Arielle Assouline-lichten
• Though Arielle Assouline-lichten earned her master’s in architecture from Harvard and worked for some of the most prestigious firms in the world, she never seriously contemplated making furniture until a chance visit to Sight Unseen Offsite, a New York City design fair, in 2015. Inspired to try her hand at “imagining anything I wanted to and just making it,” she submitted the idea for a collection of recycledrubber pieces to the fair the following year—and it was accepted. “My pitch was ‘everything from a tassel to a table,’ ” Assouline-lichten says of crafting her initial capsule from the type of flecked material you’re likely to find cushioning a gym floor.
It was the beginning of her furniture and product line, Slash Objects, an offshoot of Slash Projects, the multidisciplinary design firm she launched in 2013 to work with clients on exhibition and interior design, apps, and web interfaces.
Looking back, Assouline-lichten believes Slash Objects was a long time coming. “I always thought that I would be making things and seeing them out in
“It seems like it’s not complicated to do, but if you know, you know that it’s the most complicated thing in the world to distill
parts into a singular entity.”
the world,” she explains. “I didn’t think much about what the details would be, but I knew that would be the underlying force that drives me forward.”
Born in Philadelphia to a Moroccan father and a Danish mother, Assouline-lichten traveled regularly growing up, learning to appreciate the value of “the dialogue between cultures through art and design.” An undergraduate degree in critical theory and visual media from New York University was followed by the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a slew of positions with heavy-hitting firms such as Snøhetta and Kengo Kuma and Associates, in Tokyo.
“Japanese and Scandinavian design definitely remain a strong point of reference,” Assouline-lichten says of the minimalist angular tables, lamps, and seating made from materials such as marble and brushed aluminum that define her sensibility now.
“I’m fascinated with this idea of being able to simplify,” she adds. “It seems like it’s not complicated to do, but if you know, you know that it’s the most complicated thing in the world to distill parts into a singular entity.”
Assouline-lichten is passionate about working with glass and stone—onyx and travertine, specifically. The idea of recycling a cracked slab that was “once relegated to the trash pile in the marble yard,” she says, “is a beautiful thing.” For her most recent show,
Unbroken, which ran at Nycxdesign last year, cracks, fractures, and irregular, raw edges were the heart of a duo of pendant lights and a side table.
Currently based in New York and Paris, she hopes to bring her business to the European market (“Paris, especially, is really having a moment in the design world right now”) while also expanding her range of furniture and home decor to include dining tables, storage units, and additional lighting styles. “As I try to level up this year,” Assouline-lichten says, “I ultimately want to widen the breadth of my work to have pieces in every category.”