When we speak about love, we mean the desire for beauty. — Marsilio Ficino
Welcome back to Love Notes - a creative journal documenting visuals, words, spaces, textures, flavors, and other elements I found beautiful lately.
It has been a long and cold winter.
All winter, I’ve been yearning for flowers. Or rather it is the idea of a flower - undulating soft waves, luminous sheens, the whispers of silk, breaths caught mid-motion, perfume of dusk and secrets, crinkled kisses, the echo of the flower’s heartbeat - trembling, flourishing, life-affirming.
So I’ve sought and found. Flowers in galleries and museums. Flowers at storefronts. On bookshelves. Hangers. Tablescapes. These were the unexpected delights during the most frigid days in Paris and London. The quiet comfort of returning to favorite Old Masters, reminiscing past springs. Interiors re-awakened in alchemy.
The trees are still bare in New York now, but the air stirs with the promise of a coming bloom. Until then, here is a curated bouquet of my winter flowers in two acts: objects and space.
Miss Blanche Chair, Shiro Kuramata
"My strongest wish is to feel free of all gravity, of all ties. I want to float”.
— Shiro Kuramata
Much of my love for furniture and interior design is inspired by Shiro Kuramata. Since seeing his retrospective at the Fondation Azzedine Alaïa last summer, encountering his iconic Miss Blanche chair at MoMA in New York this winter felt like a delightful reunion.
What is it that draws me to this chair? To start, it’s profoundly pleasurable to look at: the translucent acrylic resin body toys with matter and non-matter, but the legs are all matter - cool, metallic, magenta aluminum. Then there’s the surrealism of the dainty, delicate roses floating in suspension, their seductive shadows almost reminiscent of black lace lingerie.
Like a still life painting, the chair feels like an attempt to outlast time—a quixotic endeavor to trap beauty in its most fleeting state. Perhaps it’s the same impulse that makes me photograph spring’s first green or summer’s sky streaked in candy hues: a longing to hold onto the ephemeral, to bottle the feeling of being so utterly alive. And when winter comes, I scroll back through these moments, letting them bloom once more, if only for a little while.
But of course, the roses are all synthetic. The pixels are all fake.
Until spring returns again.
FLOWers, Jos Devriendt
FLOWers was Belgian designer Jos Devriendt’s fifth exhibition at Demisch Danant, presenting 50 new lighting pieces—each an abstraction of a solitary bloom.
I love how the collection is as much a study in color as it is in material: a rich palette of lustrous carmines, marigolds, and aquas, materialized in ceramics, bronze, brass, and epoxy. A luminous forest of flowers, enveloping the entire space in soft chiaroscuro.
Ode Key Bowl, Simon Leah
Another abstracted floral form, at once sculptural and functional.
What to make of interior florals in winter?
Enter the scene at Quarters, the thoughtfully curated Tribeca showroom and wine bar by Brooklyn lighting studio In Common With. Furniture, lighting, and artworks aside, I was especially drawn to the accentuating florals throughout the space. Created by botanical and design-world darling Field Studies Flora, these living sculptural pieces are heavier on branches than petals, in honor of the season. The branches arch and twist, reaching like ink strokes into the room’s warm glow of lamplight.
“To be a florist is to be a student: a sponge ready to soak up all that the living world has to teach.”.
— Alex Crowder, Founder of Field Studies Flora
I enjoyed this except from Alex’s latest Field Notes essay on winter from a florist’s POV:
There is a luxuriousness to hibernation - the long night; the forced slowness darkness pulls alongside itself, and over us…
A plant’s view of a passing moment is vastly different from my own, and it is comforting, particularly in the languor of winter, particularly this winter, to remind oneself of the immeasurable number of experiences that exist and are felt by all living things. How it all feeds into each other, stops, starts, and drums like your heartbeat.
Beyond adornment, perhaps winter florals are really a gentle offering—to bring a small piece of life inside, to celebrate flourishing as brief and simultaneous as vanishing. Between the four walls, what a quiet, courageous act of defiance it is to hold space for what cannot last.
To embrace time: not as loss, but as motion, as life itself.
See you in spring very soon.
Lovely.
In the cold winter time with the warm feeling of the various the flowers linked with the beautiful coming spring, surely it will make the winter look much better and pleasant. Cheers for the positive thing.