Levete describes her choices as “Something old, something gold, a piece of nature, something by me, and a potato peeler.” For the London Design Festival, her practice AL_A, will be creating Timber Wave, a sculptural spiral of oil-treated American red oak for the V&A’s Grand Entrance.
Roman glass bottle Victoria and Albert Museum I spend a lot of time at the V&A these days, so have chosen a piece from its collection. Roman glassware has a simplicity that is a lesson to us all. This small bottle is both sublime and practical — the way light falls on the iridescent surface gives it a magical quality and you can sense the hand that made it. Objects like these were affordable then to people of modest means. Even now, you can buy a piece of Roman history for relatively little.
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credit © Victoria And Albert Museum
Japanese cherry blossom Kew Gardens In Kew Gardens there are many extraordinary trees, but this Japanese cherry blossom is a perfect essay in poise and balance. It’s nature at its best: poetic and with a cantilever that is near impossible to achieve, but is what we constantly strive for.
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East Established & Sons The black marble table I designed for Established & Sons is one of my favourite pieces. CNC-cut from a single slab then worked by hand, it fuses the digital with the handmade, a recurring preoccupation in our work. The material is pushed to its structural limits and because of the associations of marble, the form speaks of antiquity as well as modernity.
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REX peeler Zena Designed by a Swiss soldier more than 60 years ago, this potato peeler is a completely reductive piece of engineering, not a single extraneous detail and beautiful because of that. It’s cheap – more than 60 million have been sold – and it makes peeling potatoes, a task I loathe, almost pleasurable.
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credit REX Zena Peeler
Grape scissors G Lorenzi G Lorenzi in Milan has been going since 1929, a family business selling sharp instruments from around the world. These grape scissors cut at an angle so as not to damage the stem — a very satisfying action. I love the contrast of
a piece of design for a very particular purpose with the slightly baroque, gold-plated finish, embossed with grapes.
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