For AW26, that world took the form of Good Food, Good Friends, a micro-play written by Laura Waldren. The collection previewed at London Fashion Week, launched last month and just dropped on Basic.Space. To celebrate, we spoke with Anna about casting actors, collaborating with ASICS, and the allure of an empty room.

How would you describe your taste?

I think it’s quite instinctive and sometimes contradictory. I’m attracted to things that feel slightly unfamiliar, but I also really like restraint. I can be very excited by something completely excessive and then equally excited by a very empty room. I think I’m always looking for some kind of tension between those things: something beautiful or refined, but with an element that feels strange or unexpected.

I’m also very interested in seemingly ordinary things that have been transformed slightly. I like that moment when you recognise something familiar in an object, but can’t quite place why it also feels different and unfamiliar. I think that carries through to the references I’m drawn to as well - they can come from very different places, from decorative arts and historical objects to film, literature or something completely everyday. It’s less about subscribing to a particular aesthetic and more about whether something has a point of view or makes you look at it twice.

Your shows have become theatrical productions as much as presentations - tell us how one of these comes to life.

It usually starts with an idea, or even just the thread of one, that we think could become an interesting way to present the collection live and give the pieces a life and context beyond simply showing them in a static format. We’ll take that initial idea to the writer with lots of notes, references and cultural touchpoints, but from there we give them pretty much free rein. It’s important that they can take the idea somewhere we might not have expected.

At the same time, we’re usually thinking about casting, and then the set and the wider world start to take shape around it. The jewellery and objects, and the language of the brand more broadly, are woven very deliberately through every part of that process. We never want the pieces to feel incidental to the performance - they have to be fundamental to the characters and the world we’re creating.

It all happens on quite a short timescale, so there’s an intensity to it and it becomes very all-hands-on-deck. But I think that pace can be quite exciting.

What’s a format you haven’t tried yet that you want to?

I’d love to do something that unfolds over a much longer period of time. Our live shows are quite concentrated experiences, so the idea of creating a world that an audience could enter and spend time in, where they discover the pieces and characters gradually rather than everything being revealed at once, is really interesting to me.

You’ve worked with novelists, actors, and now ASICS on trainers. Tell us about your approach to collaborations?

For us, collaboration always starts with a genuine interest in what someone else does and a curiosity about what might happen when you bring two different ways of thinking together. There has to be a reason for it beyond simply putting two names next to each other. The most interesting collaborations are the ones where you can’t predict the outcome at the start. Both identities have to remain present - I’m not interested in one side imposing its language on the other.

We work in a very collaborative way anyway, so I don’t really think of ideas as being developed in isolation. Whether it’s working with a novelist, an actor or a brand like ASICS, you’re inviting another perspective into the process and allowing that to shift your own. I think the most interesting collaborations are the ones where you can’t completely predict the outcome at the beginning.

It’s also important that both identities remain present. I’m not interested in one side simply imposing its language onto the other.

There should be an exchange: something recognisably ours and recognisably theirs, but also something new that could only have come from that particular combination. That’s really what makes collaboration exciting to me.

If budget and logistics disappeared, what’s an idea you’d want to try next?

I think I’d want to go further in the total world creation around a collection. Rather than something that exists for the length of a presentation or campaign imagery. We spend so much time developing the characters, references and narratives behind each collection, and you inevitably only get to reveal a small part of that.

I’d love to take over a building and create something that unfolds across different rooms - part exhibition, part performance, part installation. The exciting thing about removing budget and logistics isn’t necessarily being able to make something enormous. It’s being able to be incredibly specific - to create every detail exactly as you imagined it, work with people across completely different disciplines, and not have to compromise an idea.

For now, that bigger world still starts on the workbench - recycled metal, a note to a writer, a character not yet cast. Whether it ever expands into a whole building - room by room, part performance and part exhibition - is the kind of idea Anna seems happy to let ruminate between blueprint and daydream.

Discover Completedworks AW26, now live on Basic.Space.

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Caleb Engstrom has spent over a decade fabricating for names like Frida Escobedo, Aesop, Joan Jonas, Yoko Ono, and Henry Taylor. Under his own name, Rest Energy, he pairs materials nobody thinks would go together - burl wood with crushed eggshells, resin with wool. Working across furniture, ceramics and lighting, the LA-based artisan doesn’t stop at function. He builds to make people stop and ask what they’re looking at.

Engstrom wants his work to feel unconcerned - confident, personal, never chasing trends - even if it depends on being noticed, sold, and used. He usually starts a piece with a word or a phrase, then finds its shape through material. The final object rests somewhere between idea and object.

We sat down with Caleb to talk process, paradox, and translating phrase to furniture.

You fabricated for other artists before making pieces of your own - tell us how it started, and how you got here.

Fine art, music, and growing up in rural Iowa. I never went to school for furniture or fabrication; I studied art at the University of Iowa, mostly ceramics, and later got an MFA at UC Irvine.

I moved to New York in 2009 and interned at MoMA PS1 in Installation and Exhibition Design - that’s where I realized there was real work in fabrication. I learned materials and how to make things by just doing it.

I’ve always been drawn to working with my hands, and I turned that into a job building for designers and architects. Starting my own work was the natural next step - leaning on my art background, thinking critically about materials and ideas and turning them into furniture.

Walk us through how a piece begins. What’s usually your first move?

My very first series is called Wet Wool. A lot of my work starts from language - those two words were the title of a friend’s art show. What does that mean, wet wool? Sometimes the poetics inspire me, or just give me a feeling, and then I start digging into how I can pull meaning out of the words.

For instance, when wool becomes wet, it gets stronger and more resilient - but visually, you’d think something wet looks ruined. I like that kind of contrast. So, I drenched wool in resin to make it look wet, but it’s not. It looks like it’s moving, but it’s solid. Paradoxes and juxtapositions are central to my work.

I try not to see something out in the world and think “I want to do something like that but different.” I stay focused on finding inspiration through language and words, multiplying and building off that, rather than mimicking or reproducing something that exists.

Your work is very process-driven and often experiments with what material can do. How clearly do you envision the final object before you start making it?

A lot of it happens in my head, in research. But take the Dry Kiss chair - I had off-cuts from a fabrication job and started playing with them. Doing work for others keeps me engaged with material and shows me new possibilities. If someone’s telling me to do their project one way, I think, “what if I did it this way?” - and use that on my own work.

Dry Kiss - where does that name come from? Did it precede the work, like Wet Wool?

Dry Kiss came after, but it fit. It’s actually an acronym: Don’t Repeat Yourself, Keep It Simple, Stupid. A reminder to simplify.

You’ve said you like design that feels unconcerned. How does that look in practice?

It’s about going inward, blocking out noise, not worrying whether something’s cool. I know a piece will live in the world - but I’m not trying to fit in with what’s already out there.

Your recent work explores how touch becomes a memory. What happens once a piece leaves the studio?

I love seeing things leave. I hate when pieces just sit around wrapped in blankets. They should be out there! That’s why I had a pop-up sale this past weekend: I discounted stuff just to see it go. I make almost everything myself, so I’m fine seeing a chair leave for less than I’d want rather than have it sit around and get dinged up.

Everything’s made to order - if someone wants one, I’ll make another. I also love trading pieces with other designers and artists.

What’s a material, process or idea you want to explore next?

Glass. I haven’t explored it, and I’d like to - playing with slumping and shaping glass in kilns, making curved glass, maybe windows or glass for doors.

Back in grad school, I did a thesis show with a video piece where I took lessons to become a mime. My teacher’s tagline for the class was “making the invisible visible,” one of those bits of language that does something to me and makes me think: what can I do with that?

In some ways, these spinning Crookes radiometers do that - they translate something invisible, like heat, into something visible. That might be the springboard for my next series.

Find the Dry Kiss collection - including the all-new counter stools - now on Basic.Space.

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In the 1940s, American designer-manufacturer Harvey Probber began building upholstered seating from interchangeable wedges, quadrants and half-circles. Instead of a single, finished object, the sofa became a collection of parts that could be rearranged around a room. He called it “modular furniture.”

Probber’s designs were restrained, geometric and made for the affluent American living room. Over the next three decades, designers across Europe took the idea somewhere stranger. They pulled the sofa apart, dropped it to the floor, removed its frame and let it reshape the room around it.

New materials helped. Polyurethane foam, fiberglass and molded plastics freed upholstered furniture from the timber frames, legs and springs that had long dictated its form. At the same time, a new generation of designers was rejecting the formality of the postwar interior. Modularity offered another way to live: less prescribed, more open to change - for one Florence collective, it offered something closer to an argument.

Superstudio took modularity somewhere more theoretical. Founded in 1966 by a handful of twenty-something architecture students in Florence, they took one look at the postwar world and were unconvinced. To them, Modernism was a broken promise of something better that never arrived. American sci-fi and the street politics of the 1960s made better company. They named themselves Superstudio (no false modesty) and helped kickstart Italy’s radical architecture movement within the decade, building “anti-architecture” instead.

Co-founder Adolfo Natalini said, “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design...if architecture is merely the formalization of present unjust social divisions, then we must reject [it] until all design activities are aimed towards meeting primary needs. Until then…we can live without [it].”

The Sofa Bazaar, produced by Giovanetti in 1969-70, put this idea into something sittable: five identical modules in molded polyester and fiberglass, wrapped in vibrant pink faux fur, curling into a sculptural wave that dissolved the line between furniture and architecture.

The group lasted only twelve years, disbanding in 1978 and scattering mostly into academia, but its place in postwar design history borders on the mythic: at its height it exhibited everywhere from the Museum of Modern Art to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and echoes of its imagery still turn up in the work of Rem Koolhaas, Steven Holl and Bjarke Ingels.

Hans Hopfer’s Mah Jong sofa - nicknamed for the way its three-piece modular units interlock - designed for Roche Bobois in 1971, took modularity closer to the floor. Low upholstered cushions could be stacked, scattered or joined into sprawling configurations, with no prescribed composition. Hopfer supplied the pieces; the owner decided what the sofa became.

Its adaptability has also kept it firmly in the cultural conversation, reimagined in fabrics by Missoni, Kenzo Takada and Jean Paul Gaultier - and most recently name-checked in Charli xcx’s 2026 album Music, Fashion, Film. A radical ’70s seating system has become its own shorthand for taste.

A year later, de Sede’s DS-600 stretched the idea in another direction. Designed by Ueli Berger, Eleonore Peduzzi-Riva, Heinz Ulrich and Klaus Vogt, the leather sectional was conceived as a chain of individual upholstered elements connected by zippers. Each could be added or removed, allowing the sofa to curve, coil and extend through a room.

Nicknamed the “Snake,” the DS-600 replaced the fixed silhouette of a sofa with something almost continuous. Its length was determined not by the designer, but by the number of modules assembled - seating that could bend around architecture rather than conform to it.

Michel Ducaroy stripped the sofa back even further with Togo, introduced by Ligne Roset in 1973. With no timber frame or legs, layers of foam formed its structure, folded into the deeply pleated silhouette Ducaroy reportedly compared to a tube of toothpaste bent back on itself. Individual seats, corners and ottomans can expand the form across a room, turning an experiment in all-foam construction into one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable sofas.

