To mark the 10^th anniversary of VitraHaus – Vitra’s flagship store and experimental laboratory, built by architects Herzog & de Meuron – Los Angeles and New York-based studio Charlap Hyman & Herrero (CHH) has transformed its loft space into an apartment fit for a film director.

Set atop a series of stacked, pitched-roof boxes that form the structure of the building, the loft brings the outdoors in, playing on the tensions between interior and exterior, public and private, old and new, and modernity and adornment. Binding the collection of design pieces within is a thread of homages to artworks, films, characters, books and places that have captivated CHH since the firm’s inception; what emerges from this calibrated network of references is a deeply personal space that exudes humour, remembrance and love.

Fictional characters like Jean des Esseintes from Joris-Karl Huyman’s À Rebours, Lidia Pontano from Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and the artist from Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet have left behind props from their most iconic scenes, while the terrace’s hand-shaped pillows and shell-trimmed topiary recall Dora Maar’s photomontage of a hand crawling out of a shell. Elsewhere, a writhing straw rug in the form of a snake, Verner Panton’s Living Tower, a screen made of giant profiles and Isamu Noguchi’s Freeform sofa add to the abstract aesthetic – like elements in a painting by American-French artist Yves Tanguy – dotting the expanse of a mossy green carpet that visually extends into the hills beyond.

“At first, we were designing the house for an invented character, but this shifted throughout the process as people retreated into quarantine,” says Adam Charlap Hyman, Principal at Charlap Hyman & Herrero. “The loft became a kind of vessel for the things that inspire us and make us come alive – it is in many ways a dream house that contains layer upon layer of the things we love.

“We are inspired by characters in films and books, and love to imagine the imprint that they leave on the spaces we create. The worlds that writers and directors conceive for the characters are a constant source of reference in our work – we sometimes think of ourselves as directors of movies about our clients! As the loft is really our dream house, it is a composite of so many influences on us over the years. I would hope that anyone visiting the VitraHaus can imagine themselves as a resident of the apartment, if just for a night.”