Tastemakers Take on Quality

"The quality of a home is made up of the objects in it. It's like a good party: You need different people to make it interesting. So you want things with stories that are new and old. A few years ago, I found a dark brown Chinese vase that is 3,100 years old. It has a little bruise on its side where it fell over in the oven when it was being made—so it was a failure from the very beginning. And then it spent 2,000 years in a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea. I consider my life to be bigger than the things I have, but this little vase sits in the window, ready to live on after I am dead. It makes me feel very responsible, seeing how small we as people are in relationship to time. The vase is a beautiful little nothing, but I am so taken with it I made a mold so that I can make babies of the vase—so that they may be around for someone else to find in another 3,000 years."

— Marcel Wanders, furniture and interior designer