies, exquisite tapestries and imposing 16th and 17th-century tiled stoves (one in each room), the Schloss initially was an overwhelming trove of architecture, antiquities and art. All grand and jawdropping and all in need of restoration and upkeep. Alice remembers first seeing the Schloss in the fall, when the dense ivy trellising the stone walls had turned from glossy green to brilliant red. “It was amazing, just spectacular,” she recalls. Like an enchanting time machine, the Schloss represents many styles of architecture layered over its medieval 1163 origins. “As with many storied structures that have morphed over time as each generation makes its mark, it’s an interesting mix of real Renaissance, fake Renaissance, Neo Gothic,” says Alice. g

The family library occupies the top of one of the Schloss’s tiled towers.

Alice is always on the move, supervising the comings and goings of design pieces during their annual summer installation as well as restoration and maintenance work done year round.

Nature demonstrates her own design prowess in the artful way wisteria climbs the Renaissance courtyard stair.

Family portraits in all forms— photographs, paintings set into paneling, medallions—line the lesestube or reading room.

The black and white decoration of the pool walls and floor are Alice’s own riff on the traditional stone pavers of the terrace.

A pair of monumental Dutch candelabra incorporating Chinese porcelain flank the doorway to the ballroom. The painted wall decorations were done in the late 19th century.

The magnificent ballroom hosts contemporary design seminars in the summer. Prince Alfred von Liechtenstein updated 18th-century frescoes painted by Philipp Carl Laubmann by adding his wife Henriette and their nine children to the scene in 1885.

Portraits by Gottfried Pengg-Auheim of Alice’s three children hang over Chinese wallpaper from the early 18th century lining the family’s private living room.

It took a good decade of living in Austria, during which time the couple’s three children were born, before Alice felt she knew the Schloss, and German, well enough to add her own new layer. She launched the design program once the family eventually shifted from visiting on weekends and holidays to becoming the first full-time occupants of the castle in 30 years. They moved into a long and narrow wing built in the 17th century that effectively bisected an original courtyard, and added bathrooms and an elevator as their first decidedly modern, if slightly hidden, interventions. That fresh blast of energy put cobwebs, physical and metaphorical, on notice.

“When we moved in the village, neighbors were so happy that someone was living here,” says Alice, who admits to being initially hesitant to introduce contemporary objects in a space like this. “But our design residents were maybe quicker than I was in helping each other, and me, find the right balance,” she adds. “One of the reasons I started the whole design program was because the more time I spent here, the more I realized that the people in the area actually feel that the castle is their castle. They take pride in it and are both supportive of and intensely curious about what goes on here.” Just as a young family in residence would bring it to life, so too would an injection of modern imagination from emerging designers. g

A blood red portal by Tuomas Markunpoika references a complex door surround inside the Schloss.

Designers Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s aptly named Overgrow wallpaper, based on a mural they worked out onsite, invites exterior vines inside to climb the walls and ceiling of the Gobelin Room.

Designers in residence are initially and understandably overwhelmed by the bounty of details, materials and craftsmanship, as evidenced by a single doorway in the Green Gobelin bedroom, that the Schloss offers. A new theme developed by Alice each year helps to narrow the focus.

A chandelier by the Erzgebirge Collective is composed of nearly one hundred pieces of limewood, using computer programmed machinery as well as traditional woodworking techniques more commonly found in Christmas decorations.

Design in Dialogue

One of Alice’s primary goals in developing the Schloss Hollenegg for Design program was to create stimulating frisson and food for thought that could upend long-established expectations of what an historic castle had to offer. She’s learned a lot from her decade as the sole exhibition curator and design director.“Context has always been the cornerstone of how I curate,” she says. “Even so, it took a while before I recognized that the key to an object’s success was its ability to draw from and respond to this environment.” A newly made object, if it was an iteration of a piece that a designer had previously produced, often landed in the Schloss as a foreign body, unable to connect to or celebrate its special surroundings. For an object to join such a tightly-knit, wide-ranging family, it needs to relate.

