Just a year and change out from debuting her Galerie with a line of Murano glass vases, ELLE Decor A-List designer Alyssa Kapito is back with another hyper-curated release—and this time, it's personal. Developed over the course of her own three-year home renovation, Edition 2 is an open-edition line of furniture comprising a sideboard and buffet, a cocktail table, and a nightstand.
While the collection is deeply personal, Kapito defined a straightforward set of criteria to which she adhered while editing it down, focusing on timeless forms, beloved materials, and an innate sense of proportion and scale. “Deciding what to put into production and what to keep for private clients was the biggest challenge,” Kapito tells ELLE Decor. “I'm constantly creating and designing custom pieces for projects, but I wanted this collection to be the things that I loved the most, that I would use over and over again.”
Kapito found herself inspired by the understated work of mid-century French designers, particularly Jean Royere, Jean Prouve, and the ceramist Georges Jouve. “Their materials are simple but so elegantly used, and they often focus on form over unnecessary decoration,” she says. “A lot of the thought behind these pieces is just that: simple materials in thoughtful ways that feel timeless but also somewhat contemporary.” Each piece is unique and produced between Paris and New York on a made-to-order basis, which allows collectors to select their preferred materials from an array of shagreen, lacquer, parchment, and glass finish options.
It’s a level of customization that invites a certain laissez faire attitude towards keeping one’s eras and ouevres straight, but that’s part of the point. “A connection that may not have been obvious between two pieces becomes really interesting when they are placed together in the same room. Sometimes it's about form, or color, or medium, and sometimes it's about that awesome tension that happens when they don’t match at all, like a Donald Judd sculpture next to a Louis the 16th mantel.” says Kapito. “The more you play around with mixing, the better you get.”