That same year, Swiss architect Ubald Klug designed Terrazza for de Sede. Graduated tiers of leather rise like steps, inspired by the terraced Alpine landscapes of Switzerland. Two modules placed together form a valley; separated, each becomes its own small mountain. The New Yorker called it “a monstrous thing” when it debuted.

The sofa was no longer simply occupying the room. It was creating its own terrain.

Pierre Paulin pushed the idea furthest with Dune, developed between 1968 and 1972: an enormous system of undulating foam-covered sections with tables embedded between its rises and depressions. Rather than a collection of individual seats, Dune proposed an entire interior organized around the body: a place to lounge, gather, and face one another. Paulin intended Herman Miller to manufacture it, but its scale and cost kept it from serial production.

Decades later, his family brought Dune into production through Paulin Paulin Paulin, and the once-unrealized experiment became a cult classic. Frank Ocean famously owns a teal version, while the sofa has since appeared in the homes and creative worlds of Travis Scott, Rosalía, and Justin Bieber.

Its appeal goes beyond status. More than fifty years later, Dune is still being used as Paulin intended - as a place for people to gather. “I think it’s great to offer this opportunity in design… for furniture to bring people together and open discussion,” says Benjamin Paulin, cofounder of Paulin Paulin Paulin. (Watch Benjamin’s episode of TASTE here).

In three decades, modular furniture moved from Probber's orderly American system to Superstudio's faux-fur manifesto, Hopfer's free-form cushions, de Sede's endlessly extendable Snake, Ducaroy's all-foam construction and the upholstered terrain of Klug and Paulin. The forms changed. The idea didn't: the living room no longer had to stay still.

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Brasília is the proof: the capital didn’t exist until 1956, when President Juscelino Kubitschek appointed Oscar Niemeyer chief architect and sent him to raise a city out of open savanna in under four years. Working alongside urban planner Lúcio Costa, Niemeyer answered with what he called tropical modernism - sweeping concrete curves and monumental civic spaces that expanded the language of European modernism rather than simply repeating it.

He often described his architecture through the shapes of mountains, rivers, and the human body, allowing Brazilian landscape and culture to define forms distinct from their precedents.

Niemeyer wasn’t the only one commissioned to build something from nothing. Jorge Zalszupin, Sergio Rodrigues, and others were brought in to furnish Brasília as it rose, translating Niemeyer’s vision into native hardwoods, woven cane, leather, and natural fiber.

What emerged wasn't simply a style, but a way of thinking about objects: craft as a vessel for memory rather than decoration. The designers who followed inherited that spirit, each reshaping it in different ways.

CRAFT AS INHERITANCE

The 1970s Cubo Armchair belongs to an earlier chapter of that inheritance. Designed by Jorge Zalszupin - a Polish architect who emigrated to Brazil and fell in with Niemeyer - it takes its name literally. A cuboid form, scooped out at its core, reduced to volume and void.

Postwar Brazil gave Zalszupin a career few architects get to build twice. He founded L’Atelier in 1959, drawing on the country’s native hardwoods and its deep bench of skilled cabinetmakers to push modernism somewhere new.

He wasn’t working alone. Jean Gillon left Romania for São Paulo in 1956, and by 1961 had turned from set and tapestry design toward furniture, founding the studio that would grow into Italma Wood Art. His 1968 Jangada chair and ottoman take their name and silhouette from the traditional fishing raft: a trapezoidal rosewood frame strung with woven mesh that cradles a single leather cushion, the whole construction as legible as a knot.

Sergio Rodrigues rounded out the group from his own studio, Oca, founded in 1955. Often credited as the father of Brazilian furniture design - his Mole chair entered MoMA's collection in 1974 - Rodrigues built his Magrini stools and Yara bedside tables from the same jacaranda and leather Zalszupin and Gillon were already working in. Three architects and studios, one shared approach: native wood, visible joinery, and cabinetmakers skilled enough to hold both together.

THE OBJECT AS MEMORY

Sixty years later, the next generation of designers are carrying that approach forward.

PROSA, founded by Julia Rovigo and Gabriel Pesca, treats furniture as a form of research. Their pieces carry traces of cultural and emotional memory, but never through symbolism alone. Instead, memory emerges through construction itself - visible joints, carved surfaces, and materials that retain the evidence of how they were shaped.

Their furniture resists the polished certainty of finished products. Each piece feels closer to an ongoing study, an object that reveals its own making rather than concealing it.

MATERIAL WITHOUT HIERARCHY

Pedro Ávila was born in Brasília, the city built on Niemeyer’s belief that concrete could curve like it was breathing. Working across sculpture, casting, digital modeling, and woodworking, Ávila treats material less as a constraint than as an open question. Bronze, parchment, stainless steel, stone, and wood each retain their own character rather than disappearing into a seamless finish.

That range grew into a body of sculptural furniture where bronze, stone, metal, and fiber sit inside the same piece, each material left to keep its own texture rather than smoothed into a single finish.

The Libra Wall Lamp, from his Satellite collection, balances a sheet of parchment against a folded stainless steel support held in place by a simple metal scroll. Switched on, the parchment glows softly while the steel throws a faint shadow of its own geometry onto the wall. Rather than hiding the meeting point between materials, the lamp lets each remain legible.

WHAT SURVIVES THE HAND

Sonia Gomes came to sculpture through textiles - self-taught until her forties, working out of Caetanópolis, Brazil’s textile capital. Her practice has always run on improvisation: mending, binding, wrapping, turning discarded fabric into something that no longer looks discarded.

Her candelabra for Side Hustle Gallery pushes that method somewhere unexpected: bronze. What began as fabric wrapped around an ostrich egg - every crease, knot, and stitch worked by hand - is cast permanently into metal.

Some materials remain, some change over time - jacaranda, bronze, parchment, thread. The instinct behind them hasn’t.

Find the full curation of rare vintage and emerging Brazilian designers now on Basic.Space.

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Nothing was sketched first. Latex, resin, and mirrored glass become the starting point for months of testing before a piece takes shape. The result is furniture that embraces experimentation, where compromise and unexpected discoveries are as important as the finished object.

We sat down with Jabez at his London home to talk about his transition into furniture, the materials that guide his process, and what gives an object lasting value.

What made you want to make something that was actually yours?

It was actually a book. Three or four years ago I read The Crow Poems by Ted Hughes, and it completely changed the way I thought about making things.

For ten years I’d worked in production design, where everything begins with a client, a script, or a brief. Reading those poems made me realize that some ideas only exist in their own medium. You couldn’t turn them into a painting or a film. They belonged entirely to poetry.

That made me ask myself a different question: If I could make anything, what would I make? I wasn’t responding to anyone else’s project anymore. I was trying to find ideas that belonged to me.

What does taste mean to you?

Taste is incredibly personal. If you trust someone’s taste, it’s because there’s something about the way they see the world that overlaps with your own.

For me, it always comes back to materials and the way they interact with light. Whether it’s furniture, interiors, or a set, the raw quality of a material matters. Then it’s about whether an object carries some kind of narrative. I don’t think objects need to explain themselves, but I do think they should feel like they have a story.

Why does material always come first?

Everything starts with the material.

Originally we wanted to make a cast plaster table, but it didn’t work. That failure led us to latex, and then we spent months pushing it as far as we could - casting it, dyeing it, painting it, stretching it, using natural latex and synthetic latex, trying every possible technique.

Ironically, after all of that experimentation, we ended up using it straight off the roll. Without all those failed attempts, we never would have arrived there.

The first three pieces we made: the mirror, the table, and the latex lamp, all use translucent materials. There’s just something about them that resonates with me. I could sit and look at those materials for hours.

Once you recognize that something consistently gives you that feeling, you realize you’re probably meant to keep working with it. That’s when it becomes personal.

How do you think about luxury now?

Working in fashion changed the way I think about luxury. To me, luxury isn’t perfection. It’s the opposite. When something feels too polished, it almost stops feeling luxurious. I want to feel the hand that made it. I want to see the craft behind it, even if the object itself is refined.

That’s why imperfection matters so much. Light reveals imperfect paint, handprints, the age of a surface. Those traces remind you that something was actually built - that people were there.

With CGI, AI, or anything that’s completely polished, you lose that feeling. The imperfections are what make something feel real. Patina isn’t exclusive to leather. Every material develops one. Floors, walls, cutlery, wool - everything records the people who have lived with it.

To me, that’s luxury.

What makes something worth keeping?

Good materials and craftsmanship.

There are always moments when something becomes overused, but those things eventually come back. If you’re wondering what will stand the test of time, the best place to look is what already has.

Mass-produced objects will always feel temporary to me. Handcrafted objects continue to accumulate meaning.

Where does a piece actually start for you?

Usually they begin with an idea that feels slightly impossible. We’ll ask ourselves, What if we tried this? Then we experiment.

Recently we wanted to make a chair out of solid crude-oil wax. We ordered a small amount, experimented with it, then eventually made a full-scale chair. It looked incredible, but structurally it wasn’t really a chair. Still, by the time we made a second version, we understood the material completely.

The mirror was similar. I wanted it to be a single block of mirrored glass that behaved like a prism. We spent almost two years trying different techniques before accepting that we had to compromise the original idea.

Ironically, those compromises made the piece stronger. It became more handmade. Less perfect.

How much of your process is planned, and how much is discovered along the way?

It’s almost always discovered.

When I first started making furniture, I imagined I’d become one of those designers who sits quietly in a studio, draws everything perfectly, sends it away, and gets it made.

It turns out that’s just not how I work. The process is still chaotic, just like production design. We discover ideas through making them.

I also try not to look at other furniture. I’ll research something to make sure it hasn’t already been done, but I don’t want the design itself coming from another object. The mirror began with wanting light to become part of the object, and the table began with the relationship between weight and an inflatable form.

The material always tells me where to go next.

How has your training shaped what you’re making now?

Before fashion, I worked in film. I started as a labourer, became a carpenter, learned scenic painting, prop making, metalwork - anything I could.

Production design taught me that the craft isn’t really about building sets. It’s about creating environments that reveal character through materials, light, and narrative.

That way of thinking never left. Understanding how materials behave obviously helps when making furniture, but more importantly, I hope every piece carries a story.

The biggest difference is the pace.

In production design you receive a brief, build the work, see it lit on set, and immediately know whether it succeeded.

Furniture is slower. You spend years experimenting, often in private, before anyone sees the work.

I think that’s what I enjoy most about it.

Watch the full TASTE episode with Jabez Bartlett on Youtube. Shop his debut collection now on Basic.Space.

Rudolph believed people need “caves and goldfish bowls” to live in, so he designed a space that transforms from a snug, private cottage into an open-air pavilion, cross breeze moving straight through - without a single motor or hinge. Instead, the panels move with rope, pulleys, and gravity (in the form of seven 77-pound “cannonballs”) to form shutters when closed, shaded canopies when open.

At about 650 interior square feet, few homes of this size have earned such a place in design history. In 1957, Architecture Record readers ranked the Walker Guest House as one of the most important houses of the century - but unlike Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Rudolph designed the Walker Guest House to respond to its landscape, not disappear into it. Instead, he saw it as “a spider crouching in the sand,” a reference to its off-the-ground exoskeleton.

