Modern Is a Point Of View

Our Bow Tie photo shoot took place in an iconic Case Study house in the hills above Los Angeles. In part, our rationale for using the Stahl House was to remove the brackets that separate office and residential furniture, allowing people to look at furniture with fresh eyes, to see the breadth of the Teknion offering, and how seamlessly pieces pulled from different categories work together.

We viewed the first Bow Tie through an opposing lens, placing work chairs and meeting tables in a formal setting with the look of an elegant French apartment. The juxtaposition was edgy and effective. The furniture, the fabrics and finishes, stood out against matte black and white walls embellished with carved moldings and a rococo mantelpiece. The contrast with textiles, wood finishes and simple organic forms was marked.

While architect Pierre Koenig designed the Stahl House in the 1950’s, we chose to use it as a site for reasons other than nostalgia. As California emerged from postwar years, its design community made one of America’s most significant contributions to architecture. The radical simplicity of the Stahl House re-affirms the principles of modernism. It’s my belief that those ideals still hold.

Of course, before arriving in southern California, modern architecture emerged in northern Europe as the International Style, which designers like Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen translated into an American idiom. Like the Stahl House, Mies’ Farnsworth House ties the residence to its surroundings. In southern California, the modernist impulse found a true home, with a landscape, a climate and a culture well suited to its aesthetic, as well as its humanistic ideals.

A cliff-edge pavilion of glass, concrete and steel, the Stahl House is entirely open and full of light, creating a feeling of buoyancy and a sense of flow between shelter and nature. Barriers between indoors and outdoors are minimal. The urban panorama breaching to the horizon has an aspirational energy. Simple, yet sophisticated, clean without being austere, the aesthetic is 180 degrees from the formality of our first Bow Tie photo shoot. The furniture works in both environments.

Visit Bow Tie 02.