Initially, the designers, selected after a competitive portfolio review and invited to be in residence for a minimum of two weeks, had free reign to choose their preferred materials. More recently, Alice has sharpened the focus, with residencies tuned to a material theme (wood, glass, ceramic). Similarly, she has streamlined the number of designers from as many as seven at a time to a more manageable three to four—enough so there is camaraderie and formative dialogue, but not so many that Alice is buried by the complexities of shepherding objects through production in preparation for the culminating exhibition.

Given the enormous amount of work involved in bringing a designer’s ideas to fruition, the May exhibitions, to which the public is invited, do double duty in showcasing the previous residents’ work and serving as a screening process for future candidates. Amid the historic gloss of the Schloss, there are down and dirty details that must be addressed. Participating in the exhibition reveals not only how a designer thinks but, more pragmatically, how they function: “How reliable are they? How quickly do they reply to messages? Do I trust them enough to have blind faith in what they are proposing?“ explains Alice. g

Sun has so throughly faded the velvet brocade lining the walls of the “blue room” that only a narrow section once protected by bed hangings remains blue.

Contemporary lamps by Sophie Lou Jacobson celebrate traditional Venetian glass blowing.

A Salzburg stove from the 18th century is a masterwork of majolica.

A cozy window seat in the library.

A pair of aluminum chairs by Dutch design studio OS + OOS pick up the hue of Wenzeslaus Liechtenstein’s purple robes, while a 3D-printed matte porcelain vase takes pride of place between two fine porcelain Qing-dynasty vases.

Scrubbed raw wood floors are a counterpoint to intricate wall paneling incorporating family portraits in the winter dining room.

Like a confessional, the grilled window of a closet allows anyone, like curious children spying on the ballroom below, to remain hidden.

Case in point, German designer Luca Gruber’s proposed dining table was one of the more complex schemes ever submitted.

Inspired by the Schloss’s surrounding woodlands, the table’s surface would capture the magical effect of light filtering through the lush leaf canopy,with table legs like twisted tree trunks. “Of course, my concern was all about crumbs getting caught in cracks,” says Alice, laughing, “when in retrospect, it should have been about how challenging it would be to realize this piece. Luca’s reassurance was enough in this case, because I had worked with him before and trusted him.” The outcome, the Crepuscular Dining Table, is a masterpiece of old and new techniques: wooden parts CNC-machined, water-cut glass pieces that were then partially mirrored, hand-painted and laminated by an historic Munichbased workshop, brass details all so perfectly engineered and crafted that no crumb stands a chance.

The most successful pieces to emerge from Alice’s program pick up the Schloss’s extraordinary threads of history and weave them into something new via modern methods. Some pieces slip subtly into the existing grandeur, like a 3D-printed matte porcelain vase in a gradient of the oldest and most stable glaze–cobalt blue–that takes pride of place between two fine porcelain Qing-dynasty vases.

The prototypes and artists’ proofs become part of Schloss Hollenegg’s permanent collection, adding new dimension to the historic patina. For Copenhagen-based duo Christian Hammer Juhl and Jade Chan, creating a wine fountain from, literally, the ground up, pays respect to the surrounding vineyards, utilizing on-site sand and it’s color-inducing mineral deposits in the glassmaking to deliver a natural jade hue. “We always start with a desire to understand a material better or learn a new way of working,” says Juhl. Adds Chan, “to me, the promise of design is functionality, craftsmanship and a careful beauty.”

It’s a promise exquisitely fulfilled in Juhl and Chan’s round pedestal fountain, that, when wine is poured onto its central shallow pool, simultaneously feeds six glasses via channels radiating from the center. As an elegant ensemble of serving piece and stemware with some glass polished and some not, the fountain references other splendid tableware in the Schloss’s collection “as well as the tradition of giving such a fountain as a wedding gift, especially during the Biedermeier period,” adds Alice. g

Christian Hammer Juhl and Jade Chan’s round pedestal fountain, that, when wine is poured onto its central shallow pool, simultaneously feeds six glasses via channels radiating from the center.

Wooden-Textile by Elisa Strozyk

Crepuscular Dining Table

by Luca Gruber

Brazza Screen by Kim Mupangilaï

Kor-Alm Wine Fountain by Jade Chan and Christian Hammer Juhl.

A new bed canopy by Finnish designer Hanna-Kaisa Korolainen nods to the height and coloration of the Baroque tiled stove in Princess Henriette’s bedroom.