Now the Walker Guest House circulates like a portable sculpture - most recently reassembled at the Pacific Design Center for Basic.Space LA, with interiors curated by A$AP Rocky’s studio, Hommemade - a job that demanded technical expertise, historical rigor and a process that required equal parts engineering and preservation.

Architects Paul Vantieghem and Raha Talebi of Vantieghem Talebi led the house’s structural restoration and reassembly. We sat down with them to talk about the counterweight system, the four-inch gap left between its two halves, and what it means to restore a structure that was never built to be permanent.

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Rudolph called his original design “a spider crouching in the sand.” What was he solving for on that site in 1952 that still makes the house feel so radical now?

We’d argue that the Walker Guest House, even though it was never part of the official Case Study House program - the influential series of experimental modern homes built across mid-century Los Angeles - is actually the best Case Study house out there. It’s an analog, climate-responsive prototype. The spidery exoskeleton lifts the house off the ground so it isn’t exposed to the elements, while the operable sunshade panels let cross breeze in and relieve solar gain.

On its original site, the Walker family actually summered in the Guest House instead of their mansion next door, six times its size - proof the climate strategy worked. What still feels radical is the haiku-like simplicity of it. The house is built almost entirely from off-the-shelf dimensional lumber, assembled with unskilled labor and materials anyone could get their hands on. And it’s never static - it’s constantly reconfigured, from one day to the next or even hour to hour. That’s what makes it so whimsical.

The wood panels are weighted with actual red cannonballs on a pulley system Rudolph borrowed from his time in the Navy. What does it take to get a 70-year-old counterweight system swinging again?

When our studio was brought in to plan the reassembly and rehabilitation for Basic Space’s installation, we started with a forensic survey of the house in its as-found condition - cataloguing hardware, noting what was missing, tracing its material history.

All seven original cannonballs were still intact, but the house has a way of surprising you: they aren’t actual cannonballs. They’re custom-cast concrete counterweights, poured on-site in beach sand using the negative form of a beach ball as a mold. They’re also the only deliberately color-treated element in the house. Rudolph clearly carried lessons from his Navy service into the design - the boat cleats and the counterweight pulley system both celebrate ready-made materials and exposed fastenings the way naval construction does.

This is a far from traditional structure. When you first experienced it, what’s something about how it was built that you didn’t expect - a shortcut, a detail, a piece of craftsmanship?

There's a lot of inventive detail throughout the house, but our favorite surprise was finding actual Florida sand tucked into corners - even a seashell used as a light pull in the bedroom closet. Small, unexpected moments of nostalgia.

This house has been taken apart and put back together more times than almost any building of its stature. What’s actually involved in disassembling a piece of architecture while maintaining its integrity?

Before we got involved, when the house first moved from Florida to California, the exoskeleton and entry platform were considered unsalvageable. That gave us room to strip away layers that had built up over the years and bring the house closer to its 1952 form.

Jesse Lee, founder of Basic.Space, made the key calls during this rehabilitation, restoring the roof edge, entry platform, and exoskeleton to their original geometry - it’s rare to see someone prioritize that kind of value over spectacle. Taking the house apart and reassembling it required real invention, since it was never designed to be moved this way. We introduced concealed bolted knife-plate connections between the outrigger elements and slim steel plates above them, so the building could function as a movable pavilion without losing its original slender proportions. That detail alone could be its own conversation.

The Walker Guest House now sits in the same conversation as Jean Prouvé prefabs and Serpentine Pavilions - buildings collectors treat almost like portable sculpture. How did you approach the restoration, especially knowing the house will travel again?

We think its shift from house to object is actually what saved it. If it had stayed on its original site in Florida, it likely would have been destroyed by Hurricane Ian, the way Rudolph’s Sanderling Beach Club was lost to Hurricane Helene. For the Basic Space installation, we chose to present it as both object and process. Its two halves sit four inches apart - a gap that lets light in and puts the act of disassembly on display. We wanted visitors to encounter it not as a finished restoration, but as a structure caught mid-repair. Any raw or unpainted lumber in the installation marks what’s still temporary. The gap also kept the house literally in motion - like a cat circling before it settles - until its two halves are eventually rejoined for good.

Some of what’s standing now is 1952 material, some isn’t. How do you decide what gets to stay weathered and original, and what has to be restored or remade?

Restoration should prioritize saving original material, but you run into irrational situations - the pulley system’s fasteners were too corroded to keep, so we replaced them, though we’d never paint over the original cannonballs. Anything we did replace was made to match the original geometry exactly, so the new work disappears and the 1952 elements stand out. It really comes down to patina versus obsolescence.

Rudolph called the Walker Guest House one of his favorite projects, even after a career that included far larger, more celebrated buildings. Why does this small beach house still matter so much to how we think about his work?

Rudolph was young when he built this - it was his first fully independent project. As architects ourselves, we recognize that lightness that comes with youth: the naive confidence you have before experience makes you cautious. It’s arguably the high point of his Sarasota School period - his early run of light, tropical-modern buildings - right before he moved into the heavier, brutalist work he’d later become known for.

Tell us about the restoration process ahead of Basic.Space LA. What did it mean for the house’s legacy to be reintroduced to the public after years out of view?

It’s a gift for any private house, especially one this significant to American architectural heritage, to be opened up to the public. It was fun watching visitors react to the house during the installation - a lot of them imagining what it would be like to actually live there. We wish it could have stayed up longer. There’s a real audience that finds genuine joy in experiencing a piece of twentieth-century design history firsthand.

The Walker Guest House was never built to be permanent. It was built to move, to open, to close, to weather. Maybe that’s why it survives now as something closer to a living object than a monument - not fixed history, but a structure still deciding, four inches at a time, what to hold onto and what to let go.

Questions? Reach out to Bailey Jane (bailey.jane@basic.space)

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That same instinct runs through how she works more broadly - pare things back, trust the ingredient, leave room for what can’t be controlled. She’s more drawn to restraint than spectacle, and she’d rather keep a little mystery in her process than explain every step of it.

We sat down with Imogen at her London home to talk about taste, luxury, and why she thinks food only really means something once it’s gone.

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What is taste, and what does it mean to you?

Taste is intuition. It’s not just about choosing what you wear or work with - it’s how something makes you feel. It’s all-encompassing.

What makes something timeless?

When it’s in its purest form - permanently useful, permanently functional. It’s a balance between making sense and finding beauty in simplicity. I learned a lot about that through cooking: there are certain things you always return to, things that hold everything together no matter the era. That’s fed into my own work.

When did you first realize that you had taste?

I think that ties into timelessness. When you’re young - cooking, or playing violin like I did growing up - you want to show off every technique you know. That can get in the way; it becomes trendy, or just too much. What actually shows taste is restraint: knowing what to remove. What’s left is instinctively you.

What is the most honest ingredient to you?

Sugar, right now. It’s granular as we know it, but with heat it behaves like glass and can be shaped into almost anything. It’s all about process - a delicate balance of precision, heat, temperature, time. Introduce air and it expands in a way that’s out of this world; it’s the height of intimacy and physical action with an edible material. It forces spontaneity, because you lose a degree of control, whether through heat or air. It’s exciting and it keeps you on edge - hot, unpredictable, always testing you.

When I work with it I wear white cotton gloves under two or three layers of plastic, and use a blowtorch at a precise heat. I don’t think I’ve explored it fully yet, I’m still getting to know it. That feels honest.

What’s your culinary red flag when you walk into a restaurant?

Having worked in restaurants, I know you’re thinking about so many things at once, not just the food, but lighting, temperature, service, anticipating what people want and how they feel. There’s a lot of empathy in restaurants, and I think about that with any event project: how someone’s going to feel, how they’re introduced, the choreography of the space. I’ve been to places where the food is amazing but nothing else lines up, and that’s always disappointing - it’s multifaceted, you can’t rely on the food alone.

At the restaurants I worked in, we’d sit in every chair and ask: is anyone looking at something weird, are they too close to this, how will they feel getting here? You have to put yourself in someone else’s position to curate a space that makes people feel good. That wholesomeness matters, especially in dining.

What’s the single most versatile ingredient in the world – and what’s its most boring execution?

Salt. It preserves, flavors, changes form - the most useful ingredient there is. The most boring use of it is the wrong salt for the wrong job: there’s a salt for seasoning pasta or vegetables, a different one for finishing, another for dipping. People get that wrong constantly, or they buy bad salt with no real flavor - and salt has an enormous range of flavor to get right or wrong.

What’s a flavor combination you love but sounds like it shouldn’t work?

I’m Chinese and Korean, and that’s my comfort food - what my family has always cooked. Bringing that into more European ingredients, without it reading as “fusion” - I don’t love that word - the flavors just balance each other. Chinese cuisine in particular understands salty, bitter, sweet, sour, savory as one balance. Introducing something that doesn’t seem to belong to a cuisine can come out in really interesting ways.

If you had to strip your style down to three core flavors, what would they be?

Salty, sweet, and sour.

How does minimalism show up in food?

Negative space - in plating, on a table, wherever. People confuse overcrowding with generosity, like abundance has to be visible. I’d rather let something breathe, let it be flavorful without a lot of accompaniment, or let something so fresh and seasonal stand on its own. That restraint - letting ingredients speak for themselves - starts with using ingredients that are strong enough to do that.

Walk us through how your process usually starts.

Food is chaotic, and beautifully so. It’s always either growing or dying, and in between it’s melting, dissolving, dehydrating, changing shape. My work is about finding a moment of stillness inside that, and thinking about how someone will experience something before the first taste or touch.

So deciding on a project means asking: how do we take this chaotic, natural thing and control it for a moment, while accepting that everything you make will eventually be destroyed? Food is the only medium where you have to ruin it to fully experience it. That has to be in your mind for any recipe or project, whatever comes out of it follows from there.

How do you know when something is finished?

Finding that fleeting moment of stillness, despite everything working against you - an ingredient out of season, too much moisture in the air, dough suffering in the heat. You have to stay open and instinctive, and know when the time is right, even if it means abandoning what you thought would work. I’ve learned the same thing doing event work: with a fixed number of hours, you leave room for the elements and just make sure what you’ve done stays intentional and still lands.

Imogen curated her favorite pieces on Basic.Space - sculptural vintage lighting, monochrome seating, and design objects that catch your eye without announcing themselves. Shop the collection now.

Watch the full Taste episode on Imogen Kwok on Youtube.

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We sat down with Kleinian to talk about UV printing, electrical engineering, and what a civilization sifting through the wreckage of the AI age might make of us thousands of years from now.

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How does each piece begin? Can you walk us through how the idea comes together, from pixels to rock?

The first piece started as a Photoshop project, a “Google Earth rock.” I found a source for the rocks, photographed one, and Photoshopped a map onto it, then posted the image and mostly forgot about it.

Eventually I built a rough prototype, trying to UV-print directly onto rock with a flatbed printer. The ink was too thick to seep in - it just sat on top, and the prototype fell apart. But I’d filmed it, and that video sat in my camera roll for months. When I finally posted it last October, it went viral on TikTok, and that’s when I decided to actually start making these for real.

