What the Walls Hold

In a gallery, you are allowed to touch almost nothing. That is not a rule about theft. It is a rule about attention. The distance between you and the work is what makes you look, and the few things you may hold — the catalogue, the glass of wine at the opening — matter more because of everything you may not.

I wanted a room built on that distance. Not a cold one. A room where some rows are within reach and others are there to be seen, where the eye travels farther than the hand, and where the one object every guest is given to hold has been chosen with the same care as the things on the wall. That room is now open on Ponce de Leon, and I would like to walk you through it — not to explain it, but the way you would show a house to a friend who notices things.

The city

Coral Gables was composed before it was built — drawn on paper a century ago, plazas and arcades and coral rock walls, by a man who wanted a Mediterranean town at a tropical latitude and was patient enough to be exact about it. So the plaster was in the streets before it was on our walls, and the arches and the color of the light at five o'clock were chosen for us long ago. We did not bring a flair to Coral Gables; we found the one the city was built on and asked to belong to it. There is a simpler reason too. This is where we live. The kitchens we keep company with are minutes from the door, and the people I wanted first in the room are the ones who would have walked past it anyway, on their way to dinner.

The materials

Nothing in the room was put there to impress. The forms — the bar, the columns, the arches — are finished in limestone plaster, laid by hand and uneven where a hand was. The floor is polished concrete flecked with stone, cool underfoot. The flat walls are a pale warm neutral that changes with the hour. There is no wood in the Atelier but one touch of it: a fluted pale panel wrapping the bar, so that the one place a guest leans is the one place warmth was allowed in.

The bar itself is quartzite — sandstone pressed for a very long time until it is harder than marble — and it is green, the green of water seen from a dock, veined and moving. I like that the surface you lean on was once something softer, and that the stone chosen for a house in a tropical city is the color of the sea it sits beside.

Then look up. The gold in the room is not where you can reach it; it is above you. Two chandeliers hang over the bar — nests of gold rods gathered the way a bird gathers, or the way a hand would sketch the sun without lifting the pencil — and the light sits inside them, warm, and comes down. The pendants over the lounge are the same gold. So are the rails that run the length of the ceiling. Gold is in the house for the oldest reason there is: it is one of the few materials people have wanted for as long as there have been people, and it does not tarnish. It did not have to earn its place. It arrived with it, and it belongs where the light does.

What these materials share is that they are honest. Plaster shows the hand that laid it. Stone shows what it is made of. Metal that is real ages well and metal that is not does not age at all, and a room should be allowed to.

I chose all of it. Every surface, every switch of one stone for another, every light moved a foot to the left — those were my decisions, taken one at a time, and most of them taken twice. I say this not for credit but so you know whose eye you are looking through. A room is only honest if someone was willing to be wrong in it, repeatedly, until it stopped being wrong.

The studio

An atelier is a workshop. The word was chosen because things are made here, in view — and because the other word, the obvious one, describes something we are not doing.

A bar works from a canon. The great drinks were written long ago and the techniques were handed down with them; a bartender is given an instrument that generations have already learned to play, and plays it. That is a real craft and I hold it in real respect. It is simply not ours. Our canon is not yet written. Nobody passed us the instrument, because for what we work with there has never been one — no received recipes, no classics to measure against, no muscle memory to lean on. Every composition is reached for, pushed, argued with, and only then poured. Even the ones that land adjacent to something you have tasted before got there through work, because adjacent is not the same, and the distance between them is where this house lives.

So the bar faces the room. Ten feet of green stone, four seats, and whoever is working stands at the center of everything, beneath the gold. Infusions that take hours. Macerations that take days. Combinations of flavor no one has written down, tested, set aside, tested again, and only then given a line on the menu. Nothing here was made to fill a gap on a list. Each glass is a piece of work, and like any work it can fail, and some of it will. That is what a studio is for.

The bar is also where the Readings are taken — standing, the way a winery pours, with someone beside you who knows the bottle and will tell you the truth about it. The bar carries nothing for sale. Only the flowers, the glasses, and whatever is being poured. The shelves are for choosing. The bar is for being present.

The authors

Here is the part that took me longest to understand. The house studies flavor. We go looking for the most beautiful tastes we have encountered and we bring them home. But curation is not a verdict handed down once. It is a process, and it keeps moving, because the people who come through the door move it.

The authors of this house are its guests. What they respond to, what they return to, what they ask for a second time, the question one of them asks at the bar that none of us had thought to ask — we transcribe it. The menu is a record of that transcription, and it will not read the same in a year. A gallery that never rehangs is a museum. This one rehangs.

The rows

Which brings me back to the walls. The house is hung in four runs — the Tea Wall, the Pour, Spirits & Botanicals, and the Cellar & Quiet Shelf — and on each, some rows are within reach and some are not meant to be. The high ones are there to show themselves, the way a painting is, and to be asked about. Art, in this house, is understood widely. It means expression. And what we believe is that the expression happens in the glass — a glass that comes to life because of what the walls hold, the way a room comes to life because of what hangs in it.

So the glass itself was chosen last, and most carefully. By weight. By how the rim disappears against the lip, because when it does you stop noticing the glass and notice what is in it. It is the one object every guest holds. It should be the best-made thing in the room.

The first days

There is nothing like this house, and we did not build it to prove that. We built it because we believed a glass could hold this much, and that a room could be made to deserve it. That is a humble position and a firm one, and I do not think those are opposites.

The first five days tested it, which is what first days are for. The questions came quickly, and some came sharp. Why? Who buys this? Will you even sell? Are you successful? Others came in warmer. People who bought happily for themselves, and then again for someone else. People who told me, without my asking, that their lives had moved away from alcohol and their taste had not, and that they had been waiting for a room that understood the difference. Many spoke about the room itself — the look of it, the feel. Some asked why Coral Gables and not somewhere else in the city; the answer is above. And a couple of guests used a word I had decided not to use in this essay, so I will leave it with them.

The risk of being seen — of opening the doors and letting people decide — is the risk every maker takes when the work leaves the studio, and we take it on purpose, with our eyes open and our heads up.

Then on one of those days a man asked me a question that made me stop. What would you hope someone thinks of RIENNE, he said, as they walk out of the Atelier? I had not prepared an answer, so I gave him the honest one. That they appreciated our point of view — the house's perspective on a category we are passionate about. And that they felt a warm hospitality, designed for them. That was all I had. It still is.

— Karen Ornstein