When Athena Calderone designed her first ever assortment for Crate and Barrel, there was one materials she merely needed to embody: rattan.
The hearty palm wooden, she thought, was the right complement to the modern base of her Nineteen Fifties French-inspired iron ground lamp, in addition to neatly accenting her angular, Amagansett-aesthetic sea inexperienced one. “I wished one thing that felt prefer it got here from the earth,” she says. “Rattan felt like one thing that has the feel and heat that was going to counterbalance these different slicker parts.” Fastidiously, she developed woven, knotted shades out of this pure materials, their mellow imperfections a playful distinction to the darkish elongated shapes beneath.
On September 14, she debuted her assortment at a cocktail social gathering throughout New York Style Week. Mingling among the many hand-crafted rattan shades was everybody from Oscar de la Renta’s Laura Kim, to Jason Wu, to AD100 designers Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent.
Athena Calderone isn’t the one tastemaking title impressed by the fabric. Robert Mckinley, founding father of Studio Robert McKinley (the design agency behind Resort Kinsley and Sant Ambroeus), created a chic rattan lamp in his current lauded furnishings assortment debut, Monea. Like Calderone, he was drawn to the “informal class” of rattan, juxtaposing it with hand-blown Murano glass.
“I really like the country high quality of the fabric formed into the elegant types of furnishings, lighting, and objects,” McKinley says. “There’s one thing easy about it, one thing that’s timeless and works in so many conditions. I’m in love with the wedding of those two supplies.”
Rattan, as seen in a Montauk dwelling by Studio Robert McKinley.Nicole Franzen
