Elisa Ossino and Josephine Akvama Hoffmeyer are long-time collaborators. They first met in 2002 when Ossino, a Milan-based inside designer, approached Hoffmeyer, who makes a speciality of handmade clay tiles and paint at File Beneath Pop in Copenhagen, throughout the renovation of her Sicilian house. “We admired every others’ work,” says Ossino.
A decade or so later, the 2 arrange a design studio, H+O, in a spacious 18th-century residence in Milan’s elegant Brera district. For Salone del Cellular Milan 2021, H+O has remodeled the area into I’ll be Your Mirror—an exhibitionoffering guests the chance for self-reflection by a burst of colourful interiors, meticulous tile design and a number of furnishings.
GABRIELE DELLISANTI: When did you first understand you had been match?
ELISA OSSINO: I requested Josephine for assist working with Sicilian tiles for my house, and we instantly realized that we shared an analogous imaginative and prescient of design—a up to date one which respects conventional crafts.
JOSEPHINE AKVAMA HOFFMEYER: We liked that rigidity between previous and current. Previous and new. With the tiles, we had concepts about learn how to rework an current, decades-old product for a brand new consumer. And ever since, when working collectively, we wish to reintroduce this type of rigidity. Beginning with this very residence.
GD: Is that the way you additionally approached this yr’s exhibition, I’ll be Your Mirror?
JAH: Exactly. It’s an area the place all totally different kinds and ages come collectively into one particular exhibition. We now have furnishings that dates again to the Nineteen Thirties and from the current. We mixed them with cautious tile work all through, even in locations that you just wouldn’t historically cowl with ceramic tiles. Once more: outdated product, new methods to make use of it. We needed to drag previously and mix it with our perspective on the longer term.
GD: What does that future appear to be?
EO: The pandemic and lockdowns have been very arduous for everyone, and all of us want a brand new solution to see the longer term. We needed to make use of the area as a solution to deliver some pleasure and pleasure to life by design. We determined to make use of a broad palette and good colours to deliver optimistic power.
JAH: We’ve used coloration and furnishings to encourage our guests to mirror. We wish them to get misplaced to some extent the place they nearly cease considering. The entire level of this exhibition—and our work—is to transcend the attention. We see it as a three-dimensional portray, the place design turns into a solution to evoke robust emotions.
GD: Which furnishings items did you select to furnish the area with?
EO: Loads of design icons. We work primarily with two Danish firms: Fredericia and Home of Finn Juhl. They’ve been offering us with a number of the finest Scandinavian designs, from [Finn Juhl’s] 1938 Grasshopper chair to Børge Mogensen’s mid-century Spanish Chair. We’re placing them into an Italian context, this stunning outdated residence with terrazzo flooring, alongside lamps from Spanish model Areti and materials impressed by the colours of Josephine’s tile work. As a result of they’re surrounded by such an odd mixture of colours and textures, the furnishings takes on an entire new that means. It’s tremendous attention-grabbing.
GD: That is the second exhibition you’ve arrange within the residence for Salone del Cellular after Excellent Darkness in 2019. What classes have you ever realized since final time?
EO: I feel we perceive the area quite a bit higher. The sunshine, the rooms, how folks expertise it. And I feel it reveals.
5–10 September 2021
Through Solferino 11, third Flooring
Brera District, Milan
Opening Hours
10 a.m. to eight p.m.
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