Hermès unwraps walls of beauty

The walls are alive at 541 Orchard Road. A candy-outlined troop peeks through a strip of abstracted bricks and windowpanes; two of 10 layered Hermès wallpapers ripped in vertical sections that swathe the Hermès Singapore flagship store stairwell. Life stirs from within: the crisp sound of the rips echoes through tiny speakers in harmony with see-sawing saws and bouncing hammerheads on wood and cement for Hermès Maison’s installation exhibit “Through The Walls,” on view until the 29th.

“Wallpapers are clean, pristine but it’s wrapping architecture. How can we convey architecture with wallpaper?” Charlotte Macaux Perelman, one of two deputy artistic directors revealed her thought process for her opening remarks.

If she could have her way, walls of the store would have been physically torn down and sectioned in the style of 1970s New York architect Gordon Matta-Clark, but the Singapore heads had to decline. The store endured over a year of renovations last year. Can you imagine the tree-lined glimmering shopping district under a flash flood?

Up into the upper levels, the same playful wallpapers cover split-up and intersecting concrete walls sourced throughout the city-island-state. Objects in ancient materials like lacquered leather-lined boxes are laid out of place on a dissected staircase. A coffee table made of the smoothest cast bronze rests above concrete walls stacked on the floor. In the center of the room hangs the Lien d’Hermès bridle leather Groom Attele for hooking not too many things; it is a homage to the saddle-making DNA but also adornment for a game of mahjong laid on an onyx table, but it’s as if the players had left in the middle of an unwinnable match — for drinks, perhaps, via the old-fashioned bull calf-lined wicker and brass serving trolley at the back. It’s frivolous, it’s folly, yet it all feels intimate — like the exciting chaos of turning a house into a home.

This Asian installment offsets the sleekness of its Milan debut which was aimed at the city’s professional design enthusiasts. “We wanted to bring fun and give the ambiance of a home within a home. South Asia is driving the growth in Maison along with Europe and Greater China because there is maturity in the market in terms of appreciation of luxury. It has become more personal,” Hermès Maison managing director Hélène Dubrule tells The STAR.

Its fashion metier produces one of the most aspirational wearable status symbols, too. At the opening cocktail reception, spotted were bejeweled customizations of the Himalayan croc variety, attached to an arm and a hand feeling the inside of a wicker and bull calf trash bin.

Hélène explains, “In the beginning, you want to show off, go out, wearing objects. Once you become more sensitive to true luxury, you go for the quality of the experience, the pleasure, the sensuality. That’s when your home environment is more relevant because it is a part of your daily life.”

The raison d’etre of objects is a subject of constant dialogue between Hélène and Charlotte, “an architect who sees the pieces in a space,” and her co-deputy artistic director, publisher and curator Alexis Fabry “who has a strong visual sense of the culture of design and the arts.”

“Through The Walls” comes at a point in time where, as Hélène describes to me the mor ning after, “there is the acceleration of the times. Over information.”

“There is a vital need for suspending, breathing, anchoring into the material times because our lives are totally digitized. Of course, it’s more convenient, but we need to get back to reality and experience the senses. Otherwise, everything is in the virtual world,” says Hélène.

She often discusses the tension between rigor and humor, function and fantasy. “There is a counter-trend — the need for beauty, to pleasure the senses, of objects more symbolic than functional; functional with a soul. Something to arouse creativity, your smile, your spirit.”

It can be in the whimsy of an oversized leather-lined chess set that commands a space yet serves no other purpose than to bring people together for a quick game or encourage a brain-picking showdown in a stage worthy of the challenge.

It can be in the compelling simplicity of the Studio Hermes-designed natural oak writing desk with pull-away drawers lined with fawn and bull calf, devoid of distractions, that brings back the words you thought you had lost.

It can be in a moment of awe, as with the Karumi seats. Drawn in simple strokes of bamboo designed by 1992 Pritzker Prize winner, Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, they are not all they appear to be. Wooden bamboo master craftsmen in Japan agglomerated bamboo with carbon fiber; it’s how the extremely lightweight material is able to stand while still being as light as its silhouette. Hélène effortlessly lifts the bench iteration off the floor with one hand. 

And it can be so easy, like with the wallpapers. Having headed Hermès’ famed silk department before taking the charge at home, Hélène points to the wallpapers designed by visual artists Gianpaolo Pagni and Nigel Peake found throughout the exhibition: “Wallpapers are a way for us to talk about our core identity of patterns and colors. They can bring fantasy into a home. Wallpapers are very easy to use and they are quite accessible. You can easily transform an entire room. You can have one accent wall...” Or make a party out of randomly tearing up overlapping wallpapers to create a spontaneous collage with family and friends. Take pleasure in the present moment and fill it with life.

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In the Philippines, Hermès Maison is at Greenbelt 3, Ayala Center, Makati.