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.
