Think about Gaetano Pesce’s voluptuous Up 5 chair inflated to environmental scale, or maybe certainly one of Verner Panton’s inside landscapes morphed right into a celestial pleasure dome. Though the Venus Lounge might nod to a wide range of avant-garde designs of yesteryear, its conception and execution are tethered intently to the right here and now. Architect Adam Sokol of Los Angeles–primarily based agency asap/ conjured the eccentric parlor as the newest addition to X-Home, a hybrid enterprise/residential entertaining area designed for an entrepreneur in Beijing. “It’s a spot for interactions that you just couldn’t have in, say, a restaurant,” Sokol explains. “It’s the type of area the place folks really feel out of their consolation zone psychologically, so that you get a unique outcome socially.” The upholstered part of the room was fabricated in 54 items on the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. “We started with the thought of putting folks in several seating positions. It was about creating potentialities,” the architect says. The otherworldly atmosphere is buoyed by a large photogravure of the planet Venus, created with artist Paul Taylor of New Hampshire’s Renaissance Press. A cosmography of pinspots and fiber-optic lighting, derived from a map of the celebs seen from this location, furthers the fantasy. This will not be the ultimate frontier of enterprise entertaining, but it surely definitely strikes the needle.
