Zurich Residance

One of the studio’s early projects is the Zurich apartment, which LionsBee was commissioned to refurbish for a client who wanted her living room to be black. Unfazed, Dusa Bibus got to work and found the colour to be a splendid way of setting off the beautiful paintings the client intended to hang there.

The furnishings picked by Dusa Bibus take their cue from the art – heirlooms and contemporary works – and include a Tom Dixon chair, a Jamie Hayon side table and a Serge Mouille lamp, which all contribute through colour and form to creating the desired cultivated ambience. This approach is followed throughout the apartment, where for instance Dedar velvet, a Gio Ponti armchair and Cole & Son wallpapers, in unabashedly dark hues, play off the miscellaneous artworks. No question, a statement is being made.

Of course, Dusa Bibus’s imagination is well stocked with ideas and styles gleaned from her reading, visits to auction houses, knowledge of the interior decoration of previous periods (especially the 1950s, 60s and 70s), wanderings through art galleries and so on, and she follows the work of certain designers – Sig Bergamin, Francis Sultan, the Haas brothers, Orta Miklos, etc – and artists – Pierre Saulage, Eric Mangen, Rita Ackerman, David Shrigley – and enjoys browsing through the Furniture Design Atlas.

However, on the whole she prefers to trust her instincts, finding inspiration in the most disparate places – nature, unexpected combinations of colours and textures noticed on her travels and the intuitions of unheralded designers, but the real source of wonder she returns to again and again are people, in all their multifarious variety.