Sophie Lou Jacobsen featuring the Bembo Credenza

I'm a French American designer. I grew up in the States, to French parents and moved back to Europe when I was in high school, studied in Europe, went to the UK Central Saint Martins to study industrial design, and then eventually moved back to New York, and have been based here for about ten years. This is where, after sometimes working in other studios, I eventually launched my own studio, which is partially a design studio, partially a brand of homeware and tableware, which is all under my name, Sophie Lou Jacobson.

My desire to work in design didn't come directly from my parents. They definitely are very sensible to furniture and sensitive to furniture and objects and spaces. I received a sort of informal education and appreciation for those things through them. But growing up, I only really understood that the kind of practice that could involve these things was architecture. I always imagined that I wanted to go into architecture and be an architect. And the other thing that I wanted to do, if not, that was sociology, because I've always been fascinated by humans and by societies and the way that people live and just studying human behavior.

My interest in sociology and just human behavior in general is translated in my work because I'm really focusing on the way that people interact with objects and also the way that objects affect our daily lives and our surroundings and our moods and our behavior. When you look at past civilizations or past moments in time when we're looking at movements in history, we look at the objects to translate the way that people were living. Obviously, there's texts and readings and a lot of other ways that we can learn about human behavior. But objects and art in general, are really one of the clearest visual artifacts that we have to look at how people live.

This space is my home, but it's also a showroom and it's also an office. So I definitely have the opportunity in this space to live with my objects much more than I probably would if it were not a shared space, a mixed use space. It was really intentional for me to do this because I wanted to live with my objects in this really intense way so that I can be sure that they are effective in the way that I think they are. Having so many of my own objects around me, you know, I'm constantly moving them around. I'm constantly changing faces, locations, putting different flowers in them, changing the glassware that I use.

Whenever I have people over, I'll mix it up and use different parts of my collection and also mix it in with other items of mine that I did not design to see how it all lives together. It's a daily practice that I was worried that I might get sick of always being surrounded by so many of my own pieces, and it's a good testament to the work that so far I haven't. I would never suggest that anybody live with as much of one thing as I have here, but I think in order to make sure that I'm creating products, objects that are having the right effect on the people that I want them to have. It's important for me to spend so much time with them.

So the objects that are not mine, that I bring into my home are such a mix of styles, such a mix of types of pieces. It's really a collection of things that I've found over time that I've sourced from friends or been gifted by friends or found on travels. It's a very eclectic mix, but I think that they all work together because they share this sensibility of being honest materials being very thoughtfully made, thoughtfully produced, a focus on craft, a focus on beauty. They're from all different time periods. The Bembo Credenza, for example, is probably one of the only contemporary new pieces of furniture that I have in this space. And it's just perfect because of the attention to craft that it's made with.

The characteristics that make an object livable to me are objects that you don't get bored of. So in order to not get bored of something, it either needs to completely blend into the background or have a quality that is so engaging and thoughtful that you want to keep interacting with it and you want to keep using it. So whether that's just purely visual, like an art piece or the teapot that you use every day or the sofa that you sit on or the credenza. There needs to be this balance between delight and restraint that just keeps you wanting to come back to it without getting tired of it.