Like any good adventure story, this one ends with a pot of gold—or, rather, a fruit-shaped vessel. Two years ago, at a museum in Mexico City, siblings-in-law, Benni and Miriam Frowein found themselves entranced by an intricately spiked, pineapple-shaped sculpture known as a piña. “We were blown away—we hadn’t seen anything like it before,” says Miriam, who, like Benni, isn’t exactly easy to impress: the former is the principle at Miriam Frowein Interiors in London and a modern art connoisseur; the latter, CEO of Schumacher EMEA. “We thought, we have to bring these to the rest of the world.” But first, they had to locate the source. An eight-hour drive later, they found themselves at the house of a family that, for more than a century, has been crafting piñas from locally harvested clay, a process that involves hand-applying more than 3,000 individual “seeds.” Once a rarity found only in museums and the homes of Mexico’s wealthiest families, these sculptures are now available worldwide via Objekti, Benni and Miriam’s newly launched business. Says Benni, “it’s our way of sharing beauty with design lovers like us.”
Available in a range of colors and sizes (the Black Fantasy model, shown above, measures 30″ high), each of Objekti’s piñas is one of a kind. From $1,500; available at objekti.co.uk and through The Invisible Collection, theinvisiblecollection.com.
