The Chamber of Curiosity. Apartment Design and the New Elegance

Today’s glamorous chambers of curiosity are to apartment design what the dandy is to fashion.

The most fascinating apartments have always been those that reflect the essence of their interesting occupants. These apartments function as showcases for individual character, as chambers of curiosities reflecting unconventional life patterns. The apartment as dandy, as it were.

Apartments like these contain a conglomeration of objects and features that underscore the personalities of their occupants. Modern classics meet personal acquisitions and unconventional items with their own backstory. In these out-of-the-ordinary rooms, uniformity is avoided and the historical consorts with the futuristic. Anything goes: muted colors are set against geometric patterns, antiques against ultra-modern lights, an industrial lamp hovers over an oriental carpet, dark wood paneling offsets a Carl Auböck design, and paisley is a backdrop to onyx. The list of contrasts goes on.

Like the living spaces of modernist designers and architects, these collage-like interiors are not dull, utilitarian residential units but true chambers of curiosities. The acquisition of rare, weird, and often exotic articles has less to do with money spent and more to do with the fantasy and life path of its occupant and creator.

Thus we are presented with interiors reminiscent of movies by Kubrick, Fincher, or Lynch—sometimes with an ambiance that is cool and detached, sometimes glamorous, often enigmatic, and always engagingly different.

Over 256 pages The Chamber of Curiosity takes the reader on a tour of exciting interiors. As with our publication Northern Delights, this volume also provides portraits of trailblazing interior designers. Complementing features on Jean-Christophe Aumas from Voici-Voilá, Pietro Russo, Dimore Studio, Autoban, and the Harmony Club, additional texts about the featured owners and their furnishings reveal how lives and fantasies can be materialized into an interior universe of desire and wonder. The result is a book on pioneering interior designs that focuses not so much on the acquisition of the latest products as on the telling of a story.