Young French company ENO (“Edition Nouveaux Objets”) sees itself as a type of design matchmaker, bringing together talented designers and smart manufacturers to produce new objects for ordinary living. Taking their cue from Japanese design culture, the end game for ENO is beautiful, useful and discreet objects that do what they say they do, simply. End of.
I stumbled upon this apt and eloquent reminder of why the old luxury just doesn’t cut it anymore…
The post reproduced below was written by James Pearson. Entitled The New Luxury, it comes from the website of Acholi Beads, a ‘Socially Proactive Business’, based in Uganda, that sells handmade jewellery crafted from beads of recycled paper.
The New Luxury is our society’s response to consumerism’s inability to add meaning to our lives, while recognizing its power to improve livelihoods.
The New Luxury is smarter than advertising. It doesn’t seek its values in airbrushed images or phrases engineered to be memes. The New Luxury abides in story. It basks in the soft fabric of lives woven together by intention and fate.
The New Luxury transcends the sterile front of retail shelves. It peers into the true history of products, joining hands with the many people behind the supply chain, on the far side of the world, who brought the products into existence.
The New Luxury doesn’t rely on the weight of a price tag, but knows the glory of connection to stories larger than any dollar figure, more important than any bragging rights.
The New Luxury acknowledges that value cannot be bought, but that we can buy based on values. It asserts that meaning is broader than a slogan, more attractive than a photo, and deeper than any pockets. It assures us that beauty created in a studio pales when compared to the faintest reflection of real love. And The New Luxury insists that we will not be blinded by advertisements or manipulated by marketing; we are too smart and passionate to allow our dollars to be tempted away by false promises of happiness.
The New Luxury chooses joy, truth, hope, and love.
Like the Arezzo villa I posted a liitle while back, this much design and art and regalia of family life packed into one apartment really shouldn’t work this well. But then, this is the Cologne apartment of Belgian art director and artist, Mike Meire a consummate collector not afraid to mingle the personal and the public. (Meire’s collection includes the work of ‘names’ like Damien Hirst amongst others). All up, more exquisitely curated proof that sometimes more really is more beautiful.
The much feted Paris ‘king of modern patisserie’, Pierre Herme, has called on TNL’s favourite ‘warm minimalist’, Olivier Lempereur, to design his latest Boutique Macarons et Chocolat at rue Cambon 4. It’s unlikely that the shopper would ever see the boutique in such splendid emptiness though with Herme’s superlative offerings regularly inspiring fans, Parisienne et non, to queue around the block.
Looking surprisingly restful and oasis-like really, (I love the way the white gravel seems to mirror the sky in this shot) this ex-industrial Soho courtyard is perhaps not so much an outdoor room as a private transition space. Giving the loft-dwellers above a leafy moment to steel themselves before hitting the street.
This kitchen in a converted Milan farmhouse with its simple racetrack layout (focussing all the attention on the task at hand instead of the wide screen TV in the next room perhaps?) is another instance of the trend back to a more well-mannered approach to domestic planning. And with dedicated dining rooms disappearing fast, it just has to make sense to put more not less visual separation between cooking, with all its inevitable creative clutter, on the one hand, and the closely related, but altogether more leisurely, pursuit of dining on the other. Especially when the results might end up looking as sleek and, well, open as this.
Rapidly shaping up as the young world master of that space between art and design, Jaime Hayon does it again. This time in partnership with Baccarat, Hayon is plying his remarkable talent for transforming the slightly stuffy into the covetable and highly collectable. Helping to preserve traditional craftsman techniques for a new generation into the bargain. The splendid spoils of the Baccarat collaboration are the rather jauntily named Crystal Candy Set. But snappy (and hugely apt) titles apart, for me, the really wonderful side of Hayon’s work – be it with Lladro or Metalarte or Swarovski – is how he seems to bury a little piece of himself inside every vase and lamp and figurine. In the hands of the Spaniard, inanimate objects they most definitely are not.
