Garance Rousseau with lots from the upcoming auction. Carlo Scarpa, Mirror, model no. 30, circa 1937. Lucie Rie, Footed bowl, circa 1972. George Nakashima, "Kornblut" cabinet, circa 1972. Paul Rodocanachi for Jean-Michel Frank, Pair of side chairs, circa 1936. Design New York.
—By Garance Rousseau
As a designer, I think about interiors and objects every single day. It is my work, of course, but it’s also an obsession — one that involves extensive research and patience. I source pieces for clients to reinvent spaces and create harmony, a place where people can grow, rest, host, and feel good. Everything I do is done with a lot of love and a genuine willingness to understand people. No two homes are ever the same, and with each project I become more and more of a sponge.
When I place objects together from a personal place — consciously, emotionally — something shifts. I say “la magie passe” to describe that feeling. The pieces start to speak to each other, and through that conversation they accumulate a new kind of meaning. Not the meaning assigned to them by history or the market, but something more alive than that. A system of value built from memory, feeling, and individual experience — one that can change, grow, and surprise you. One that doesn’t age, because it was never really about trends to begin with.
Looking at the works I’ve selected, I can’t help but think about the places, people, and conversations that have surrounded them since their creation. That, to me, is endlessly fascinating.
LUCIE RIE, Footed bowl
Lucie Rie, Footed bowl, circa 1972. Design New York.
But when I first saw a pottery wheel, I decided at once to become a potter.
—Lucie Rie
I get notified whenever Rie’s work comes up at auction, and every time, without fail, it stops me. Encountering a piece I might not have seen before genuinely moves me — it's not excitement exactly, but a quieter feeling. The economy of it.
She never did anything unnecessary. Every decision she made was a decision not to do something else — not to add another band of color, not to complicate the form, not to explain herself. And yet the result is never cold. There’s warmth in the restraint. You find yourself leaning in, looking closer, and the closer you look, the more there is — the foot ring, the subtlety of the surface, the way light changes across it. She hid the depth. You almost have to earn it.
Rie studied in Vienna before moving to London, where she initially made buttons for the fashion industry before her austere, sparsely decorated tableware caught the attention of modernist interior designers. She communicated through clay at an unusually intelligent level — no unnecessary decoration, no fussiness. Her forms are defined as much by what isn’t there as by what is. She understood that the space around a thing matters as much as the thing itself, a concept I constantly consider in my own work.
The footed bowl I selected from the upcoming sale is a perfect example: that small terracotta well at the center, ringed by dark golden manganese glaze, is startlingly light in the hand.
GEORGE NAKASHIMA, "Kornblut" cabinet
George Nakashima, "Kornblut" cabinet, circa 1972. Design New York.
I’m essentially a druid. I believe that there are ghosts in trees, and in a very deep sense the tree is more God-like than man.
—George Nakashima
There is something deeply settling about a Nakashima piece. He was a man of spiritual intensity who genuinely believed that one’s interior environment could meaningfully shape our lives, which, depending on the day, is either ridiculous or completely correct. At least I would like to think so.
The present Kornblut cabinet dates to 1989, a year before his death. It is made from English walnut, warm and alive with grain, sitting on those characteristic splayed legs. The dovetail joinery is visible and intentional, a signature of his refusal to hide how things are made. Nothing is veneered or disguised. What you see is exactly what you get.
Nakashima believed that every piece of wood has a single ideal use — that the woodworker’s job is not to impose a vision onto the material, but to listen carefully enough to discover what it already wants to become. “I have to find my own relationship with the spirit of a tree,” he said, “and pretty soon, the wood evolves as a form.” That is not the language of a furniture maker. That is the language of someone who understood that making things well is a spiritual act.
CARLO SCARPA, Mirror, model no. 30
Carlo Scarpa, Mirror, model no. 30, circa 1937. Design New York.
Carlo Scarpa’s Mirror, model no. 30 was produced in several different colors. A blue version of the same model was on offer in the recent Phillips Design auction in London. When visiting the galleries, I stood in front of it for a very long time, trying to find any reasonable justification to buy it for a client. I didn’t have a space in mind and considered every option, even mounting it over a bookcase if there was nowhere else to put it. In retrospect, I wish I had.
It was the light. The way it moved through that pale Murano glass and landed on the wall behind it. It did something to the room that I’m still thinking about. That slightly mottled surface catches and scatters light in such an unusual way — it doesn’t reflect cleanly like a polished surface. It breaks light apart, diffuses it, and makes it move.
Carlo Scarpa designed this mirror in 1937 while he was artistic director at Venini. He was thirty years old and already thinking like an architect, which he would become even more fully later in his career. He was drawn to the way surfaces layer, the way edges meet, the way materials hold and release light.
The present mirror is all of that in a single object. The panels of translucent glass set into brass brackets are not decorative choices. They are structural thinking applied to something small enough to hold in your hands. A mirror, at its most basic, reflects what’s in front of it. This one does something far more interesting, and I was genuinely thrilled to see it appear in the June sale.
ELIZABETH GAROUSTE AND MATTIA BONETTI, "Le Nôtre" cabinet
Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, "Le Nôtre" cabinet, 1990. Design New York.
A teak body paneled in a grid of green-patinated bronze squares, each stamped with a bronze flower. And then those legs — tapering, studded, almost unruly. It shouldn’t work. But it absolutely works.
There is a particular kind of French audacity that has nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with nerve. Garouste and Bonetti had it completely. They called themselves the “New Barbarians” and meant it. Their work was a deliberate provocation against refinement, against the tyranny of good taste. The Le Nôtre cabinet is a perfect faute de goût in that sense. Those studded legs are not an accident or a failure of judgment — they are a considered decision to go where polite design would never venture. And the name itself is a wink: Le Nôtre was Louis XIV’s landscape architect, the man who imposed perfect geometric order on the gardens of Versailles.
Garouste and Bonetti said it themselves: “Good taste really bothers us a lot. What we care about is implanting doubt.” As a French designer, I understand that instinct completely. Some of the most interesting interiors I’ve ever seen — and created — resulted from the decision to put something strange in the room. Not carelessly wrong. Or deliberately wrong. But a bit odd. I was just speaking about this with a client who really values that approach to design.
I keep imagining this piece in a room, and how it would change the temperature.
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