I’d just left my job as an art director, so I had free time, and I started working out of a studio with my friend Austin. Time, space, and resources all came together at once.

Now each piece is a balance of what’s culturally resonant, what looks visually striking, and what tells the story I’m after. I source rocks based on vibe, measure the exact dimensions, photograph them, and build a Photoshop artboard to match. Some pieces need real design work to fit a screenshot’s proportions onto an irregular rock; others I build entirely from scratch - the desktop rock, for instance, is a fully custom UI I designed in Figma, folders and all. The FaceTime rock is a fabricated screen built from my own camera roll. It’s a mix of found imagery, original design, and interfaces I build myself.

What materials are involved, and what does “calcifying” actually mean in relation to the work?

A lot of what I’ve been perfecting over the past few months is getting the ink to actually seep into the pores of the rock instead of sitting on top - that’s crucial for the pieces to last.

“Calcifying” is about taking moments of UI we see every day and making them physical and permanent. Interfaces change constantly - an early iOS screenshot or the first Windows desktop already reads as nostalgic. But beyond the updates, the pixels lighting up our screens represent one exact moment in time. They’re literally just light, nothing physical.

So the question becomes: how do you preserve light?

What are you working on in the studio right now?

Probably my most ambitious piece yet - a permanent installation for a ceramics museum in Korea. It’s four rocks that together tell the story of the evolution of sound and music: the first is just the natural sounds of Earth, the second traces early human rhythm and instrument-making, the third moves into electronic music and production, and the fourth is AI-generated sound.

Each rock has an audio device embedded inside it, so visitors can plug in headphones and hear a soundscape built specifically for that piece. I’m collaborating with two producer friends on the sound. It’s also my first time doing electrical engineering - learning to solder and build these devices from motherboards, plus fabricating the stands. It’s a big jump in production, and it’s coming together fast, so I’ll be heads-down on it for the next month.

You describe the work as “speculative archaeology.” Can you explain that concept and the audience you imagine encountering these objects?

I’m drawn to the idea of people looking back at us - at who we were as a civilization in 2026. We’re at the forefront of an AI revolution, and so much of our lives happen in a digital realm that’s literally just lights and pixels on a screen.

A lot of how we communicate - and what invokes emotion in us - depends on the context we’ve built up over time. A single emoji can carry wildly different meanings depending on how you’ve seen it used before; memes work the same way. That entire language exists only digitally.

So imagine a post-apocalyptic world with no electronics left, everything buried under rubble - what would actually remain? That question is a lot of where the work comes from.

What do you want to say or preserve about our current relationship with technology, particularly as the line between what is real and fabricated becomes increasingly blurred?

I don’t think I’ve fully explored that question yet. I get a lot of comments from people who assume my work itself is AI-generated, probably because of how surreal the pieces look.

I did make one piece that plays directly with that line: a rock with a QR code that led to a site I coded, where you had to pass a CAPTCHA to prove you’re human. Once verified, AI generated an image of a cave painting onto that rock. I’m interested in keeping work in that space between AI and humans.

Where do you see the work going next?

I want to make machines. I don’t fully know how yet, but I want to start building functional objects, furniture, and mechanical things out of natural materials. The Korea project is my first step in that direction - combining natural materials with electronics and function. Eventually I’d love to put something like an AI bot inside a natural object, like a tree. I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, but that intersection of natural materials, technology, and function is where I want to keep pushing.

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White grew up in an 1800s gristmill outside Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina, at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She learned to weld with her grandfather in the marsh outside Charleston, trained in a goldsmithing studio in the Netherlands, and moved to Los Angeles, where a larger studio led her practice to expand in scope and scale. From ruby-encrusted taxidermy goat hooves to red clay dirt from back home, her singular material language examines the relationship between our outer and inner worlds.

We sat down with Marley in her LA studio to talk Bible Belt aesthetics, the holiness of filth, and the line between devilish unruliness and childlike play.

Where did you grow up?

Traveler’s Rest, South Carolina; the beginning of Appalachia. In an old gristmill used to process cornmeal, water wheel and all, about thirty minutes from the closest proper town.

We had a lot of Tennessee fainting goats, which I hadn’t thought about when I started working with goat hooves, but my brother came in and was like, “Is this because we had all those goats?” – especially the ones propped up on the hooves, because that’s what it looks like when a fainting goat gets scared and faints. A car would drive by, they’d all faint, and somebody would come running into our house thinking they’d killed all the goats. They were all pets, no farm purpose. We started with two and ended up with twenty-one, each named after a different Harry Potter character.

Was craft part of your world growing up, or something you found on your own?

It definitely was part of the world I grew up in. I’d “help” my grandpa and his friend weld, but I was young, so I was just kind of there learning. My dad was always building, or working on cars or sheds or chicken coops, so there was a lot of physicality in the learning. My mom was an architect, so there was a lot of drawing and art early on too. I always thought I’d go into medicine, or something having to do with the body, which is interesting because so much of the work I make now is about the body, and the way the inside and outside are affected by the spaces around us.

What was it like moving to LA? Did it change how or what you make?

Yes; I lived in the Netherlands before this, working primarily in a silver- and goldsmithing studio, so my work was much smaller in scale, in the language of jewelry. But when I moved to LA and got this studio, I had all this space, and I immediately started making very large work. The first big piece I made was this eight-foot chair. It felt exciting to take ideas I’d been thinking about in a really internal, intimate way and make them way more spatial – to take advantage of what it means to walk through something or around it. Before, I was the inverse of that, situating all these ideas inside the body, making internal adornments.

What draws you to such tactile, bodily materials?

Where I grew up, all the dirt is red clay. When I was really young, I went to school in a city, and I’d feed the goats before school and track red clay behind me in the halls. I was so embarrassed I’d shuffle it under other people’s chairs so nobody would think I was the one leaving all the dirt. Then, I was probably nine when I heard the Gillian Welch song “Red Clay Halo,” this beautiful ballad about red clay being holy – getting into the gates of heaven in a red clay halo. The idea that the dirt and filth is what’s holy, against a biblical idea of filth and purity, I thought was such a perfect metaphor. I grew up in the Bible Belt, very Christian, and I find that a great lens for thinking about belief systems and the way they’re mimicked by our physical surroundings.

So every time I came back to LA I’d bring a bag of red clay with me through the airport; I mean, every time I go through TSA it’s the goat hooves, or the bag of dirt, or the tools. I never go through without getting stopped. Last time I had a suitcase full of summer sausage from Wisconsin, and that was just for eating. But they were very curious about it.

You mentioned goats earlier, and shepherds. Tell me more about growing up in the Bible Belt, and how that affects what you make.

I use so much biblical symbology, especially in the work I first started making when I moved back to the States. Living abroad really changed my idea of the South. I’d say it’s the fetishization of faith you find there – a belief system that’s not based in an intellectual understanding, that embeds in your body before you’re conscious of it. I think that’s such an interesting way to think about the social and political situations happening now.

I’ve been obsessed with that biblical logic of spatialized reasoning; you personify belief. When you’re in church, you take the Holy Communion and eat it, so it’s inside of you. You’re inside the body of the church, and the body of the church is a group of people. I think every piece I’ve made is playing with that logic.

I’d also say a huge interest of mine is this idea of redneck aesthetics and how they’ve diffused from the South – in progressive areas, aesthetics with conservative origins get separated from their ideology, and that physical separation is very interesting to me. My use of goat hooves plays with that. They’re a symbol of Satan in the Bible, and I play with that idea of devilishness. Each piece has this idea of impurity; instead of evilness, it’s naughtiness, being unruly. I also use lead a lot, and the history of lead causing unruly behavior in children who’d eat it because it was sweet is just so conceptually interesting. The tub piece [from Basic.Space LA] has the lead and the hooves, giving it this devilish unruliness that also always has a childlike play about it.

Is there a piece that feels like the clearest distillation of what you’re after?

I’d say the first goat hoof. I’d been researching and thinking a lot about devilishness, using the imagery of lambs and shepherds and the parables around them. So I found somebody with taxidermied goat hooves, got them, and they sat in my studio. I’d also been using rubies for a while. I think the aesthetic of bedazzling is very interesting and dense. In traditional religious sculpture, rubies represent the blood of Christ and purity.

A friend curating a show came in and asked where my piece was, and I hadn’t had one. So I quickly took one of the hooves and set rubies in the palm of it, and I thought, this is the most concise thing I’ve made. A sculpture is good when it’s very concise, when it’s not over-speaking – this direct comparison of the devilish, naughty symbol, this baby little black goat hoof, against these playful rubies. It also reminds me of shirts in the South covered in rhinestones. And what’s usually stuck on the bottom of a hoof is dirt; here it was rubies, this symbol of purity and the blood of Christ. It just feels super cheeky.

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Nothing YY makes is final. Tawanda Chiweshe and Francisco Gaspar met folding clothes on a shop floor in London and went on to spend nearly a decade building a generation’s visual language together, first at Virgil Abloh’s ALASKA ALASKA, now as YY. Their objects for IKEA, Mercedes-Maybach, Vitra, and WhatsApp, and their exhibition AAAAYY: same same but different, are treated less as finished statements, more as prototypes released in-progress on purpose.

We sat down with Gaspar and Chiweshe to talk about taste, timelessness, and why the unfinished thing might be the most honest one.

What is taste, and what does it mean to you?

TC: Taste is conviction, really. Everything is subjective, and things can also just be styled. If there’s no conviction and you’re doing what other people are doing, you’re following a playbook, and that’s not taste.

FG: For me, it’s also filtering – the capacity to understand the current conditions of a moment, and filter what’s necessary for that time and context. That’s what taste is defined by, as difficult as taste is to define.

TC: You can’t buy taste. That’s what I’ll say.

How do you decide what’s worth keeping versus letting go?

FG: That’s a recurring question we ask ourselves at the studio. What we can and can’t let go of needs to be bigger than ourselves – the moment we put too much of ourselves into it is the moment we constrain the idea from existing or not.

TC: The question we always ask is, what is the best idea? And the best idea always wins – because it’s the thing that actually serves the intention of the context or application, bigger than trying to value objects and justify their existence.

What’s your taste red flag?

FG: For me, there are two big ones: explanation and language. If you try to explain an idea into the world, that’s a red flag. Language is extremely limiting; even for us, in our ability to actualize ideas across disciplines without being defined by a medium, but rather a point of view.

TC: The only way to really test an idea is to see it in multiple applications – the same language can’t exist in multiple applications, so consistency is almost a red flag. It’s about doing what’s actually right for a moment, space, time, and place. Otherwise you’re just making a brand. I’m not interested in being a brand.

Tell us about one piece you love and why.

TC: I love the collection we did inspired by the K67 – a love letter to Saša [Mächtig], its inventor. Transmuting the language into different design typologies was an exercise in understanding the original intent and doing something relevant in dialogue with something iconic. The sofas, for me…I think they’re fire.

FG: The door handle we designed with Izé has the most meaning, because of the context in which it exists and the dialogue it creates relative to the space we’re trying to open up in design.

