- By
- Tate Smith
- Art by
- Gustaf von Arbin
SOPHIE BUHAI
With today’s market of fast fashion and the mentality that newer is better, it’s refreshing to hear from a younger group of designers determined to create pieces that you keep forever. Sophie Buhai, who launched her home and jewelry collection this past spring, is one of the standouts.
Ten years ago in New York, Buhai and Lisa Mayock founded Vena Cava, a ready-to-wear line that was a runner-up for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2008 but then closed its doors in 2014. Post–Vena Cava, for maybe the first time ever, Buhai found herself with extra time on her hands. She moved out to Los Angeles and fully invested herself in designing her home in Silver Lake. Her style, a modern, appealing simplicity with an unexpected Western twist, would have made one of her inspirations, Georgia O’Keeffe, proud. What happened after is a story of organic growth, as Buhai moved from beautifully designing her own home to working on friends’ homes to friends of friends’ homes to a full-fledged line of home products.
For her jewelry line, Buhai says she was strongly inspired by her grandmother’s early modernist silver jewelry. Her collection resembles a clever mix of Art Deco whimsy and Seventies playfulness, with a touch of Nineties minimalism. “A lot of my pieces are kind of modern hollow pieces, and it’s pretty time-consuming to make each piece,” says Buhai, who credits her “ten-year New York boot camp” for teaching her discipline and organization. “There isn’t that much silver being made [through the] old kind of modernist techniques anymore. So that’s what I’m trying to reintroduce back into the market.”
There are plenty of happy correspondences between the jewelry and furniture lines. For instance, the gentle sweeping form of Buhai’s antique bottle complements the rounded curves of her egg broach. “We were putting the æsthetic together all at the same time, so there’s definitely a thread, but I think the whole website, the interior, the objects, I think they all fit into the same æsthetic world,” she says. At first, jewelry and home seem like an odd correlation, but, as she points out, “you’re making objects that function in a different way.”
For more information, please visit SophieBuhai.com.
- By
- Tate Smith
- Art by
- Gustaf von Arbin