From Mavaleix to Milan

Last Easter weekend I was in Mavaleix to finish a few jobs so that Thomas Mayer can visit the Mill at the end of the month to photograph the interior. We’ve been working on the project for nearly 10 years now and it’s nearing completion. The first comprehensive report on the Mill, including its interior, will appear in the spring issue of the Dutch Elle Decoration. To make the buildings rise up again out of the ruins, thousands of large and small decisions have been made, and problems with contractors, local authorities and all sorts of other people have been overcome. It has been a very long and intense process, and it will probably (and hopefully) never be completely finished. Undergoing and analysing processes is just about the greatest pleasure in my life, as long as I don’t go under while doing it. 

 

For months now, in between all other activities, I’ve been busy writing a little book about the Mill. It will be the first book in which people play the most important role, instead of materials, machines and technology. This is because it is for the most part people who have been decisive in this process of building the Mill. I have thought so intensely and deeply about these people and the place that noting down all these rambling thoughts might well result in the most honest book yet about my way of thinking. 

 

In November last year we installed the Old-Window-Display-Case, which was specially conceived for the kitchen in “Le Four”, the Mill’s former barn. This building gets its name from the bread oven – more or less the only element that is still intact. Without “Le Four” there would have been no steel Old-Window-Display-Case. 

 

As well as this display case, many other objects were specially designed and made for the houses in France. Last weekend, as well as hanging up the “Camembert painting”, we finished an installation of LED Line Lamps in the Mill’s master bedroom. The installation is now hanging in the Mill’s dark wooden cap. The Line Lamps were specially devised for the Mill and will be presented more or less at the same time at the Salone in Milan as part of the collection, alongside a range of other lights and products. The only thing that still needs to happen in France is to ask an elusive, vastly overpaid French electrician, who always fails to turn up, whether he can install a dimmer switch instead of a normal one. Before we really try to let the Mill for the first time this summer, we would like to have a telephone connection, but in trying to get this organised we have already called just about everybody except President Hollande. Maybe the whole experience would be even more natural without telephone and Internet, but it’s still nice if you can decide for yourself to have this experience by pulling out the plug.