What piece in here has the best story attached to it?

FG: [One] object became a consolidation of our practice into one single piece. It started with an idea that failed, that we tried not to release – and we found another way. One of the biggest learnings: if we don’t tell people the limitations, are those limitations even real?

TC: It’s also an exercise in context – we’re not reinventing the wheel, just modifying a component to serve a different purpose. It’s the capacity to connect, iterate, reinvent.

FG: We just call it the Connector. It’s not that deep.

Walk me through how something actually gets made. Where does it start?

TC: It always starts with an idea. We’re interested in fleshing things out and iterating, letting one idea inform the next – an accumulation process, a snowball effect.

FG: Beyond an idea, it’s also a trigger – internal or external. Whatever we see or consume always comes back into the practice and informs what we put into the world.

What’s the last thing you made that actually surprised you?

FG: We’ve been surprised by a few ideas in the last couple of months as we progress them further. We’re so reactionary that everything feels pertinent to the moment.

TC: It’s the result of prioritizing meaning over output – we’re not trying to prescribe outcomes, the idea’s already validated internally. So you end up surprised. It’s gardening.

FG: We’re very much like kids at the studio – when you’re excited by something, you push it forward without prescribing an outcome.

How do you know when something is finished?

FG: I don’t think anything is ever really finished or unfinished. For the last year or so, we’ve focused on prototyping as more than a stage in the design process. It’s a worldview: the ability to iterate continuously on multiple ideas, letting everything inform each other.

TC: We’re a practice that oscillates with different outcomes feeding one another at the same time. Even if something appears finished because it’s launched, the remnants of that thread show up in another context. So it’s not finished.

FG: We publish a lot of processes – things not finished, cutting-room-floor ideas. The practice might look messy, but it’s actually very rigorous. The unfinished holds the most truth about an idea – right now, with everything happening from an AI perspective, I feel like the prototype has the most value.

TC: The prototype is the most human thing. People forget the value of the feedback loop – it’s necessary to really complete the process of developing an idea, and releasing it is part of that.

FG: This is why the Connector project is so interesting - we thought it should do something it wasn’t the best fit for. Sending it to peers, they’re using it differently than we expected, but the outcomes are incredible. At the end of the day, no one really cares about anyone’s idea. It needs to just be in the world, and you see how people react.

TC: The best idea wins.

Watch the full TASTE episode with YY on Youtube.

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Every recording holds more information than almost any system will ever play back. Most consumer audio is built around that gap – Bluetooth, DSP, compression, all working to fake what got lost, to make a small driver in a small box sound bigger than it is. High fidelity works from the opposite logic. Every component in the chain – source, cartridge, phono stage, amplifier, crossover, driver, cabinet – is chosen to add nothing and remove nothing. You hear the room where it was made, not the room where you're sitting. Paul W. Klipsch put it plainly: "The better the speaker, the worse it sounds, until other sources of distortion and inaccuracy have been eliminated." A great speaker doesn't flatter its environment; it reveals it. The speaker isn't the instrument; the room is.

We caught up with Brown about how he got here and where he’s heading next.

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When did you realize you wanted to do this full time? What led you to start Friendly Pressure?

I’d wanted to build my own speaker since around 2018, but there was a lot of applied research to do before I knew if it was something I could attempt myself, before bringing a team together around what I wanted to build. My first prototype came in late 2021. At that point I knew I’d done something that had legs.

What are the technical and experiential differences between a more traditional consumer audio system and a dedicated hi-fi setup?

A traditional consumer audio system suggests that the typical consumer listens to low-resolution audio in mono through a Bluetooth connection with DSP - digital signal processing - which creates most of the experiential tonality by filling in the gaps of what’s not there. A dedicated hi-fi setup is designed to communicate and translate every single detail held in a preferably analogue source signal.

Is there a listening room you consider the standard? What makes it right?

Anyone that works with audio on a daily basis will have their reference system - this is the “control” you would need in a science experiment to test a hypothesis against. If that person knows exactly how one of their reference tracks sounds on that system in its usual position in a space, they should be able to hear the difference in the cables used in that signal chain. In short, the standard is subjective to that practitioner.

What’s the commission you’re most proud of?

Stone Island. From a materiality and design perspective it feels like the most collaborative project we’ve been able to activate - with a team that feels like a family, just like ours.

What do you want to create, curate, or collect that you haven’t yet?

More fine art and sculpture.

Where do you tend to find inspiration, and what’s inspiring you lately?

Ninety percent of what I’ve made to date references the most iconic systems I’ve seen or heard. Most of these are the classic heritage systems from the legacy brands. That’s where the language comes from.

Hi-fi has become a design language, and Friendly Pressure is one of its most compelling new voices. At Basic.Space London, Friendly Pressure partnered with Kevin Parker's Telepathic Instruments to build a listening room from the speakers outward.

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At Monument, rare furniture and objects are approached not as functional pieces but as artworks in their own right - each selected for its material presence, historical significance, and sculptural quality. Their discerning eye has attracted a growing international clientele, establishing Monument as a notable voice within the contemporary collectible design landscape.

We sat down with the pair at their East London gallery ahead of Basic.Space London.

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What does taste mean to you?

VS: Taste is something that’s developed over time that requires thought and investigation. Taste is very individual - it’s a form of creative expression. I have a great respect for someone with entirely different taste to yours.

How did you approach building this space?

LFS: It was really important to us that we could create an environment that was Monument. We’re in this industrial village, it’s super unexpected. People walk down the driveway phoning ahead asking, “am I in the right place?” But as soon as you walk to the door you see the first sphere, and for us that’s the moment you’ve arrived. As you make your way up the stairs we’ve deliberately placed pieces that represent us - rocks, stone, warm lighting - and then the main gallery opens up as this canvas for us to experiment in.

What do you want people to feel when they’re in it?

VS: We wanted to be able to present pieces on their own, to really hero the works. Every piece needs enough space for the viewer to contemplate, away from any domestic context. We like our pieces to be seen as artworks rather than objects in a home - we find that gives them a deeper perspective.

How has your eye changed since you started?

LFS: What’s interesting is that what we have in the gallery at any point really reflects where we are in our own research. When we started out we were very into 1970s Italian - a lot of marble, a lot of stone. It was highly impractical; we must have shifted tons of it over the first few years. As our taste evolved we started to seek out the radical design of the 1980s - what was happening in the UK and specifically in Germany. Part of what was happening then was the use of industrial materials - a lot of metal, a lot of steel - and you see it start to creep into our collection. Now people would probably say we’re more known for metals.

Is there a misconception around the work you gravitate towards?

LFS: I think it can be perceived as something that is hard or cold. But we don’t experience it that way. We see it as something that can be used really artfully. You see it with more fluid forms or more geometric angular forms. It’s an exciting material and it has a lot more possibilities than stone.

Is there a piece here that speaks to that - something with an unexpected history?

LFS: This mirror was designed by Tom Dixon in the early 90s as a special commission for James Worrell. Tom was known for his period of creative salvage in the 80s, working with scrap metal from Chelsea scrapyard - but this piece was really about what was available to him at the time. He’d moved to a studio next to someone working on air conditioning ventilation, and that material - galvanised zinc - was simply what was at hand. Only 25 were ever made; four are in the home of one individual, and this is the fifth. Very typical of Tom’s work. We love it.

Is there a piece in the space that feels especially significant to you?

VS: This trio, the Sensilla Chair and Sensilla Messa, designed in 1988 by the late Christoph R. Siebrasse. He and his partner Rainer Schenk were key figures of the new German design movement. What’s really special about this piece is that it’s the first of its kind to be fully suspended using wire that was used regularly in aircraft. As a furniture artist he brought something entirely new to the form.

How do you think about the relationship between pieces?

LFS: The conversation we’re most interested in is juxtaposition. Sometimes there is this less obvious language that the designers or artists have imbued, and you can see how the forms connect - or the philosophy connects - and we really love to play with that. We acquired the Otto Zapf ‘Softline’ cabinet for that reason. It was inspired by apparel - you can see it with the studs, the soft fabric, the zippers. It’s quite unusual for us, but against the metals, against the stone, its softness combined with its grand size means it holds its own. That for me feels like a great conversation within the space.

Watch the full Taste episode on Monument on Youtube.

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Earlier in his career, Ross worked with the late Virgil Abloh, before founding A-COLD-WALL* where he recently sold his majority stake.⁠⁠ Now, through his British atelier, SR_A ‘Studio Research Attire’, Ross creates atelier garments, and distinct hard luxury goods. He continues to partner with select groups including Nike, Kohler, LVMH, Apple Group, and Aqua di Parma through SR_A.⁠⁠

We got to visit him at his rural studio in the Midlands ahead of his exhibit at Basic.Space London.

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What does taste mean to you?

Taste is a life experience expressed through material, texture, form, and a sense of closeness - emotions coming together in material form. It’s about belonging to a place or culture, expressed through shape and material.

Taste and style are one in the same - it’s music, culinary, scent, light within a curated space - all determined by your life’s experiences. Taste is living, not an object. It’s analogous to newness, a growing principle. You can’t buy it - it’s something you grow into.

To a degree, taste is knowledge, even knowledge that has nothing to do with design or art. Taste is also about providence and choice - moving into a particular aesthetic or sensibility or politics. It’s a way to signal who we are and our place in the world.

Do you think the rational side of us has to think about what we do, or is it more instinct?

Taste is something that should be felt more than thought. There’s a tension - taste has two aspects that are totally organic and flow from the self, but the self is shaped by outer engagements and experiences. It’s an elastic band - the push and pull creates energy and definition. Ideally you want someone to pursue higher tastes and higher principles of being a good human, through literature, art, learning, language, food, travel. Taste is a response to that pursuit.

What does luxury mean to you?

Luxury is simply time - the ability to think across a longer throw of time and not be reactive to trend cycles. The word he prefers is “artisan” - the return of reverence for the craftsperson. Dedicating yourself to a particular discipline or craft, sometimes for half a century or longer - that is luxury. Fundamentally, luxury is the expression of excellence more than a price barrier.

What makes something timeless?

The principle and the application. Timelessness relates to materiality, structure, and quality of materials. The studio they’re in was established in the 15th century - nearly 600 years of custodians caring for it generation to generation. That level of care and cultivation from the very start validates timelessness. Timelessness and stewardship are one in the same. Creating without the expectation of immediate sale leads to more comprehensive, timeless works.

Creating simply as a process - not for a market - is perhaps the most pious way to approach timelessness. If you’re creating to sell immediately, it works in that moment but not in 20 years. Like Michelangelo - he created for himself, as human research, and it still works today.

Were you inspired by someone in your family?

My father had a huge impact. Both my parents are painters who show and tour their work regionally, and both are academics who teach in the arts and craft space, for 25-30 years. The household discourse was always around expression, liberty, and the arts. My parents are fundamentally socialists and Marxists - their north star for success had no interest in worldly things, which meant the principles surrounding the art were uninterrupted.

How do you know what is worth keeping versus letting go?