Other designs boldly step out from historic shadows. In the former bedroom of Princess Henriette, a narrow bed crowned by a half tester features the work of Finnish textile artist Hanna-Kaisa Korolainen. With a nod to the Orientalia collected by Heinrich Karl August von und zu Liechtenstein on his Asian travels in the 1880s, fiery orange dragons writhe amid green leaves and stems that match the dragons’ watchful eyes. Other fantastical animals are inspired by the stylized and imagined fauna Korolainen discovered in the Schloss’s tapestries and furniture. Executed in a boldly calligraphic style reminiscent of Chinese brush painting, the fabric was screenprinted locally by FabricFabrik, a Viennese studio and workshop

Similarly inspired by the landscape, Lex Pott, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, concocted a pendant light fixture for the lesestube (reading room), a repository of family ancestry in books and portraits. Hung from the ceiling like an upside-down tree, the pendant reinterprets, in branches of LED-lit frosted acrylic, the frescoed family tree that climbs the arches of the vaulted round library, delineating 30 generations of the Liechtenstein family. g

A “family tree” light fixture by Lex Pott hovers over a leather chaise longue by Charlotte Kingsnorth in the reading room.

Beneath ancestral portraits, an intimately scaled digital work by Canadian designer Jon Stam captures a 40-minute video of Alice’s favorite walk in the woods.

Lack of heat in the historic rooms of the castle has helped preserve the finery of elaborate plasterwork and parquet flooring.

Woodland was simply a material theme three years ago, but woods are lifeblood at Schloss Hollenegg and in its region of Styria, the most forested of all the Austrian states. The views from the arcades and high terraces of the Schloss take in a canopy of deep greens of spruce and larch extending so far in the distance that green fades to misty blues. “The real legacy of this place is not actually all the things that are inside it but the woodlands outside,“ says Alice. “Because without the woodland, we would never be able to support the castle.”

The limbs and branches continue to expand and flourish inside the Schloss, with the design residents and their objects being adopted and welcomed into the castle’s ongoing conversation between history and modernity. Yet amidst the imaginative, creative work of dreaming designs into being, there’s the slog of ongoing upkeep. “Every year my husband and I meet to map out what needs to happen; he has his pet projects, and I have mine,”

Alice says. One year it was restoring chandeliers with the work done by the legendary workshop Lobmeyr. Another saw the replastering of the external solarium walls, an arcaded space enclosed by neo-Gothic windows in the mid-19th century.

But for Alice, the practical is mitigated by the lyrical. She is a visionary, and a dogged one at that, championing designs and designers who make you feel as well as think. Design that, like a long drink of cool spring water from the Schloss’s hallowed grounds, provides full body satiety. “I am like the doctor of the soul,” she says. “Everyone needs beauty. Culture is something that we take for granted, but it actually needs a lot of support. We cannot expect to have a beautiful, creative environment if we’re not prepared to invest in it. Suddenly I realized my job, like that of someone who works in a museum or in theater or music, is really important. To provide essential nourishment for having a more happy, relaxed, fulfilled life.”

One of a dozen crystal chandeliers at Hollenegg, many of which have been restored by Lobmeyr.

The lavish decoration of the church within the walls of the Schloss speaks to its early role as more than a family chapel.

More plus more works when the elements, such as a Venetian mirror and Chinese silk wallcoverings, are all of equally elevated stature.

LEONID RATH Managing Director

LOBMEYR

Look up, inside any grand space in Vienna—opera house, museum, palace, parliament building, hotel— or indeed at Schloss Hollenegg, and the glitter your eye catches from a chandelier was likely generated by Lobmeyr, Austria’s most venerable glass maker. Whether Lobmeyr made the fixture from scratch or restored to its original luster one made by others, the house that was founded in 1823 has touched nearly every splendid light hanging in every magnificent space in a city brimming with them.

Lobmeyr’s own shop on Kärntner Straße, an historic edifice on what was once the most exclusive shopping street in Vienna (a building that thankfully survived WWII bombing), is a beacon of elegance amid fast food and fast-fashion neighbors. Its resplendent interior, packed with one shining example after another of generations of imagination and skill, is like a disco ball turned in on itself. Beyond the sparkle of prisms, is the dazzling testament to what a single maker can do with glass.

