NERI&HU: DESIGN WITH MEANING
“The main guiding principle is really trying to find the meaning behind what we do”
Everything Neri&Hu designs, be it architecture, interiors, or product, comes from a place that is highly intentional and deeply considered. Co-founders Lyndon Neri and Rossana Hu are committed not just to the formal or technical aspects of design, but to the philosophical. Their work considers everything that makes us who we are, from history to culture to daily life. At their Shanghai-based interdisciplinary architectural design practice, they bring all of these elements together into work that is quietly experiential, well engineered, and beautifully crafted. De La Espada has collaborated with Neri&Hu since 2013, producing a body of work that reflects an aligned commitment to the highest standards of craft, materials, and design.
Designer portrait by Jiaxi Yang & Zhu Zhe
The best design possesses a quality that cannot be emulated, affecting us on a visceral level. Coming from a place of connection and honesty, its impact is more than simply the sum of its parts. Neri&Hu’s work has this elevated quality, due in part to the complex network of considerations, explorations, and academic and sensory connections.
. Meaning is at the heart of everything they do; something Lyndon and Rossana search for and discuss before even deciding to take on a project. They ask themselves: “What the purpose is, what the meaning is, is this consistent with our pedagogy and ethos. And obviously the more nuanced ideology comes to play, be it scale, detail, proportion, the cultural narrative behind it. All of that becomes integrated into our process, but the main guiding principle is really trying to find the meaning behind what we do,” says Lyndon.
“And I think that meaning is probably a bit abstract, as Lyndon articulated. Some examples would be looking for connection between various things. One of them is history: looking at traditions of function, use, as well as style, form. We often look at historic references; and partly why we do that is a fascination related to identity: finding a personal identity as well as a collective identity of cultural, national, historic, communal. These are all things that later on will be distilled in a form of an object or architecture,” says Rossana.
This approach has brought them international renown, with accolades including the Frame magazine Lifetime Achievement Award, Designers of the Year from ELLE Decor International Design Awards, and induction into the Interior Design Hall of Fame.
Photography by Yuki Sugiura
De La Espada is the most prolific publisher of Neri&Hu products, both furniture designed for their projects and pieces conceived outside this framework. Crafting each design to the highest standard, we bring the intent of the architects to full fruition; products that engage all the senses, intricately detailed and made with wisdom spanning generations.
“I remember saying to ourselves, ‘[De La Espada co-founder Luis De Oliveira] can make this into the best quality it can be. Let’s do that because it carries our name. This is the Neri&Hu collection, we want to give it to a person who can make the best quality.’ And still to this day, he’s proven himself. So I think, it’s not our collection, it’s a real collaboration with him,” says Rossana.
Papi restaurant photographed by Simone Bossi
Most Neri&Hu products carry the story of the studio’s architecture and interior work, created to respond to the individualised conditions of a project, while each piece also possesses universal appeal and application, well suited to diverse homes and public spaces internationally.
“Each project has a unique story and the project’s story then is woven within the story of the furniture piece. So, for example, Papi, I remember vividly, it was a tiny little space in Paris, and if you have that Parisian restaurant-going experience, you often go into a tiny space. So this restaurant, we needed very small chairs, the profile, because it’s also a very tight space and we needed to fit a certain number of chairs in there. And this [Petit Chair] was done in a few weeks. So that whole story became part of the product, and every time we see the chair it reminds us of that entire journey, so that’s what makes it meaningful,” says Rossana.
Shanghai Edition Hotel photographed by Pedro Pegenaute
Select Neri&Hu products, such as the Frame Sofa and Structure Table, were created exclusively for universal use – not tied to a project – and came from a design brief or a desire to fill a specific need.
“Frame Sofa was a challenge to say, ‘How can we make a bulbous sofa to still have architectural integrity?’ And we’re big fans of Finn Juhl. We’re big fans of a lot of Gio Ponti’s pieces, and he’s managed to always use supposedly luxurious Italian furniture prototypes and precedent and make it still tectonically clear. And that was our challenge. And we said to ourselves: ‘Can we make something comfortable without compromising our pedagogical rigour?’ And I think we’re pretty happy with it. But of course, a lot of credit goes to De La Espada as a brand; their commitment, their intensity to just doing good products, the quality is unmatched,” says Lyndon.