I don’t like to let go of much - I’ve kept every sketch and drawing for close to a decade. The idea of planting seeds and having early sprouts of conversation that harvest five to six years on is how SRA has cultivated distinct works with incredible people. Nothing is thrown away, though some things are harvested in place.

Walk me through how something actually gets made - where does it start?

Everything starts from hand and from thought. It’s draftsmanship - drawing, sketching, lucid painting - not necessarily deeply rooted in research. Over time, shapes and forms come about from trying to create tension or contrast, pulling different influences and worlds together relevant to the manifesto of my practice. There’s a lot of walking involved - switching on and off, revisiting ideas again and again. The process can’t be rushed. There is no stop and start point; time simply runs out and the idea has to be submitted.

Watch the full Taste episode on Samuel Ross on Youtube.

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Illya Goldman Gubin sculpts the overlooked into something you can sit on, something you can keep. The Berlin-based Ukrainian artist works across installation, sculpture, and furniture with a quiet specificity - taking materials of transit and utility and asking what else they could be. A crushed cardboard box, a dark-textured shoe, a raw foam arrangement - familiar on the surface, but look closer and something shifts. Through his Berlin studio IGG Atelier, his work blurs function, material, and intent without resolving any of them, a quality that has drawn collaborators like ECCO and Rimowa, and collectors like Demna, who keeps Gubin's pieces in his private collection. He embraces imperfection as a philosophy, the scalability of materials as a question. Each piece invites you to look closer, to touch it, and ultimately, to question it.

We got to chat with Illya at his studio outside of Berlin ahead of his exhibit at Basic.Space London.

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What does taste mean to you?

Taste is a sum of one’s filtered perceptions - an accumulation of what you observe, and what your brain decides to keep. There’s a famous saying, “one only sees what one already knows,” which is beautiful. The more you know, the more you see.

What’s worth keeping and what’s worth letting go?

Since 2022, I got into this space where I try to detach myself from things. My goal became to own less and less. It becomes a burden to own too much. The less I own, the better.

What is something you want to own next?

Without sounding cliché - more time.

What’s the object that made you fall in love with design?

The narratives in the art world made me fall in love with the creative industry. Not the object itself, but the story - why this object is allowed to exist in the world. The idea is more important than the execution. The narrative behind what I create is more important than the piece.

What was the last thing you made that surprised you?

My last show in Seoul. The space had two concrete walls in the middle of the room - one damaged at the base, one intact. I hadn’t researched the space beforehand. But I’d made a cardboard bench in a semi-transparent white finish, deformed on one side and kept fully normal on the other. Only once I was in the space did I realize how precisely the piece echoed those walls - the damaged side mirroring the damaged wall, the clean side mirroring the fresh one. Those alignments are very exciting.

What’s the most underrated part of your process that no one sees?

My work is very performative. The way I deform my cardboard pieces involves my full body - I lay on the box, I hack it, I sit on it. It gets very physical. That part I never show.

How do you know when something is finished?

My pieces should never be finished. I enjoy the imperfection in my work. I work very precisely, but at some point there are so many chances that you just decide to keep - and that’s what makes each piece unique.

What are some pieces here you love and why?

Right now I’m very engaged with this new execution of the cardboard stool. My question at the moment is: how can I change the color of the box without changing the actual color of the box? We use cardboard to transport and protect things - art, furniture, whatever. I use it constantly, so I wanted to integrate that material directly into the work. Change the color without changing it. There’s an actual idea behind it.

The shelving pieces are also something I’m drawn to. They’re standard galvanized shelf units, but what happens to them is completely unintentional - when zinc comes into contact with water, or water sits in a place without enough airflow for a long time, a chemical reaction occurs. That result belongs to no one.

Walk me through how something actually gets made - where does it start for you?

What a lot of people don’t know is that the form exists first. Once that’s complete, I go through the process of finalizing it so it also becomes functional.

Watch the full Taste episode on Illya Goldman Gubin on Youtube.

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Okuda came to furniture through fabrication – years building work for artists and architects, learning what objects could hold before making his own. Waka Waka is now a full commission practice spanning restaurants, retail, and residential interiors, each piece built by hand in his Atwater Village studio. The reference points are Japanese postmodernism. The result is something harder to categorize: functional, considered, and resistant to being either.

How did Waka Waka start?

My wife opened Iko Iko in 2009. A friend said there was an interesting store, so I went. I went back a second time, then a third. We started dating, got married. I was making furniture for her events, people started buying it, and she told me I should name the line. We were in the car one day and the Fela Kuti song called Waka Waka came on - and that was it.

Where did you get the confidence to pursue design as a career?

I’ve always just needed to be making something. Before Waka Waka, I spent years fabricating for artists and architects, and that was enough. But eventually I wanted to make things that were mine. You start finding your own language, and once you find it, you just keep following it.

What role does material play in your work - why Baltic birch, and why laminate?

Baltic birch was already part of the vocabulary of Los Angeles when I arrived - deeply tied to mid-century furniture here. It felt like the right foundation. I also have a mild color blindness, so for the first few years I leaned into that limitation: just birch with an oil finish, nothing else. Around 2015 I started pushing toward color - beginning with a specific red, the kind used in Japanese Urushi lacquer - and that opened everything up. Laminate came later, through my love of Memphis, which has always been as much about surface as form. Most of my sheets come from Abet Laminati, the company behind the movement’s iconic finishes.

What design movements have shaped your thinking?

I’m drawn to many things - Bauhaus, Memphis, but also very old Japanese minimalism. Shrine and temple architecture. Tea house architecture from the 1500s and 1600s. They’re very different worlds, but I find they speak to each other in the work. I’m not trying to resolve that tension so much as let it exist.

What are you working on right now?

Mostly commission work - restaurants, retail, residential. But I’ve always wanted to do a hotel, and I’m finally doing it. One in Tokyo, in Asakusa. One in Fukuoka, which is my hometown. It feels like a full circle, in a way.

You’ve said you want your furniture to have character, but not be too loud. How do you walk that line?

It’s about finding the balance between functionality and something more considered. I don’t want the furniture to make demands - I want people to decide for themselves how it fits into their lives. Everyone has a different way of living, a different sense of comfort. The pieces are meant to be a suggestion, not a statement.

You grew up in Japan and built your life in LA. What do you miss, and what keeps you here?

Order. In Japan, everything functions - that’s simply how it is. You don’t notice it until you leave.

What keeps me here is the sense that something new is always possible. Japan is an old country, deeply established, and that’s beautiful but it doesn’t leave much room for reinvention. Los Angeles does.

Walk us through your design process.

Inspiration tends to come when I’m moving, not sitting still - the way a door is hung, materials stacked at a construction site that happen to look interesting together. I try to keep many drawers of ideas, so when a commission comes in I can open one and see if something fits.

I start with pen and paper, then move to the computer to fully resolve the piece before anything is cut. I want to maximize every sheet of material - when something gets thrown away, it genuinely bothers me. I keep all the scraps, and sometimes I’ll build a project specifically around what’s left over. That constraint usually leads somewhere interesting.

We caught up with three of our rare print dealers – Geoff Snack of Wrong Answer in New York, Taylor Kan of Offbrand Library in Toronto, and Sean Brickhill of First Edition Library in Melbourne. They came to this work from different places and work in different ways, but they share an underlying discipline: the best print objects are the ones you have to know how to find.

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ON PRINT AS GATEWAY

Every collector starts somewhere specific. Often, the book that drew them in is still on their shelf. For Geoff Snack, it was a Damien Hirst artist book - I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now - that he asked for on his birthday in high school. At the time, it cost somewhere between $100-$200; it sells for many times that today, and Snack still owns it. He named the project Wrong Answer because ideas initially deemed ‘wrong’ – for instance, Pop Art and Minimalism – often reveal themselves as ‘right’ down the line. He collects against the current consensus.

For Taylor Kan, it was a Raf Simons Spring/Summer 1997 Teenage Summercamp lookbook he had to have as a teenager. That obsession grew into a childhood-bedroom archive that got so large he started posting scans online. “Enough people asked if the pieces were for sale,” he says, “and the rest is history.” Offbrand Library remains an extension of Taylor’s shelf today.

For Sean Brickhill, it started with skate magazines. Then zines made by friends. Then making his own. Ari Marcopoulos, Ed Templeton, and Greg Hunt were early inspirations. Time spent shooting and reading eventually went into collecting, and First Edition Library was born.

ON PRINT AS FILTER

Curation is an elimination game by nature. What gets kept and what gets passed over is mostly invisible work – it’s the discipline of looking past the cover.

Snack calls it 'instinct informed by context.’ A book piques his interest, and then he digs – who made it, who owned it, where it sits in history. Two pieces he brought to Basic.Space prove the method: the first is a 1940s architecture book with an off-brown cover, completely unremarkable on its surface, except that it came out of Buckminster Fuller’s library and is signed and dated in Fuller’s hand. The second is a beat-up copy of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, missing its dust jacket. Open it and you’ll find an inscription from Warhol to a Factory photographer, complete with a small soup can drawn in the margin. “On the surface, it looks like garbage,” Snack says.

Brickhill’s approach: buy what you’d want to own, usually titles that inspire his creative practice (even better if its a first edition). He recently got his hands on Shomei Tomatsu’s Okinawa Okinawa, a foundational book in post-war Japanese photography. It was priced far below market, with one page missing and another ripped. “If it doesn’t sell,” he says, “I don’t mind having a copy that’s missing a page. My favourite spread is still intact.”

Kan’s eye leans fashion-heavy, with plenty of space for discovery. His standout pick on Basic.Space is Nest Magazine, Issue 12 – the one with the die-cut shape running through every page and an intimate feature by Nan Goldin on her time in the hospital. “Nest definitely has its cult following,” he says, “but I think the wider market may be unaware of how unique this publication is as a whole.”

ON PRINT AS HUNT

The book never comes to you. You go to it. Sometimes it takes years.

Snack works the way the best New York dealers always have – the street, flea markets, a small network, occasional online hunts. “I’ve found extremely rare books on the street,” he says. He’s after one-of-ones now; the market has gotten too good at finding similar.

Many of Brickhill’s best finds come from Japanese dealers, but the real gems are often waiting in op shops (thrift stores). “People often skim over skinny books, saddle-stitched books with no title on the spine. Sometimes the zines and catalogues can be the most valuable.” The market moves quickly in both directions – he recently missed a cheap copy of Gaetano Pesce’s Il Rumore Del Tempo; a week later, the same edition was listed elsewhere at five times the price.

Kan’s trajectory was inside out. The bedroom archive existed long before the store; the audience found the scans, not the other way around. What he’s chasing now is older and rarer – original lookbooks, deadstock catalogues, print that documents what won’t get reissued.

On opposite sides of the world, Kan and Brickhill are hunting the same white whale: the original Comme des Garçons furniture catalog in its metal case. Reprints exist, originals are elusive. Brickhill knows a friend in Melbourne sitting on two copies, waiting for the day one needs to move.

ON PRINT AS REFUSAL

Every collector’s market is also a cultural one – what people are willing to pay for is usually downstream of what they’re tired of.