At Lobmeyr, curiosity and the thrill of a challenge drive innovation today as in the company’s earliest days, when founder Josef Lobmeyr produced traditionally elaborate

chandeliers for, among others, the House of Hapsburg. His son Ludwig collaborated with the Edison Company to develop the first electric chandelier in 1882. Fourth-generation owner Hans Harald Rath, inspired by images from space, designed the Starburst chandelier for the 1966 opening of the Metropolitan Opera. The iconic design, and its many iterations, remains a bestseller in the collection today.

For mere mortals (i.e. those who may not need ballroom chandeliers), Lobmeyr’s glassware has long been coveted and collected. The company boasts many of the most iconic forms in crystal tableware, thanks to its dedication to excellence and consistent collaboration with design talent. Stefan Rath, grandson of the company founder, worked hand-in-hand with members of the Wiener Werkstätte to create common objects of the highest quality. Josef Hoffman’s “Patrician” drinkware of 1917 is iconic for its simplicity, delicacy and perfect proportions, an echo of Ludwig Lobmeyr’s Drinking Set No. 4–radically modern when introduced in 1856. Both stemware designs are elegantly timeless, as are the tumblers and carafe of Drinking Set No. 248, created by Adolf Loos in 1931.The delicate crosshatch cut into the thick base is a fine geometric contrast to the bubbles of

his favorite drink, “Feingespritzter,” a mix of Champagne and soda. A similar crosshatch embellishment encircles the waist of tumblers in Drinking Set No. 282, designed by Ted Muehling, one of Lobmeyr’s contemporary collaborators.

Of the three Rath cousins leading the company today, Leonid oversees glassware and furthers the tradition of inviting designers to take Lobmyer’s unparalleled craftsmanship to new heights. Andreas Rath manages the store which is being refreshed by Viennese architecture firm Hubman-Vass, while Johannes Rath steers the chandelier division. Astonishingly, everything they produce comes out of one workshop a little over a mile away from the store in a district that has housed chandelier production since the 1700s. A showroom in the front is encircled by light fixtures and centered on a spacious carpeted platform where clients can bring chandeliers needing repair or restoration. In first and second-floor rooms overlooking a courtyard, ironsmiths shape, forge and weld; coppersmiths turn shapes on a lathe and file, hammer and emboss; other craftsmen restore, assemble, wire and gild.

Across the courtyard another suite of small rooms houses Lobmeyr’s finishing school for the glassware. Here, other master craftsmen start with raw glass elements largely imported from the Czech Republic, then cut, engrave, sandblast, polish and paint. On a back wall, there’s a black poster featuring small white silhouettes of each shape in each collection. When Leonid is embarking on a collaboration with a designer, he will point to the poster and ask them, “do you see a gap? Is there something missing you would personally love to have at home?”

While life may be less formal today than in the early 19th century, people still, as Leonid says, “long for good products that have been carefully designed and lovingly crafted by hand.” Many hands, that is. By the time a Lobmeyr glass reaches a customer it has passed through at least 24 hands and four quality controls, the last of which is always by a member of the family. Lobmeyr is a company steeped in but not bound by tradition. “We don’t want our glasses to sit in a cupboard,” says Leonid. “We want people to engage with them.” With core values of authenticity, peerless craftsmanship, curiosity and outstanding design, Lobmeyr’s future is as sparkling as cut crystal.

LEONID RATH Managing Director

LOBMEYR

Designers in residence often take their meals at a table designed by art collective breadedEscalope with wood milled from a single tree on site. Iron tie rods on the loggia serve as a handy drying rack for a rug.

This page:

A painting of Alice’s eye by Pilar Almon.

Next page:

A weaving designed by Zoe Jo Rae made from plant and tree fibers collected from Hollenegg.

“Everyone needs beautiful things to look at. We take it for granted, but it is nourishment for having a more happy, relaxed, fulfilled life.”

