Hermès Home Collection Features Alvaro Siza Chair
Hermès returns to Salone de Mobile Milano this year. Collections for the Home 2017-2018 feature leather, referencing the label’s history as a saddler and harness-maker. “It dresses objects as it dressed the horse. Combined here with light maple wood, lacquer, wicker, crystal, or metal, leather rediscovers this original act.” Included in the repertoire of palladium-finished brass and bridle leather objects is an Alvaro Siza chair.
The Siza-designed Karumi bamboo stools and bench are products of Japanese master craftsmen. Carbon fiber and bamboo are fused into a lightweight material. The marriage of tradition and technology strengthens the bamboo but allows it to retain its simplicity. In effect, the seats are as light as their silhouette. In the Pritzker-winning architect’s poetic modernist manner, the Alvaro Siza chair is “drawn in bamboo like simple strokes of light.” A flat leather cushion addition, the Hermès signature, tops it off. Karumi is available as a triangular stool, a square stool, and a bench.
Another collaboration this year for Hermès Home is the Aes table by Barber & Osgerby. The lipped coffee table, evocative of a metal girder, is cast in black bronze in a single-use mold. Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby reduced the piece to its purest line and finished it with a waxed surface that “seems to absorb all the light and throw it back with greater brilliance.”
The two items and the rest of the collection had their debut in an Mediterranean-inspired pavilion in La Pelota. Large timber beams cast stark shadows and characterize the space exhibition space designed by Macaux Perelman.
