Incollect Magazine - Issue 12

Incollect Magazine 79 In September 2023, Architectural Digest magazine published an expansive cover story on an interior design project by AD100 designer Jake Arnold for Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, and Tony award-winning entertainer John Legend and his wife, model and television personality Chrissy Tiegen. In the article was an image of their glamorous and moody piano bar, featuring a pair of bulbous bronze Enchantée tables by the Korean-French designer Hoon Moreau. (The global edition for the audience outside the United States, where the celebrities are less well known, featured the table on the cover.) Arnold sourced them from a French gallery called OAK Oneofakind, run by a dynamic and enterprising French design dealer named Antoine Vignault. “The Enchantée series was launched in 2016 and it was immediately popular,” Vignault says, sitting in his Toulouse gallery, “but the AD story catapulted the designer and her work into the limelight like never before.” The Enchantée wood twin tables are now sold out; the last pair was sold to top interior designer Julie Hillman in New York. A few pieces are still available from the subsequent Enchantée Ellipse and Les Enchantées Jumelles bronze table series. Vignault met Moreau in 2019 during participation at the PAD Paris Design Fair. “I was amazed by her sculptural creations that effortlessly merge art, design, and nature into harmonious, immersive forms,” he says. “Whether freestanding sculptures or functional objects like furniture and lighting, her creations are guided by a real respect for natural materials — wood, bronze, stone, crystal — and inspired by shapes found in the natural world.” Moreau’s designs transcend and even challenge utility, like much of contemporary collectible furniture. But more than that, they seem to invite the viewer to touch, to observe and what Vignault poetically described as “connect” with the forms — both on a sensory and an emotional level, a quality he ascribes partly to her bicultural heritage and partly to her love of materials and uniquely expressed spiritual purpose and sensibility. Korean Minimalism and French decorative arts meld together in Moreau’s sculptures, but in a way that renders both of them unrecognizable. There is a sense of both tension and fluidity in her designs, with a dialogue between external space, the human body, culture, and the universe. The result is a contemplative object that integrates thought with aesthetics. Left: Les Enchantées Jumelles (The Enchanted Twins), bronze, 2016. From a series of side tables designed with organic forms, as if emerging from the ground or from a magical dream. In sculpted patinated bronze with gradient intensities of tone from gilded to black bronze. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP. Right: Hoon Moreau. All photos courtesy Hoon Moreau/OAK Oneofakind. All pieces shown, plus more from Hoon Moreau, are available from OAK Oneofakind Gallery on Incollect.com