-ALICE STORI LIECHTENSTEIN

BIRSLEY / PIERS

ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIORS BY STUDIO BKA / PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACQUELINE MARQUE / STYLING BY SUZONNE STIRLING

GIBSON INTERIORS BY KATIE ROSENFELD & CO.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARTA XOCHILT PEREZ

STYLING BY CATE RAGAN

LOU LOU

INTERIORS BY J.D. IRELAND / HILL & HURTT

ARCHITECTS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY STACY ZARIN GOLDBERG

PENCOMBE HANG

INTERIORS BY SHERRY SHIRAH DESIGN / PHOTOGRAPHY BY EMILY FOLLOWILL / STYLING BY THEA BEASLEY

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND BUILD BY STUDIO ROB DIAZ / INTERIORS BY JESSICA NICASTRO DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALEX ZAROUR / VIRTUALLY HERE STUDIOS

SHIPTON

MARY BETH WAGNER INTERIORS PHOTOGRAPHY BY NATHAN SCHRODER

SURREY INTERIORS BY BASIC PROJECTS PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER FRANK EDWARDS

WHITBY

AMIE CORLEY INTERIORS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY GIESEKING

STYLING BY REVEL & HEARTEN STUDIO

PIP

ARCHITECTURE AND INTERIORS BY STUDIO BKA

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACQUELINE MARQUE

INTERIORS BY AMITY WORREL & CO. / PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM ABRANOWICZ / ART + COMMERCE

LUIS LAPLACE + CHRISTOPHE COMOY

GIANTS IN THE WORLDS OF ART AND DESIGN, LUIS AND CHRISTOPHE’S STORIES AND PASSIONS DETAIL THEIR EVER-EVOLVING, AUTHENTIC DEDICATION TO THEIR WORK, CREATING NUANCE AND INTEREST IN SOME OF THE MOST ICONIC AND COMPELLING RESIDENTIAL, COMMERCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL PROJECTS AROUND THE WORLD.

LUIS LAPLACE AND CHRISTOPHE COMOY

A Paul McCarthy lithograph presides over a table of ceramics in the carefully curated salon of Luis and Christophe’s office.

In the world of Luis Laplace and Christophe Comoy, partners in business and in life, these three words—utility, gesture, context—might be thought of as a rubric that guides their architectural and design work. But they also signal a collective understanding; a roadmap for how, in the end, their Parisian design firm, Laplace, approaches a project as both a process and an intellectual exercise.

Our conversation with Luis and Christophe showed their world as highly interactive—and experiential. Their days are hands-on; fast-paced but somehow slow moving too. In their Paris atelier, a team of 50-plus focuses on the architecture of the house. The furnishings, the landscape, the art and the objects too. This is what is worked on and talked about. A lot. But Luis tells of a team member who also calls the work a réveillé—an awakening. And it’s here that you realize that for the pair, for their studio and clients, this is where the real focus is. A sense of connectedness, how one thing relates to the next. A sum of the parts with the common goal in every project: to awaken, though this awakening is no single tap on the shoulder. Instead, it appears as a developing story, one that requires an awareness on the client’s part as there is no signature Laplace style. An astute client will feel an ease and an interest in the environment Laplace has created for them. It's a unique approach that has earned the firm international acclaim.

The two grew up 7,000 miles apart: Luis was raised in Argentina and Christophe in France. They met in 2001 at a Christmas party in NYC, where Luis was working for Selldorf Architects after earning his masters in Architecture and Urbanism in Buenos Aires. Christophe was on the cusp of attending Columbia Business School. So while the cultural differences and distance between their childhood

homes and worlds were profound, they discovered they shared remarkably related family values. Both had close relationships with their grandmothers— strong, independent women, who, it turns out, shared an uncanny fondness for hats and reptiles. Luis and Christophe each have a photo of their respective grandmothers, wearing similar hats and each is holding—a snake! What are the chances that these grandmothers would both have such specific fearlessness? And that one day, their grandsons would meet and fall in love on NYC’s Lower East Side and begin a life working together.

