In Paris, jeweller Sophie Buhai provides lighters and tablet bins a fantastical edge

Within the exhibition Jewellery Objects, Sophie Buhai unveils a dreamy bespoke assortment of design items at Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval, a Parisian area flanking the Seine that neighbours the Dries Van Noten retailer and the Beaux Arts de Paris. The newly reopened gallery just lately underwent a renovation masterminded by French architect/designer Sylvain Dubuisson.

Los Angeles-based Buhai—identified for making shapely earrings and stone necklaces—launched her namesake jewelry model in 2015. Her collections have been featured within the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in addition to at retailers like Dover Road Market and 10 Corso Como. All the pieces is made in Los Angeles. ‘We do our manufacturing, our design, our achievement, every little thing occurs there’, she says. ‘It feels outdated world.’ She works every day in her studio alongside her husband (who has a enterprise function) and a small group.

Jewellery Objects (on view till 30 June) spans 20 distinctive or limited-edition items, every bearing her delicate signature (actually, with a refined, delicate flourish). ‘These items are up to date, however they’re influenced by totally different moments in design historical past,’ Buhai says. Throughout the gallery, Buhai’s creations dialogue with items chosen by Blum: nesting tables in crimson lacquer by Katsu Hamanaka and a parchment and lacquer pedestal desk by Marcel Coard. ‘The gallery is admittedly identified for Artwork Deco, from the 20s up till most likely mid-century’, Buhai says. ‘Jean Michel Frank, Pierre Chareau, Rose Adler, Eileen Grey, Jean Dunane – these designers I’ve studied and are my inspirations.’

Buhai notes she began coming to Paris often 10 years in the past, a number of occasions a yr, to indicate her collections, ‘and that was actually an training for me… since you’re uncovered to a degree of magnificence that’s actually solely in Paris on this explicit manner’ provided that the ornamental there are celebrated and brought severely.

A few of Buhai’s items required collaborating with as much as 4 totally different craftspeople. ‘When you do not have to fret a couple of explicit value vary or how time-consuming a method will be on a bit since you’re solely making one or three of them, what you are able to do could be very uncompromised.’ There have been silversmiths and lapidaries Buhai had had a protracted relationship with from engaged on her foremost assortment. However she scouted an artisan primarily based in North Carolina who skilled in conventional urushi lacquer strategies in Japan, a method that yields a phenomenal end: ‘it is like 40 coats from the lacquer tree. It’s totally labor intensive and time-consuming”—however! ‘There’s a depth that comes from all of the layers.’ Probably the most complicated piece to execute was a silk-tasseled minaudière with a magnetic closure in black urushi lacquer (it resembles a small creature or ‘a 3rd eye’).