ONE PIECE: Interviewing creatives about their favorite art, clothing, decor, and reads (vol. 2)
Dipping into the world of design with Leonora Epstein, Preston Alba, and Carlo Mollino.
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Merci, thank you tons and tons for reading!
Thank you for all of your support and excitement over my debut ONE PIECE article, which featured Sarah Reeder and Bridget Bartal! We’re back with two more interviews to celebrate the start of 2025.
First, I’ve been moved by Carlo Mollino’s Casa Miller, so much that I’m bursting with impatience and can’t keep myself from sharing it with you. Carlo Levi wrote about Mollino’s interior design in September 1938 for DOMUS. The Surrealism-tinged photographs of the space and the words themselves are working mischievously together to give me this strong gravitational pull.
“A shell is formed over time in infinite layers that are the negative and petrified image of the animal living within: it is the practical expression of a feeling. The same is true for our faces and our homes. They grow around us and anchor, in new or discolored curtains and in clean or peeling walls, fathers' and children's events, habits, passions and boredom. We read the interiors divided by demolitions, and their flowery wallpapers, like photographs that narrate monotonous needs like just-removed clothes that still retain body heat. We live within these sentimental shells; but because they, like Diderot's dressing gown, have our form and speak; they can become objects of art but not art.”
I think this month’s ONE PIECE guests would appreciate Mollino’s interiors and attached sentiments. I paired these two design-centric people together because they each approach one of my favorite industries with completely different outlooks. One is a more monochromatic Minimalist, the other more appreciative of Surrealism, chaos, and color. I often feel these dichotomies at play in my own mind and in my design interests. I love the control of a perfectly rounded stone sculpture AND the dream-like trance of ornate optical illusions! It seems like Mollino did, too.
PRESTON ALBA
Preston Taylor Alba is a Los Angeles-based designer who develops products and projects for architecture, interior, and fashion studios worldwide. He’s worked for Commune and Studio Shamshiri—among other impressive names—all while founding/running his own lighting company. He has another design project up his sleeve and I can’t wait for him to share it with the world.
I’ve known Preston for all of my adult life. He was a fast friend and has become practically a sibling to me. I am constantly amazed at his eye, his conscious way of embracing minimalism in his lifestyle, his very fine attention to detail, and the way he’s able to transform an idea into a real-life finished product. I wish I had all of these meticulous skills! Whenever we talk, we are always gushing about what we’re reading, visiting, and paying attention to. He is a natural fit for this series!
ONE PIECE of artwork that you wouldn’t mind living alongside:
i’ll never be able to afford a judd. or an andre. or a martin. but maybe one day i’ll be able to afford a piece by richard nonas. he was right there in the new york scene but never quite got the recognition during his lifetime.
ONE PIECE of clothing or accessory that you want to wear until it’s tattered:
my friend evan makes clothes - simple shapes, special fabrics. i’m very much a uniform kind of guy so i’m almost always in what he calls the big shirt two. also, honorable mention to the key ring kelsey got me well over a decade ago - i think it’s the object i’ve had longest in my life.
ONE PIECE of literature that fills your mind/spirit:
one of my favorite things is penguin’s crazy assortment of design paperbacks. i tend to gift them or suggest them to anyone getting into this world. i just reread the medium is the massage which is quick and fun - but that assortment includes john berger’s ways of seeing, adolf loos’ ornament and crime, so many good reprints of iconic design writings.
ONE PIECE of decor that would provide a mood boost to your home:
i am perpetually obsessing over dom hans van der laan, a dutch benedictine monk and architect. he was a real freak. a stool of his would look great in the apartment and it would probably be looked at more than sat on.
or the very rare crucifix candelabra. [Editor’s note: Hopefully nobody will be sitting on that either!!!]
ONE PIECE of advice for yourself or others:
i’m not sure if this qualifies as advice, but i keep coming back to this passage by fernando pessoa. it’s a comforting reminder or mantra of sorts, especially as we’re all getting back into the swing of things after the holidays.
In all, there were three things:
the certainty one is always beginning,
the certainty one must go further,
and the certainty that one will be interrupted before finishing.
LEONORA EPSTEIN
Leonora Epstein is a design writer and the author of Schmatta, “a newsletter that discusses design in a way that is humorous, curious, and chaotic.” I was introduced to Leonora thanks to Substack, and I immediately fell for the way she wrote and the designs she featured.
From Leonora:
“Schmatta is a Yiddish term meaning a gross, rag-like, or dirty piece of clothing. Your wrinkled bed top is a schmatta. Your picked-at Wet n Wild blue nailpolish is schmatta-adjacent. Everything you wore/bought in the ‘90s was schmatta-worthy. Most design is schmatta. The above picture of my eighth grade bedroom is decidedly schmatta thanks to some utterly annoying mosquito netting and a Pikachu stuffed animal.
Yet schmatta is also a state of mind, one that is embracing of imperfection.”
I sense that Leonora has a firm grasp on the way our world is designed and she often focuses on the parts of our visual world that are overlooked (like palm trees in the context of design history). Just as she said: many topics are humorous! She’s tapped into all of the right sources; seems to follow her strong intuition and taste; and isn’t pretentious or monotonous about it. Also, she seems COOL. I’m looking forward to seeing how she predicts and dissects the culture of design this year, and what she gathers up for her Good Schmitz aka Things I Found and Love series.
ONE PIECE of decor that would provide a mood boost to your home:
An Emilio Martelli trompe l'oeil table circa 1950.
ONE PIECE of artwork that you wouldn't mind living alongside:
Anything by Leonora Carrington. And not just because we share the same name.
ONE PIECE of clothing or accessory that you want to wear until it's tattered:
I don't have one yet, but the minute I have the moolah to get my hands on a green Goyard Belvedere, it's never leaving my side.
ONE PIECE of literature that fills your mind/spirit:
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
“‘Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie, came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,’ Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930.
Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels, and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.”
ONE PIECE of advice for yourself or others:
"Do it once, do it right." (At least as it applies to home renovations.)
Related Notes:
The City of Los Angeles still needs our kindness, and likely will for a long, long time due to the ongoing wildfire tragedy. It seems that so many organizations and individuals are brimming with physical donations at the moment, but financial support for recovery is always welcome. Here is a city-produced list of people who need your help.
In Preston’s early brainstorming stages, he mentioned wanting to own the Rothko Chapel if he could have any piece of art in the world. I loved the boldness of that answer! The chapel’s motto is “a stillness that moves.”
Leonora had me completely intrigued by Emilio Martelli. After looking up his name, I found a reproduction of The Birth of Venus on display at the Museum of Outdoor Arts in Colorado. It’s attributed to Martelli. In the mid-80s, he also received permission from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to produce copies of other Botticelli paintings using the scagliola method. Mind-blowing to me that the designer of the trompe l'oeil table above also painted this Botticelli reproduction.
Katrien De Blauwer’s photomontages. Wallpaper Mag described her as “the photographer without a camera.” She has “an intriguing way of introducing works that bring back long-forgotten imagery from vintage magazines. Katrien De Blauwer has worked with photomontage methods since she made her first collage books 20 years ago, after abandoning a degree in fashion at Antwerp’s Royal Academy.”
Leaving you with one more Mollino interior!!
**
Happy one piece-ing!
Kelsey Rose
Hi Preston!!!
I loved reading this! I always feel so inspired!