A modular seating system of twelve modules, Frame celebrates the art of construction with a single, modular solid wood frame developed to serve all the needs of the product including base, legs, decorative feature, and practical support for brass trays. It is a flexible, utilitarian design that is so comfortable it almost has an informal feel while its appearance remains refined, elegant.
This is part of the unique power of Neri&Hu products. Each design is quiet, tactile, functional, with a feeling of familiarity and welcome, yet each also reveals complex layers of intention and skill. Perhaps this duality can be attributed to Lyndon and Rossana’s dedication to designing with humility. They are not interested in creating a spectacle; rather, they come from a place of honesty, of integrity, and are fiercely dedicated to creating the best possible products.
Sulwhasoo Flagship Store photographed by Pedro Pegenaute
Sometimes their furniture arises from both a project and a brief, as in the case of the Capo Chair, a relative successor to their iconic Solo Chair.
Solo Chair was designed as an homage to Eames, transforming the industrial look of the Eames Shell Chair into a sophisticated, comfortable chair with smooth curves of solid wood, detailed with mortise and tenon joinery, and an upholstered shell seat. An imagining of what Eames might have designed 50 years later. The chair features in several Neri&Hu projects, including Shanghai Edition Hotel, Sulwhasoo Flagship Store, and Le Meridien Zhengzhou, among others, and is a favourite for residences and public spaces worldwide. The chair’s success led to the creation of a successor, the Capo Chair, as Lyndon explains:
“Solo Chair was very well received by the public, both within the commercial sector and also the domestic world…sold quite well globally. And to create hits after hits is very difficult. But Luis wanted something else to replace Solo; he knew that one day Solo would plateau. And it was interesting because we were doing a restaurant called Capo. And the idea behind Capo was: how can we create something that is completely removable like a flatpack, or that’s how the restaurant started, and be assembled together. So if you look at Capo, actually, it could be disassembled and all pressed within a particular square. It started with that idea; that purpose and meaning is a practical one.”
Capo restaurant photographed by Pedro Pegenaute
At the Italian restaurant Capo in Shanghai, the interior design concept was based on a basilica; a masonry enclosure with old world charm and handsomely crafted detailing. The Capo Dining Chair also takes on those qualities of heritage, where the simple and modern form is enriched with tailoring details that evoke old-world sensibilities. The Capo series later expanded beyond the dining chair with the addition of a bar stool and a lounge chair, the former which can be found in Neri&Hu’s design for the Sosharu restaurant in London, and the latter in their design for the Kimpton Da An Hotel in Taipei.
Lyndon and Rossana have a wealth of personal and cultural experiences from which to draw. They were born in different parts of Asia and educated in the United States before establishing Neri&Hu Design and Research Office in Shanghai. Their practice, founded in 2006, works on projects across the globe. They are true citizens of the world, and their designs reflect their varied experiences. Some draw from life in China — design history or daily life — as is the case with the Commune Series, consisting of a bench, stool and dining table.
“Commune is an example of the celebration of the everyday, mundane. It is so simple and yet the craft behind it is so immaculate. It reminded us of the mundane, the everyday of the Shanghai lane houses. And our kids grew up in those kind of conditions, and we thought that that would be an important celebration for the community that is very much part of our practice,” shares Lyndon.
Lyndon and Rossana are academics, teaching and lecturing at prestigious universities including Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, alongside running their studio, and their encyclopedic knowledge of art and design, architecture, philosophy and construction is interwoven with their deep reflections on memory and the human experience. With humility as a core value, the studio creates furniture with meaning and intention that can be seen and felt in every curve, every detail. There is a reason why their furniture is a favourite for architects and interior designers.