After the tumult of 9/11, moving together to Paris felt a natural next step and the right time to establish their company. Luis had worked on a project for Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula Hauser on Mallorca when he was at Selldorf. Upon establishing his eponymous firm, she gave him a small project at first, growing their relationship to the breadth it is today. Museums, private residences, commercial spaces and gallery projects abound, but Laplace’s studio practice, regardless of a project’s scale, is noted for its intense enterprise. When one hires Laplace, you don’t simply receive a set of plans and put it out for construction bids. Rather, it is completely the opposite. Laplace delivers a nuanced body of works— a series of designs and activations that will touch on every aspect of the project’s final outcome. It is why a Laplace building is full of Laplace furniture, decoration, soft furnishings, and most importantly, the spirit that goes along with it. Why as a studio they never repeat a design, and Luis, with warmth, will report that he goes to trade exhibitions to remind himself that he is not interested in trends nor, what they both call, “ticking the boxes.“ This is why being with them in their studios and own houses is so thrilling. The pair is certainly not phoning it in. g

A vintage pendant light from Studio BBPR hangs over the seating area in the Laplace offices; a work by Gary Simmons commands the back wall.

The silhouette of a statue that lights the way for guests visiting the Laplace atelier.

The entrance to Luis and Christophe’s personal office is through the garden.

The open plan studio of multidisciplinary designers and architects.

Luis at his

Christophe reviews project details with a client beside a large Suzanne Ramié for Atelier Madoura pot.

The entrance to Laplace’s Viewing Room on Rue du Bac, a renovated hôtel particulier in the 7th Arrondissement.

The staircase of the former L’Hôtel Samuel Bernard, an 18th-century building on Rue du Bac that Laplace is converting into a chic gallery and entertainment space. The storied building once housed the workshop of the taxidermy institution, Deyrolle, which still operates an adjacent shop.

An Armand Albert Rateau gilded wood pendant light, once owned by Lanvin and then Lagerfeld, hangs above a bathtub in Luis and Christophe’s private residence.

Luis Laplace

Luis and Christophe’s Paris flat, which looks out in a kind of flatiron aspect to views that divide up Rue Notre Dame de Lorette and Rue Saint-Georges is replete in the tensions found in their studio work, a fine-tuned balance of antique and modern. A highly decorative Armand Albert Rateau gilded wood pendant light, once belonging to Lanvin (and then Lagerfeld) hangs over the bathtub. A set of 1970s velvet upholstered Francesco Pasinato wooden Sculpture Chairs in the dining room were originally designed for a restaurant and a Jacques Adnet column light that once lived in Andy Warhol’s Paris flat sits against a wall in the main salon. Ceramics fill tables everywhere, though their collection is never complete—Christophe mentions

they may like to find some 18th-century porcelain. They are forever curious and additive.

“I can’t stop working,” admits Luis. “It’s not because something is bad. It’s that I’m discovering ideas and solutions to many different things all the time. Something will inspire me—‘Oh, I like that color,’—and then I’m off.” The pair are rampant collectors, though modest compared to many of their clients who possess world-class art collections. As a child Luis collected empty cigarette boxes and soda cans, “things a mother would get in trouble for letting their child collect today,” Luis admits. But that’s given way to an affinity for collecting vintage and antique tools—implements full of humility and, of course, utility,

speaking of the gesture or the meaning of the design of each implement and its intention. Christophe, on the other hand, is more apt to turn to the natural world. He collects trees and and tends to a small arboretum outside their office and at their country retreat in Southern France. “Oak Trees” he specifies. “I like to be outside. It keeps me grounded.” The pair also has a fine collection of furniture from all periods, acquired over time. Their collections are scattered between their city flat and farmhouse in Toulouse. Luis also takes drawing classes and recently created a private ceramics studio just steps away from their offices with a wheel and kiln—perhaps he’ll add some of his own work to their collection soon. g

Christophe Comoy

In Luis and Christophe’s flat, Rick Owens’ Curial Chair in aluminum pairs with voluminous brown velvet chairs designed by Laplace and a bright red Jacques and Dani Ruelland ceramic lamp.

The main salon in Luis and Christophe’s flat features a Jacques Adnet column light that once lived in Andy Warhol’s Paris apartment and a Laplace-designed coffee table made of lavastone.

“I QUICKLY READ THE DNA OF A HOUSE TO UNDERSTAND THE HISTORY, WHERE THINGS COME FROM. THE LAYERING AND HOW THINGS ADJUST OVER THE YEARS, OVER DIFFERENT GENERATIONS AND WHAT OTHERS HAVE CHANGED TOO.”

