Mademoiselle Chanel

Yesterday, I referenced Coco Chanel's bouquet of crystal flowers. I don't know about you, but it drives me INSANE when there are written accounts of particularly beautiful things sans accompanying images. Take, for instance, Denning and Fourcade's legendary raccoon carpet, pieced together from old fur coats. Only read about it, never seen it, and can't stop building it up in my head.

So, for the sake of sanity, here is Coco Chanel's Parisian apartment, on the 3rd floor at the House of Chanel, 31 rue Cambon. It's one of my absolute favorite interiors, full of loveliness in the form of rock crystal, aged metallics, huge sculptures, and bronze deer grazing in the living room. It seems that Ms. Chanel wasn't an antique snob either, only a snob for taste: While the marble torso on the mantel is a Greek 4th century BC Aphrodite, and the carvings surrounding the mantel are from an Italian church, the crystal flowers were from a flea market!! Hervé Mille also noted something to this effect in Architectural Digest's 1977 edition of Celebrity Homes: "She never bought anything she didn't like. She didn't buy because it was valuable. She hated furniture for furniture, jewels for jewels, precious stones as stones. She was a connoisseur by intuition." Well said, M. Mille. We could all learn a thing or two from Coco.

(Enlarge images by clicking.)

Scans of Chanel's interiors from Architectural Digest Celebrity Homes, 1977.

Daisies and Daggers: A Crystal Jungle

I've been thinking a lot about crystal lately. Coco Chanel had a bountiful bouquet of crystal flowers atop a glass table in her Rue Cambon apartment; artist Florine Stettheimer had one sitting beside masses of cellophane drapes, overlooking a grand view of Bryant Park.

How lovely would a crystal jungle be? One full of daisies and daggers, delicate and dangerous at the same time. Maybe not quite as cloyingly feminine as the Coco or Stettheimer bouquets; rather, a tension between masculine and feminine. Crystal lends itself to this sort of contrast, don't you think?

This piece is a set of lamps, formerly sparse wire structures with bare, exposed bulbs planted directly at the center— stripped down skeletons of flowers in their own right. I wrapped and encased them with my own sort of crystal bouquet. Ideal, because it softens and splinters the light from the formerly exposed bulbs, which hide behind the mass of crystal flowers growing up the lamp shafts.

Lamps were created, photographed and edited by Lauren, click to enlarge.