House of Harmony
In its new collections for the home, Hermès has created furniture, soft furnishings and even objects that the deputy artistic directors themselves admit ‘serve no evident function’. So why is the maison dedicating an entire floor to the home universe in its newly renovated Liat Towers flagship store in Singapore? Jane Ngiam jets to Milan to get the answer
ur great ambition is to generate desire,” Alexis Fabry declares some 10min into our interview. Not exactly an earth-shattering comment, coming from the deputy artistic director of a luxury house like Hermès, but having viewed the new creations from its home universe, the declaration stops me in my tracks with its irony. Aside from furnishing items such as the new Pippa lounge chair, sofas handsomely iterated in buttery-smooth lambskin and woven cane, and the eye-poppingly cheerful wallpaper—all of which are easily covetable— this new collection also includes whimsical decorative items under the Équilibre d’hermès range, such as the Toron leather cord-laced wastepaper basket, a magnifying glass and spinning tops. And then, there’s the Icosahedron, the 20-sided leather dice. No wait—it’s actually a paperweight. At 15cm tall, it’s also not quite something you’d be able to pick up easily with one hand. In fact, it’s not exactly something anyone would go out looking to buy. Creating desire, he said? “This is one of the rare objects that does not have a perceived function,” chuckles Fabry. “That’s the curiosity which this object immediately draws out from people. Because it doesn’t have a function, we decided to design it at a scale which is proportional to its life as a decorative object.” Charlotte Macaux Perelman, who works alongside Fabry as co-deputy artistic director, adds, “The 20-sided dice is the most complicated mathematical shape. The object looks very simple, but requires an enormous technical skill to make. It’s made from just one sheet of leather.” That all sounds simple enough. Yet, the ideology behind each of the decorative objects seems anything but. Take for instance the other items in the Équilibre range—