in pursuit of
escritoirefashion
an office romance
for the discerning
THE OFFICE ELECTRONIC. It is lustrous, chic and rapturously unrepentant about
replacing certain staid sentimentalities—the brass bookends, the saddle brown
leather pencil holder to complement that snazzy gold-trimmed desk blotter.
The look is cultivated, engraved, frolicsomely Wall Street, and the digital life
swallows it whole with slick devices, mirrored surfaces and all-in-one shimmer.
And yet something is missing. With apologies to bells and whistles, could it be
that the world does not always look better flat and crisp in vector-based GPS
graphics; especially when compared to the sensational hand-assembled Mikado
globe from Replogle Globes, a company manufacturing this sort of dramatic
cartography since 1930.
The modern office is glamorously right now, but it’s also personal, mixed and
hopefully devoid of golf-themed mementos. When Kelly Wearstler designed these
marble books, she captured the idea brilliantly, desiring to create something
sculptural and clean for the desk. The resulting effect is a set of supremely cool
black and white objects that luxuriously transcend the ho-hum static of what a
desk accessory should be.
Travel, photography, emotion, texture—the office should be filled with our
greatest loves: Marcelo Lucini’s immaculate alpaca silver and cow horn Chaco
desk set for Airedelsur; a hauntingly beautiful bone and alpaca silver letter opener
with corresponding tray, scintillating the style of a foreign destination from the
always inspiring Edwina Hunt; the quirky-fantastical porcelain Ascot magnifying
glass designed by Bodo Sperlein for Lladró in its vivacious new chapter. These
are things that will never gather dust. As a collection of rarities and essentials, the
desk is an open studio for functional art, taking calls on Bang & Olufsen’s ultra hip
BeoCom 1 phone (our thanks to gloriously inventive Danish design); working late
by the glow of this astounding vintage table lamp from Italy’s Arredoluce circa
1960s. Perfection with an on/off switch, the banker’s lamp weeps, wishing that it,
too, could be found at the exquisite Wright gallery in Chicago.
On this surface for thinking and considering, we need an elegant place to
sort out lists and kick around big dreams. For spring, London’s premiere stationer
Smythson offers the luscious Azur selection of manuscript books, jotters and
organizers, including the charming Blue Sky Thinking notebook, which is infinitely
better than a diary and definitely more posh. The collection looks incredible, even