What’s pulling younger generations back to print, Kan thinks, is the same instinct that pulled him in: a desire to opt out of preordained discovery. “Many of us grew up on algorithm-based platforms like Tumblr and Instagram,” he says. “Nobody is telling you what to see; you flip through and find things you’d never discover otherwise.” Nothing about the book in your hand was optimized for you. That distance – between page and feed – becomes increasingly meaningful.

The titles on Basic.Space didn't get there because an algorithm surfaced them. They got there because three people in three cities went looking, kept looking, and eventually opened the cover everyone else walked past.

Wrong Answer, Offbrand Library, and First Edition Library are on Basic.Space.

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Basic.Space is a curated IRL-to-URL shopping experience for what’s new and next in design, art, and fashion. Own The Future™ is where we go deeper - the why - behind the scenes thinking, inspiration, and motivation for how and what we do.

There is a pattern running through British cultural history that is so consistent it cannot be dismissed as coincidence. Every movement that has mattered– every sound, every scene, every aesthetic that eventually made its way around the world came from somewhere it wasn’t supposed to– or at least definitely wasn’t expected to. This is not a romantic myth, but simply what happened, repeatedly, across decades, in the same city.

These movements did not come from institutions or academies or people with the resources and the connections to make things happen properly. They were birthed from below– from the chaos found at the edge, from people operating at the brink.

I love the expression “brink of possibility” especially when examined alongside chaos, and the (crucial) space it naturally creates for new ideas to emerge and develop.

Over time “chaos” has morphed to be understood as something negative. However, according to Greek mythology, Chaos was the first being to exist, and as it relates to the creation of the universe, chaos is the origin of everything. It is the impossible-to-imagine space at the beginning of time from which everything emerged. A formless space of limitless potential where nothing was yet “in order.”

In philosophy “chaos” is also talked about within the context of order and disorder.

Rather than being something incomprehensible or not yet “in order”, the formless space is what allows for disruption of existing structures to occur. Chaos creates the environment and conditions necessary for new ways of doing, and being, to make their way into existence. It is nearly impossible for new ideas or new forms of order to emerge and naturally develop in a space that has already been organized and shaped to fit a certain form. Ideas, similarly to seeds, need space to grow into their full potential.

In a conversation between Tim Marlow and one of my favorite British icons and artists Rose Wylie, they had the below to say about chaos–

The very liberation Wylie speaks of is why I love the concept of being on the brink of possibility.

It is the high risk, high potential edge between what is currently achievable and what has been deemed impossible– where conventional reality runs out and something else is forced to begin. At the brink there is no choice but to reimagine an alternate reality and to make that next move. Whether that move leads to groundbreaking change or results in total failure is exactly the point. The brink is chaotic in the best way. It is space that represents a moment of immense potential and transformation. The most interesting things always tend to happen when you lean into uncertainty.

Enter the city of London, where Basic.Space’s next edition will be taking place.

So much of British culture was born in this liminal space between old systems and new ways of living in post-war Britain.

The brutalist housing estates of the sixties and seventies– Trellick Tower, Robin Hood Gardens, whole concrete neighbourhoods reaching into the London sky– were utopian propositions for the time. The architecture was idealistic in the way that only architecture can be: it was load-bearing optimism. A hopeful mindset that actively supports, sustains, and carries the weight of believing that designed environments can produce a better society. The definition of load-bearing optimism itself is structural, and the architecture of that era was structural optimism made literal. It acts as a foundation. It is both heavy and supportive. It allows you to endure risks, disappointments, and mistakes while remaining functional enough to continue looking forward. It carries the weight of the past while continuing to look toward the future.

When funding in Britain dried up, maintenance stopped and the communities inside these post-war utopias were left to get on with it. What they got on with turned out to be extraordinary…

The sounds that came out of those spaces– punk, lovers rock, jungle, grime– were not the sounds of people who had been failed. They sounded like people who had decided the official version of things was beside the point. Each scene entirely original, each born in a space the mainstream had written off, each eventually acknowledged as visionary by the same culture that had ignored it first. The concrete meant to be a utopian gift became something the architects never planned for– an autonomous creative territory where nobody was watching, nobody was in charge. It was chaotic and therefore anything was possible.

What made (and makes) the British underground genuinely singular is that all of the artists and voices and designers never stayed in their own lane. The separation that gets imposed later by institutions, academics, and retrospectives is a fiction. In the moment it was always one culture, not several running parallel.

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at SEX on the Kings Road were not running a boutique that also had connections to a band. The clothes and the music and the provocation were a single continuous act, inseparable from each other and from the space they inhabited. Ben Kelly’s interior for the Hacienda made the same argument in a different register— the room, sound, light and design were not separate decisions. Hacienda was not a venue that hosted culture. It was the culture that went on to inspire giants like Virgil Abloh.

Is it a coincidence that this is what Basic.Space has been building? This emphasis on the importance of space and cross disciplinary exchange. Or is the meta-ness of this all a wink from the universe, a glimmer of what’s possible?

For our London edition, space was, as you can now imagine, one of the most important things for us to find. We knew it would become our anchor and our canvas for all the worlds and people we wanted to bring together.

Which brings us to the Old Selfridges Hotel. Brutalist in the truest sense– concrete, deliberate, carrying the same load-bearing optimism as the housing estates built in the same era. It sits in an interesting relationship with the institution that is Selfridges, one of the great temples of commerce and aspiration, right beside it.

Basic.Space London takes up residence at the Old Selfridges Hotel not as a nostalgic gesture toward Hacienda or the warehouse parties or any specific golden era (though that was certainly a huge inspiration) but as a continuation of the same impulse that produced them all. The impulse that says the most interesting things happen in the collision between disciplines, in a room where nobody has told you what you’re supposed to be doing.

Basic.Space London is a living archive of what British creativity actually looks like when it is allowed to be itself: cross-disciplinary, uncontained, shaped from below. Curators, artists, designers and makers from across the UK, brought together not as representatives of their separate fields but as participants in a culture that has never really recognised those separations anyway.

The chaos— the productive, generative, Rose Wylie kind— is our raison d’être. The brink of possibility is where we are operating. This is the space where conventions get challenged, where the future is not yet fixed, where one step forward could change everything.

When we look at the now, many of these spaces have been lost. Fabric nearly shut in 2016, Robin Hood Gardens was demolished. Physical infrastructure continues to disappear as the creative class gets priced out. The age of social media promised more connection but we are more disconnected from ourselves and each other than ever.

Many of today’s crises are underpinned by the belief that we are separate, a hyperindividualism that implies that we hold no responsibility for one another. Underground movements challenge this idea. They naturally foster connection, belonging, and collective agency. What begins below the surface does not remain there. As the expression goes, a rising tide raises all ships.

Music, design, and subcultures extend far beyond aesthetics, reflecting and reshaping wider systems of power, value, and resistance. Long a testing ground for sound, style, and dissent, the underground is, by nature, grassroots: collective, self-organised, and rooted in community.

In a world where loneliness has been declared an epidemic, where third spaces have been in steady decline, physical space is more important than ever. It is not just architectural– it is psychological, cultural, political. It is the distance between what exists and what is possible.

The conditions that created these extraordinary movements still exist– economic pressure, outsider energy, the impulse to make something from nothing. The digital never replaces the physical. But it can support and extend it by widening its reach, and carving out that crucial space. While physical structure has been lost, we have not lost the energy needed. The chaos, the collision, the right people at the right time in the right room– is exactly why it is worth building back. It is exactly why Basic.Space aims to continue extending its reach and creating these spaces empowering our collaborators to Own The Future™.

Basic.Space London will take place 12-14 June at the Old Selfridges Hotel.

Writer, comedian, director, and winemaker Eric Wareheim has traded Hollywood green rooms for greenhouses. These days, he’s more likely to spend an afternoon hunting down a rare Torrey Pine, visiting an aloe grower in Orange County, or wandering a marble yard than at an industry function.

At Serpentine - his sprawling plant design studio and immersive creative space in Boyle Heights - Wareheim has built a world where monumental plants, vintage concrete vessels, and sculptural furniture collide. What began as a longtime fascination with bonsai, mid-century design, and collecting has evolved into a fully realized design language rooted in scale, texture, and atmosphere.

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Step into Serpentine and it’s obvious that Wareheim treats plants as far more than decoration. Here, oversized philodendrons tower overhead, gnarled bonsai roots resemble sculpture, weathered Willy Guhl planters sit beside rare cycads and Australian bottle trees. The setting feels less like a nursery, more like a cinematic environment – one where plants shape space as much as architecture or furniture do.

You’ve said you’re someone who can’t dip a toe into anything. Walk us through the path from directing into plants and design.

I came up directing, then got deeply into food and wine with Las Jaras. Plants were always in the background - my mom’s a master gardener, and I’d been studying bonsai in Japan for years - but it didn’t fully click until I placed a large specimen into a vessel that felt intentional and sculptural. After that, this became the only thing I wanted to do.

Serpentine exists because of how it makes people feel. You can see it as old concrete and silly plants, or you can see it as art. I choose art.

There’s a specific aesthetic running through everything here. Where does the curatorial vision come from?

It started with film. I was obsessed with Kubrick growing up - especially A Clockwork Orange. His production design was unbelievable. The Kubrick exhibition at LACMA completely changed how I thought about visual worlds because it felt less like cinema and more like an art installation.

A lot of the vessels here reference that era. Like fashion, good design always comes back around. I love music from the ’60s and ’70s, so it makes sense that I’m drawn to collecting pieces from that period and pairing them with these wild plants.

A lot of this comes back to scale. How do you find plants, and what was the one that started this?

The philodendron. In Los Angeles it grows everywhere, so most people stop seeing it. But if you present it monumentally, it becomes something completely different.

The entire project is really about scale play. I’m tall, so I rarely get to look up at things. Here, especially in the Oasis, the plants tower over you. They stop feeling like houseplants and start feeling cinematic.

How do you decide when to pass on something?

I honestly don’t pass very often - I definitely have a shopping addiction. But running this as a business means sourcing things responsibly and pricing them fairly.

I wanted Serpentine to feel like the shop I wished existed when I was starting out: approachable, helpful, and genuinely excited about the plants. We’ll plant something for you, check in afterward, help you keep it alive. That kind of care matters.

You have what’s likely the largest Willy Guhl collection in the country. Tell us how it came together.

It hit me like a storm. I started with a few pieces, and suddenly I was completely obsessed.

The Willy Guhl pieces I love most are the painted ones that have aged naturally over decades. The patina, the moss, the weathering - they evolve almost like plants do. That relationship between decay and beauty is a huge part of what I’m drawn to.

A lot of people buy plants; few people design with them. What separates those two things?

My mom has a beautiful catnip garden - it serves a purpose, and it makes her happy. What I’m doing here is something different.

This art form is ancient. Bonsai alone has existed for over a thousand years. Sometimes people see exposed roots and think the plant is being harmed, but the opposite is true. You’re not hurting it. You’re accentuating its most interesting parts.

How did the idea of pairing events with a plant and design space come about?

LA is magical, but the event culture can feel pretty soulless. I’ve always loved creating experiences for friends at home that felt intimate and transportive, and Serpentine naturally became an extension of that. We host sound baths, bonsai workshops, wellness gatherings - people can come buy a plant or simply sit among them for a while.