“Many of our architecture friends would send pictures of their houses and they would say ‘Without your furniture, it’s actually quite empty’ so we’re quite flattered – a lot of them are – because of De La Espada. Because of the collection, because of the entire spatial construct that we’ve created that allow them to do this. I remember Jeanne Gang said, ‘I sleep with both of you every night.’ [laughs] It’s contentious, but literally, it's the bed that we designed. And so she says, ‘I remember you guys a lot of times, in both my joy and my nightmares.’ [laughs] So I think there’s a lot of narrative and stories behind a lot of the pieces and we find it fortunate. I think there’s also a difference in many of the brands that we work for. At De La Espada, it’s almost like we are part of a family. I think Luis, in many ways, we see his kid grow up, playing the cello, the drawings that they do, so in many ways, Luis and his wife are very much part of the Neri&Hu family and vice versa,” says Lyndon.
At 3daysofdesign this year, Neri&Hu launched the October Chair, a design reflecting a crossroads in their personal life, and an exploration into working with leather in an unfamiliar way.
“The October Chair is quite intriguing for us. It was a departure from what we normally do. In many ways this is a dialectic, a language between institutional wisdom of wooden structure, contrasting it with something that is malleable, something that is perhaps softer, that deals with the human condition. And naturally we call it October; October is also the idea of a season, the ending of a season. It deals with death, decay, but at the same time it also promises new birth, new beginning. It’s closely affiliated with the fall semester in an academic setting. So this contrast of an institutional stability highly steeped in precedent, compared with something that is malleable, that would form the body that sits on it, is a provocation that actually intrigued us. To a point that when we were doing it, we weren’t even sure how it would look. We were really interested in the tension between the two and we were pleasantly surprised by the result, because all of a sudden the meaning that we were exploring, this provocation, this dialectic, became something that also became aesthetically pleasing. Which never is our first way of doing things,” explains Lyndon.
“It’s a chair that if you look at orthogonal line drawings, it’s really very simple. We added simple details so from different angles you see different profiles. This cut here and this round edge here [on the chair arm], it immediately changes the way you see the form from an angle; the profile becomes much softer, and becomes a lot more articulated. And I think it just adds to a very simple profile the sophistication that it needs in a design like this,” says Rossana.
Neri&Hu’s previous work with leather was always as upholstery; the October Chair is their first time working with the material in this way: “Basically allowing the leather to become itself,” explains Rossana. “That’s something that is harder, I think, for us as architects. We want very hard edges so when we draw a profile, it’s made like that. With this leather you can’t really draw that perfect curve and expect the leather to act like your drawing.”
The chair is an example of how Neri&Hu designs for life, drawing from personal experience to both create for and reflect memories: “We had this conversation that maybe a family of 6 using the chair over a course of dinner in a span of 18 years might see 6 chairs being completely different. But with that comes a memory of a particular individual, a character; all of a sudden the chair has an identity in itself,” explains Lyndon.
Carrying a personal significance, the chair was designed at a moment of transition for Lyndon and Rossana, partners in both life and work. After living in Shanghai for many years, they are working on a home for their family in New York.
“The October Chair almost became Walker. Because this was designed for our loft in New York City. And last minute, we thought, ‘Let’s not make it too obvious; let’s call it a season.’ Because we’ve always been in Shanghai, this is the first place outside of Shanghai that we’re staying in, we thought that this is important for us, it marked a mileage, a threshold, a liminal space that we wanted to inhabit,” says Lyndon.
Trunk Low Cabinet photographed by Yuki Sugiura
Now, 12 years into our partnership with Neri&Hu, with over 70 products born of our collaboration addressing the needs of every room of the home, our relationship is stronger than ever. There is a fluency to our communication, an honesty and alignment. Our shared values are present in every product.
“Over the years we have gotten to know Luis [De Oliveira, co-founder of De La Espada] and we realise that he’s always been consistently about quality. Consistently honest and rigorous about what he can do and what he cannot do. And it’s never just about the numbers, unlike a lot of the brands that we work with. And that I really admire. So the growth was very natural. Over that time, I think, there is this mutual trust. And honest opinions and honest relationship,” says Lyndon.
All lifestyle photography by Inês Silva Sá unless otherwise indicated
