INSPIRED BY NATURE
Creative Director Mary Justice Thomasson of Mary Justice Designs has brought her flair for 'fine art as furniture' to the table with a new range of home accessories, perfect for gifting this holiday season. Her debut collection is a luxury line of interior home décor produced in her studio in Bali.
Creative Director Mary Justice Thomasson of Mary Justice Designs has brought her flair for 'fine art as furniture' to the table with a new range of home accessories, perfect for gifting this holiday season. Her debut collection is a new luxury line of interior home décor exclusively produced in her studio in Bali.
Bali based Mary Justice Thomasson, known more affectionately to her friends and associates as ‘MJ', is an American designer, writer, explorer and artist with an insatiable appetite for culture and decorative arts. She has spent the last 32 years in Asia commuting between Hong Kong, Bali, Indonesia and the USA, and is a fascinating story in herself, a zany character who bursts with both passion and personality.
MJ has combined her background in fine arts and love of Indonesia to create a debut limited edition series of decorative fine art as furniture and table-top décor, offering an outstanding collection of multi-purpose everyday use tilt-top tables, butler and nesting trays, folding tables and Lazy Susans. Each comes with its own unique story inspired by MJ's voyages throughout the Indonesian archipelago and her extensive 15 years of travelling and face-to-face experiences with indigenous animals, plants, exotic environments and marine life.
The MJD range fills the space between design and art with a mix of multi-purpose fine art furniture as entertaining décor. Designed to have cross-generational appeal whether you be a fine decorative arts lover, a collector, or a millennial fascinated by the personality the pieces can inject to any interior setting.
Beautifully illustrated and hand-painted using self-created watercolours, each piece takes up to four weeks to complete by the designers, master artists and craftspeople who carve and finish each elegant item with painstaking precision and meticulous attention to detail. No machinery is used in the creation of these handperfected pieces, making them genuinely unique with only 15 of each themed series being produced. Each piece in the collection is specially designed to be water-resistant and spill-proof to ensure everlasting use.
The entire process from inception to completion is very organic with MJ's design ideas hand-drawn and water-coloured in the studio by an in-house artist. The original drawings are then carefully painted by master Indonesian artists onto gessoed wood, a Renaissance technique from the 16th century, which takes 9-12 brush strokes of paint to create the equivalent of one stroke on canvas.
With five themes in the decorative range: ‘Panthera'; ‘Certainly Simian'; ‘Flights of Fancy'; ‘Flora' and ‘Deep Ocean', mahogany oval tilt top trays feature natural jungle scenes graced by an endangered Clouded Leopard in the ‘Panthera' series, or a vibrant show of lionfish and sea snakes in a coral habitat in the ‘Deep Ocean' collection. The ingenious craftsmanship of the designs allows for the trays to be removable from the stand to reveal a hidden and superbly crafted occasional table. When not being used as entertaining or service pieces, the tilt-top function allows the parts to be fashioned into upright displays of artworks.
Just in time for the festive season, MJ has also launched her ‘Drink In The Deep Ocean' multi-functional wine buckets, handmade collectables that are carved and chiselled out of sustainable teak wood by in-house master carvers and which come with a removable brass bucket and two removable dividers. Each is an objet d’art with multiple functions, and a special touch is the brass plaque that can be customised with a personal message.
The design is based on MJ's many dives in the Coral Triangle, and the fan coral is the centrepiece of the design, ensconced in sculptural clamshells that also cleverly serve as the handles for the wine bucket.
A set of ‘Deep Ocean' coasters are a textural detailed view of the fan coral and are presented in a teak shell holder, perfectly
complementing the wine buckets.
Newly added to the ‘Flora' collection is a set of coasters that feature a design that details the Banda Island's nutmeg and butterflies. Each is hand-screened and hand-finished with a cork back and can be displayed or stacked in a hand-carved holder. The two designs can be mixed and matched.
Teak folding butler tables and interchangeable nesting trays in the ‘Certainly Simian' range show White-Handed Lars gibbons at play at sunset tossing tropical fruits to each other. The interchangeable pieces can be collected as an entire set or purchased as individual items. In the ‘Flora' range, the teak ‘faux bamboo' folding tables and nesting trays depict the famed nutmeg and butterflies of the Spice Islands, heralding Indonesia's independence from the Spice Wars. This range comes with a purpose-designed base to display or store the collection when not in use.
A centrepiece to any dining experience is the table top ‘Lazy Susan' which features the beautiful Bird of Paradise, and when spinning, illustrates the fabulous mating dance at sunrise in the ‘Flights of Fancy' piece.
“I have designed my creations to be useful everyday pieces that are beautiful to the touch and visually vibrant. I want each piece to have a story that sparks conversation, not only for the fun and whimsy behind the illustrations, but to appreciate the function, form and quality craftsmanship it takes to hand make this decorative form of high-end furniture,” says MJ.
Details about the illustrations and scientific fun facts come with a ‘Show and Tell Card', and each item is delivered in an exceptionally elegant and eco-friendly handmade, padded wooden box that can be repurposed as a storage chest. The mahogany and teak woods in the collections are sourced from sustainable, FSCcertified farm plantations in Indonesia.
Each piece in the Limited Edition Series of 15 is signed by the master artist and features a brass plaque engraved with its unique series number.
The collection, entirely produced in Indonesia, has been years in the making to ensure that each piece is a sustainable, collectable work of art designed to immortalise the extraordinary natural beauty of a country that MJ and many others have come to love.