–LUIS LAPLACE

YVES BRAYER (1907-1990)

A French painter known for landscapes of the countryside evocative of the topography of Toulouse.

RHYTHMS OF THE COUNTRY

COMBENEGRE TOULOUSE, FR

In their work, Luis will tell you that “reading the DNA of a house helps to understand its history.” And Christophe might add that it “helps us understand our own too.” At the couple’s country house near Toulouse, a 17th-century blue-shuttered farmhouse with roots to the original vineyard on the property that has been in the Comoy family for generations, the layering and how things adjust over the years shows how people and times have changed. But the constant? That this house is a retreat from a life lived elsewhere. This is where Luis and Christophe, like generations of Comoys before them, return to a simpler rhythm. Outings to brocantes or fairs, mostly full of junk, is where Luis looks for the tools he collects, “beautiful because they are designed with specific intention,” he says, whereas Christophe savors walks in nature, perhaps channeling Proust.

As one stands in the central room, the colorful family stories flow—of Luis’s grandfather in Argentina who had a penguin that would follow him home to stretch out in front of the fireplace. Or a grandmother in France whose pioneer spirit gave the young Christophe a deep affinity and reverence for the natural world.

Toulouse’s slow pace and the home’s unique heritage provide Luis and Christophe with the artistic inspiration to fashion the house’s contemporary design narrative. They fill it with what interests them, inside and out, to make it authentic and resonant. As a couple, they remain warmly tethered by their family history and their funny and charming stories, even while they have their eyes clearly fixed to the future.

Looking through into a colorful sitting room; nature’s bounty decorates the hanging light in the foyer.

The central staircase showcases a collection of avian prints amidst other heirlooms.

Striking blue limewash walls are a backdrop to Luis and Christophe's collection of art and objét.

The rustic setting of Luis and Christophe's restored stable makes for idyllic dinners overlooking the French countryside.

Les

In high summer, the facade of Laplace and Comoy’s Combenègre in the southwestern Midi-Pyrénées region of France.

This page: Luis’s collection of art, ceramics and tools in his private ceramics stuido.

Opposite:

The studio’s monochrome facade features collected works in the windows.

This spread: The ceramics studio is a true artist’s workshop.

Context, that helps explain and give meaning, appears in the conversation too.

Near Toulouse, a series of simple farm buildings has been in the Comoy family for generations, at first used as a summer retreat, but since winterized by Christophe to enjoy year round. When you visit, it’s clear that you are in a traditional agricultural home in the southwest of France, but Christophe and Luis have had their way with it, too.

Here in the countryside, both partners appreciate the unexpected while honoring the soul of a place, an exercise they have practiced in projects the world over—from a centuries-old bakery in Mexico to a naval hospital-turnedart gallery in Menorca. The academic tendencies in Luis can give way to an unpredictable combination of things and as a couple, they seem in a beautiful coordinated step as their private and work worlds travel a parallel path.

Over the course of our story, we’d met several times stealing moments in their bustling schedule, but our final meeting was back in Paris on a cool and serene November afternoon. We returned again to their postural words—a utility of work, the gesture of design, a context to provide meaning—as we walk back into Laplace headquarters, through one of Christophe’s arboretums, a small, fairly dense clump that casts a spell at Place Saint-Georges from sidewalk to atelier.

Is this small urban forest there to give visitors and clients a way to shift gears into the world they are about to enter, preparing them for the experience they will have? Surely, it is like a group of trees anywhere—full of possibility and interest, no two ever the same. Taking patience to grow and flourish. This is Laplace.

SURELY, IT IS LIKE A GROUP OF TREES ANYWHERE—FULL OF POSSIBILITY AND INTEREST, NO TWO EVER THE SAME. TAKING PATIENCE TO GROW AND FLOURISH. THIS IS LAPLACE.

“Sometimes I just like to break the rules. I cannot even explain why, but I like the unpredictable combinations of

things.”

-LUIS

LAPLACE

POP ROUND

INTERIORS BY MCCANN DESIGN GROUP / MHK ARCHITECTURE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY CARMEL BRANTLEY

SCOOP MINI

ANNIE DOWNING INTERIORS / PHOTOGRAPHY BY LINDSAY BROWN / STYLING BY ADAM FORTNER

BEHIND THE SCENES