Through the Looking Glass Hostess Stand

Interior decoration is a subtle art where a single small detail, piece, or accent may be enough for the ambience to become imprinted on your memory forever. It is precisely that special detail that grabs your attention, enticing you to take a closer look, to touch…  To think of such an art object and to create one is a tantalizingly challenging and provocative task that requires convergence of the artist’s imagination, technology, the team’s savoir faire and, most importantly, everyone’s passionate aspiration to create a décor masterpiece with its own, unique personality. It has to be simple and complex all at the same time, and it has to always be different and work on different levels, depending on how it is viewed and who by.

“The outside is always an inside”, Le Corbusier wrote, defining his idea of space in architecture. These two aspects are inseparable. The important part is to find the correct interplay format, defining the accent and its echo effects, the source and its projections, and keeping in mind that the actors keep swapping roles all the time. The mirror image of the same principle – “the inside is always an outside” – is of topical relevance today, and it applies across the entirety of the creative space. The ideas and tropes that germinate somewhere out there first take flesh as massive sculptural forms arousing interest and inspiring awe, and only then find their place in interior decoration. In the intervening time, the style, technology and creativity standards set by sculptors and designers become very high.

Unveiled to the world in a range of large size works of contemporary sculpture, the metal mash technology has smoothly embedded itself in the domain of interior and exterior finishing.

Thanks to its rigorous geometric form and unusual metal surface texture, the Through the Looking Glass hostess stand is a piece of interior décor eminently deserving to be hailed as a brilliant exemplar of the style shaped by the creators of those sculptural masterpieces. Its style and design synergize to evoke a portal to another dimension rather than merely a geometric figure. The outside and the inside, times and technologies, fantasy and reality are interwoven in this piece. As for reality, we all know that the trend is law.

The metal mash trend has of late firmly taken root among creative décor lovers as the style of choice for decorations and furnishings alike. It is this trend Through the Looking Glass exploits in order to attract and impress. This simply means that the eyes of every customer entering the area where the hostess stand is have to instantly rivet on its perfectly harmonious “defectiveness”, combining the metal’s elegant austerity, verging on severity, with textural plasticity.

This hostess stand is the first piece of furniture every person gets to see upon entering the space. It is the signature of the space in everything: style, status, mood, color palette, and interior lighting design. Geometrically, Through the Looking Glass is a regular rectangle, but its surface texture makes all the difference. Its every facet is an embossed metal mash mirror picture with its own plot, which will play out differently depending on the shapes and colors around, the angle of the light, and how fast people walk by it, all this in addition to the viewer’s own imagination. A Through the Looking Glass surface reacts to every minuscule change in the surrounding ambience, as if communicating with it in some cryptic language. It is amazing how this seemingly lifeless, strictly linear geometric form with studied angles comes to life through the constantly changing interplay of tropes on its surfaces, and how the borders of the images appear to dissolve, allowing the action to debouch into surrounding ambience.  And the rigorous stasis of Through the Looking Glass acquires a presence infused with lightness and a dynamic of its own.

The Through the Looking Glass hostess stand looks unusual and… daring – as befits an art object. It will blend perfectly into any environment and any decorative style, whether traditional or ultra modern, running the gamut from classical and empire through modernism and art deco, to minimalism and high tech. It will sit equally well with vastly different finishing ideas.

But Through the Looking Glass needs lots of air and lots of space. It’s the kind of art object that wants to show off its every aspect. It has to breathe and share its incredible wealth of energy with the space around. We have taken the ideas epitomized by giant sculptural objects and shrunk them to interior decoration size. Made according to the same knowhow, these diminutive replicas also have something else in common with their prototypes: they crave the pride of place and visual prominence.