The Art of Not Competing With the Art

René Lalique had already accomplished the difficult part: making crystal behave like sculpture, light and memory at the same time. "Our job was not to improve upon that. Our job was to know when to get out of its way."

For Lalique in Miami’s Design District, Guycorp created a contemporary setting for a house whose history refuses to remain historical. The Lalique Maison collection—developed with Lady Tina Green and Pietro Mingarelli—extended that legacy into furniture, lighting and objects for modern life, carrying the vocabulary of the Maison beyond the vitrine and into the room itself.

Dieter Rams said, “Good design is as little design as possible.” An interesting proposition when your client has spent more than a century making things people cannot stop looking at. So restraint became part of the architecture. After four decades designing retail environments, Guycorp understood that luxury rarely needs another adjective and exceptional objects rarely need a louder room. The design became the supporting cast: proportion, procession, material, shadow and precisely enough theater.

Artist James Turrell once observed that “light has always been the domain of artists.” At Lalique, it also happens to be one of the materials.