Where do you source your plants?

Everywhere - Facebook Marketplace, San Diego, longtime growers across California. Right now I’m sourcing a Torrey Pine from the Southern California coast. They’re windswept, sculptural, and incredibly difficult to find.

That’s part of the thrill: tracking down rare specimens and building relationships with growers who’ve spent decades cultivating them. You really have to earn access.

Why the name Serpentine?

The Year of the Snake really resonated with me. Snakes shed their skin, and that idea of transformation felt personal. Around the same time, I started seeing nature differently - even trees suddenly felt emotional and cinematic to me.

Serpentine is ultimately about reinvention. When I got into wine, people questioned it. Plants felt similar. If you care enough to put in the work, you can evolve into something entirely new.

Is there a plant you’re still hunting for?

An Australian grass tree that’s survived wildfires. The bark permanently chars as protection, so it ends up looking almost sculpted by nature. There are only a few in Los Angeles, and they’re incredibly hard to source.

What’s next for Serpentine?

Probably a weekend of sleep. But this work feels very different from film or television. Those projects eventually live on a screen. This is physical - cranes, dirt, trees, people building something together.

My favorite moments are still the quiet ones: coming here alone on a weekend, moving things around, and sitting with the plants.

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Call Eli Russell Linnetz a multi-hyphenate and you’ve already missed the point. Hyphens suggest separation. Linnetz deals in cohesion. His work - spanning directing, photography, styling, and stage design - isn’t a collection of parallel careers but a single, controlled world where taste is the product. Whether shaping visuals for Ye, producing music with Kid Cudi, designing stages for Lady Gaga, or dressing Jon Batiste for the Met, every output extends the same system.

Linnetz grew up in Venice - the boardwalk, the salt air, the secondhand Americana that would become ERL‘s identity. Work arrived early and indirectly: through a synagogue connection, he ended up assisting David Mamet while still a teenager, later finding himself in USC’s opera program, where he performed and learned costume-making as much by proximity as intention. From there, the pattern continued - less a planned trajectory than a series of openings - moving between directing, photography, and stage design without ever settling into a single definition.

By the time Adrian Joffe of Comme des Garçons asked him to create a line for the opening of Dover Street Market LA in 2021, Linnetz had already spent a decade constructing worlds. That same year, he brought that instinct to the Met Gala, dressing A$AP Rocky in a thrifted quilt stitched with his own family name, translating personal history directly into clothing. Recognition followed in quick succession - the Karl Lagerfeld Prize at LVMH in 2022, guest design roles at Dior Men and Pitti Uomo by 2023.

You can't talk about Venice anymore without talking about ERL. The brand isn’t geographic, it’s geological - accumulated out of one specific neighborhood across one specific lifetime. With his feature directorial debut now in production, the world he’s been authoring across every other surface is finally getting the widest frame yet.

You’re often called a “multi-hyphenate,” working across fashion, art direction, photography - and now film. How do you refer to yourself creatively, and how did your interest in these different mediums develop over time?

On every project, I push myself to the ends of reality, reaching to the farthest corners of possibility. So often once I’m done with a project, I don’t think there’s anything else to uncover, causing me to switch gears. It’s only later that I realize perhaps there’s something I left unexplored, which causes me to return. And the cycle repeats itself.

Could ERL exist anywhere else? How does the environment - and Venice Beach specifically - figure into your work?

ERL couldn’t exactly exist, in its current form, anywhere else. That’s why I believe so many people are drawn to the world: because it’s so far from the world they exist in. However, as ERL expands, so does my imagination and curiosity. What does an ERL room look like? What does an ERL bed look like? What’s under an ERL bed? And so on. And not only is it becoming more focused every day, it becomes more unclear, and wider in its vision.

You’ve called yourself devious and provocative. What’s the most provocative thing you’ve done that no one noticed?

I open-mouth kissed a horse once.

You’ve said you don’t have a mood board; you hoard objects. What are you hoarding right now? Anything specific you’re on the hunt for?

Yeah, I can’t stand at the end of shows when I see people presenting a mood board of something we just saw. If you aren’t able to communicate your story through the collection - to evoke a feeling - then what’s the point? That’s why I’m often inspired by objects and things I stumble upon in the real world. I often seek to find order and create solutions to the world around me, as imaginative as my collations can be.

I’m a dreamer, but in a very specific way: mostly by my immediate surroundings, not a photo online or an image someone else has taken. I’m exploring my own mind with my work, not really someone else’s imagination.

You’ve said you think of clothes only as costumes for characters you’re building. Now you’ve written and are directing an actual film - does it feel like the work is catching up to something you’ve always had in mind?

Every season I set out to tell a new story. I can tell you every single thing about that world. There are, however, limitations and timelines when working with clothes. So often only a very small fraction of what I have in my mind survives the clutches of reality. With the feature film, I’m able to paint with an enormous brush, and go down all sorts of rabbit holes, and bring the full vision to the audience.

Talk to Linnetz long enough and the gap shows up between what's been made and what's still queued. ERL - the collections, the press, the prizes - survived the trip from his head into reality. The rest is still in the room, under the bed, in the script. Fashion is no longer the ceiling for a designer with a world to build, and that instinct - to author objects, characters, whole rooms - is exactly what's pushing the design market forward. Linnetz happened to start with the clothes. The push and pull just keeps widening the frame.

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Jesse Lee, founder of Basic.Space, thinks the industry is half-right. Taste matters because of what it earns, he argues. Curation builds trust. Trust licenses convenience. Convenience gives people back their time. And time, in Jesse’s framework, is the only asset no one can manufacture more of.

“Time is the most valuable asset. Convenience helps you accumulate more time.”

That chain - curation to trust to convenience to time - is the operating thesis behind Basic.Space’s multi-category marketplace, and it’s how Jesse explains why the “taste is the moat” narrative misreads consumer behavior. Taste alone doesn’t change behavior. Convenience actually does.

The Hidden Cost of Infinite Options

If convenience is the product, decision fatigue is the tax. Curation is how Basic.Space prevents its customers from paying it.

The problem the platform is solving, in Jesse’s framing, isn’t where to find things - Google solved that. It isn’t where to buy them - Amazon solved that. The unresolved question is: of all of it, what’s actually worth your time?

“Curation is trust,” he says. “And trust enables convenience.”

Infinite choice looks like abundance and feels like a gift but it is actually tax - paid in browse time, in low conviction and uncertainty, in the quiet regret of spending hours finding something you don’t end up buying or loving. Basic.Space’s bet is that a constrained, human-indexed shelf - vetted curators with great taste and integrity, a coherent, discerning point of view with exclusive, limited supply - is 100x more efficient than a million-result+ search page.

The Observer's 2025 design market analysis - charting record-setting auctions for artists like Louis Comfort Tiffany and the Lalannes at Sotheby's - reads like evidence for the same thesis. The collectible design market has always run on discovery, not search. Nobody types "Joris Laarman" into a search bar unless someone has already told them who he is. The buyers setting records weren't searching; they were being shown. Jesse / Basic.Space already saw that dynamic brewing several years ago.

Being Objectively Subjective

To make curation work at scale without collapsing into a mirror of one’s biased opinion, Jesse has a phrase he returns to.

“Being objectively subjective is the single most important skill one can possess.”

He traces the discipline to his agency years, when the work required him to think in mindsets and speak in voices and that weren’t his own - a college student for one brand, aspiring musician for another then a high net-worth executive for something else - because the work was never about him. When a client brought him a problem to solve, the objective wasn’t to tell them what he personally thought.

“My job was to recommend what I thought was best for their brand and their product - to achieve their commercial goal” he says.

The same logic governs decisions inside Basic.Space now. Even what songs play at a Basic.Space event in Los Angeles isn’t a referendum on Jesse’s personal playlist.

“It has to be considered around the environment we want to create for the people that are coming,” he says. “This all goes back to my DJ days. You can’t just play what you want in any environment. That’s how you provide memorable experiences for others.”

But there’s a clarification he wants on the record: being objectively subjective isn’t just crowd-pleasing.

Holding Two Truths

The most frequent critique of Basic.Space is its refusal to pick a category. Vintage and new. Fashion, furniture and art. Online and offline. Category purists find it incoherent. Jesse finds the question itself strange. When people ask why, his answer is simple, “why not?”

It’s fundamentally a different model than conventional retail or online marketplace.

“We’re not in the niche business,” Jesse notes. “We’re in the aggregate of the very best in different-niches business.”

The connective tissue across categories isn’t a vertical or a demographic - it’s the psychographic of the end user. “Enough niches with a coherent, cohesive point of view, and you can get to mainstream scale without losing what made each niche attractive and valuable in the first place” Jesse states. Underneath the category question is a meta-principle he returns to often: holding two truths at the same time. Discovery both online and offline. Expertly understanding both culture and technology. Shopping both vintage and new. Traditional retail forced a choice at every layer; Basic.Space refuses to.

Nostalgia is one place that refusal shows up now. The cultural current pulling toward analog, handmade, human-touch objects is real, Jesse says, and the niche communities driving that conversation are among the most interesting voices in design. But he’s careful not to confuse a nostalgic moment with the direction of history.

“The past is a reference, not a residence,” he says. “The future always wins.”

Again, both thoughts can be true. A platform can recognize and highlight a trend towards something from the past without betting against what’s new and next.

Built, Not Chased

The structural consequences of this worldview show up in how Basic.Space is run. No paid ads. No reliance on influencer placements. Minimal traditional market research.

Influencers (by definition and per contract) are paid to recommend; curators earn trust by choosing. Different economic incentives yield different results. Influence is a media buy. Curation is a reputation. Not having everything for everyone is a feature, not a bug.

Basic.Space’s approach to market research echos what Steve Jobs famously said “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Customers are brilliant at telling you what’s wrong with what exists. They’re unreliable witnesses to what should exist next.

Looking backward builds a slightly nicer version of yesterday. The cost of conviction is being wrong in public. The payoff is an audience you’ve built rather than one you’ve chased.

Quality Input = Quality Output

When Jesse opens Basic.Space his top feed is mostly chairs and hats. When a Vogue editor friend of his logged in she saw mostly jewelry and bags. Same inventory, same curator - two completely different shopping experiences. The “For You” feed and personalized emails take a highly considered shelf and bend it toward the individual.

The input is human: vetted sellers which lead to products/listings with a discerning point of view at the catalog level. The output is machine: a recommendation engine trained on what the customers browsed, liked, and bought. A vetted catalog without personalization is a magazine with a price tag. Personalization without curation is the algorithmic landfill. Basic.Space treats them as one job, split across two layers.

Humans with taste control the input. Machines extrapolate the output.

The Inflection Point (Own The Future™)

Jesse is quick to say Basic.Space is still early.

“We’re very much at the beginning and the bottom of where we want to be. The first 5 years were a lot of small ups and downs but incrementally upwards.”

It’s the base of the hockey stick - the slow, accumulating arc before the vertical leap. The next decade of commerce, in Jesse’s framework, belongs to the individuals and businesses that refuse the false choice between curation vs. convenience or human vs. machine; it’s not either/or but both/and.

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