Charlap Hyman & Herrero in the VitraHaus Loft

While people retreated from the outside world into their homes this past year, Charlap Hyman & Herrero redesigned the loft of the VitraHaus as a lush landscape for living indoors; a surrealistic meditation on the tensions between inside and outside, public and private, old and new, modernity and adornment, uncanny and real. Binding the range of design pieces collected within is a thread of homages to artworks, films, characters, books and places that have captivated CHH since the firm’s inception. What emerges from this carefully calibrated network of references is a deeply personal space full of humour, remembrance and love.

Fictional characters like Jean Floressas Des Esseintes from Huysman’s À Rebours, Lidia Pontano from Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and the artist from Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, have left behind props from their most iconic scenes. The terrace’s hand-shaped pillows and shell-trimmed topiary recall Dora Maar’s photomontage of a hand crawling out of a shell. A writhing straw rug in the form of a snake, Verner Panton’s Living Tower, a screen made of giant profiles and Noguchi’s Freeform Sofa take on an abstract quality, like elements in a painting by Tanguy, dotting the expanse of mossy green carpet that visually extends into the hills beyond.

Adam Charlap Hyman explains more information on the idea behind the new interior in an interview in Vitra magazine.