By Bart Boehlert
Moving into a new residence is the perfect time to refresh and rejuvenate style at home. The tabletop is a good place to start: bring a bright update to dining with a recently launched collection designed in collaboration between young New York decorator Remy Renzullo and popular Paris-based homeware brand Carolina Irving & Daughters. Hand-painted with delicate blue flowers scattered over a white ground, this tableware offers refinement and simplicity in a new collection that has a timeless elegance.
Renzullo and Irving are well-matched for collaboration; in their work, both incorporate the beauty of the past with the present. Irving, along with her daughters Olympia and Ariadne, is well-known for her bohemian-style textiles and accessories that are inspired by trips all over the world and are favorites with fashion insiders. In New York, Renzullo is an up-and-coming decorator who favors classical, romantic interiors, as evidenced in his own uptown apartment, which is located in a former ballroom and was photographed for Architectural Digest. “This collaboration was born out of a desire to create a collection rooted in history but made for today,” says Renzullo.
To begin, the team was inspired by a nineteenth century charger from Mallorca that belonged to Renzullo’s aunt who spent summers on that Spanish Balearic island in the 20s. Hoping to create a group that looked like inherited pieces collected over time, they faithfully reproduced it as the Mabel Large Platter. From there, they explored eighteenth and nineteenth century Spanish ceramics and then thinner eighteenth century French faience, which is tin-glazed earthenware.
Now, all of the ceramic pieces are handmade and painted in a small, local factory in Portugal, and available for pre-order on the fashion luxury website Moda Operandi, which was co-founded by fashion entrepreneur, social figure and former magazine editor Lauren Santo Domingo. “Remy and I are great friends and he has been dreaming of this project for months,” reports Santo Domingo. “I love antique china but often the sets are incomplete, chipped or too small-sized for modern taste,” she observes. The tableware is particularly well-suited for dining in the lush garden at Santo Domingo’s Southampton home, which served as a location to photograph this tableware and which was recently featured in Vogue. But the true measure of the collection’s success lies in its practicality. Says Santo Domingo, “I’ve used the dishes consistently for months, three meals a day!”