DAVID STARK
EVENT designeR
What inspired you to INCORPORATE SMOKING PIPES AS CANDLE HOLDERS FOR A dinner party?
When I was a kid, my Dad smoked a pipe. I would sometimes go with him to the mall to get tobacco at a store called The Tinderbox — I remember those trips very clearly. I loved the way the shop smelled, and today, I gravitate towards scents that have strong notes of tobacco.
While I have never smoked a pipe myself, I’m weirdly sentimental about those times with my father (and I’m not really a sentimental person). I also can’t shake the romantic vision in my head of all the artists captured in photos sporting a pipe, or all of those, for that matter, that painted their own self-portraits with a pipe in tow. So, this dinner party, with it’s cloud of pipes repurposed as candle holders is an homage to my Dad (with love), but it’s also for all the famous pipe smokers whose imitable style was partly defined by the wooden implement hanging out of their mouths.
“[SFERRA] has such a diverse rainbow of hues and shades available, and when ruminating on this monochromatic study of brown, SFERRA's chocolate was a must-have to build our table story upon.”
– David Stark
What inspired you to use vintage matchbooks as place cards, and how do you see them adding to the storytelling of a table setting?
Both custom and vintage matchbooks and matchboxes are so popular right now, why not turn them into place card keepsakes for your guests?
An array of vintage finds collected from antique stores and online resources are a creative, yet inexpensive way to give personality to the table while also engaging with our multileveled pipe centerpiece. We curated them by palette in this case, but of course there are other ways in. For foodie hosts, is it a collection of favorite restaurants world over? For native New Yorkers, is it a selection of matches from long closed, favorite haunts like Restaurant Florent, the Copacabana, or Elaine’s?
How haS ART influenced your approach to CREATING EXPERIENCES FOR CLIENTS?
When I see a pipe, I immediately think of artist René Magritte’s infamous painting, “The Treachery of Images.” The painting is also known as, “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (“This is Not a Pipe").
I have long marveled at the idea that an artist could “own” an image in the way that Magritte does with the painting. I mean, he obviously is using the image of a thing that exists in the world, but his meta statement is so charged that he becomes inseparable from it. That's when art is very powerful to me.
Lots of other artists have been inspired by this seminal work, too, making their own homages to Monsieur Magritte. Some years ago, we created a pop-up store called Wood Shop, filled with hand-made items inspired by the wood workers’ atelier. We fashioned a piece for that store where a plume of “smoke” was created from wood shavings. In our recent table, we turned a cloud of pipes into candle holders.
