The glass-fronted Crystal Houses, a magnificent townhouse by lauded architecture practice MVRDV, is home to the Amsterdam flagship store of Hermès. Needless to say, the ingeniously constructed transparency of the façade is a major draw in the Dutch capital’s luxury shopping artery, but also helps to make the store’s window installations even more spectacular. The latest installation, whimsically entitled Horstonishment, is intricately crafted from paper by Stine Gam and Enrico Fratesi of Copenhagen-based architecture and design studio GamFratesi. Taking ample cues from the theme Astonishing Hermès!, the creative duo have reinterpreted the extensive legacy of the French luxury house by way of a fantastical horse, very much a symbol of Hermès, which at the same time takes shape as a 19th-century train carriage depicting history from the day the house was founded. The evocative installation has been entirely crafted from paper and embeds a series of carefully selected Hermès items, including a beautifully crafted Mini Médor bucket bag, a silk foulard and colourful crockery (on through the end of November).
Hermès
P.C. Hooftstraat 94 (Oud Zuid)
1071CC Amsterdam
Telephone +31 20 3057050
Mon 12pm-6pm
Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
