Where winds meander over the Viennese hills, amid vineyards and serpentine streets, Studio SPHAER has found its sanctuary.
This tranquil creative abode is a place where emotions metamorphose into visions and concepts take form.
Aging walls and roof beams envelop the designs and designers in a harmonious mantle of inspiration — as if they were purpose-built to ignite creativity in SPHAER’s founder Leni and her collaborative partners. These walls, although young, house an ancient, wise, and subtly whimsical spirit, conferring upon the early 2000s structure an aura of a time long past.
The building was deliberately crafted using traditional materials. It stands on the site of a formerly bustling tavern, melding imagined memories with a pulsating present. Time seems to be suspended within the creative space — galvanising Studio SPHAER to experiment, to envision the future, and to create objects that narrate their ever-evolving tales.
SPHAER explores the boundaries of intersecting realities through the creation of furniture that shapes our conscious experience.
Philosophy
At SPHAER, we embark on rigorous collaborations, journeying to the frontiers of converging realities, fabricating furniture and designs that contour our conscious experience. The objects, meticulously sculpted from uncomplicated yet eloquent, sophisticated low-impact materials, exist not only in our current perception but in their own right.
We advocate and require an environment where a space and its occupants can truly listen. In doing so, the narratives of these objects incite fresh stories, thoughts, and emotions that we materialise where we luxuriate without confining ourselves — except perhaps to the mantra of collaboration: from aesthetics and functionality, from object and space, from emotion and intellect — from one creative mind to another.
Collaboration is a fundamental part of SPHAER’s holistic approach. It propels the individual to reflect and reconsider, while engendering interdisciplinary points of friction between knowledge and understanding. Our ideas ought to reverberate between minds, between past and future, between the imminent and the extant — this is a vital aspect of our work. With this cooperative mentality, Studio SPHAER endeavours to construct highly exclusive objects that epitomise quality, attention to detail, openness, and diversity.
Philosophy
SPHAER founder Leni Piech, born in 1993 in Vienna, is a product designer who graduated with honours with a master’s degree in Innovation Management from the renowned Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.
Her master’s thesis dealt with “feminist worlding”: a deconstruction of human realities in non-human worlds. The focus on the approach of radical otherness and the exploration of non-human dimensions continues in her work as a designer.
As a mother of two children, Leni Piech is interested in setting her dream vision of “worlding” in motion: She designs worlds as mindsets and perspectives that include approaches and sensitivities to make visible the diversity of interrelationships and entanglements between humans and non-humans in the world. She adopts alternative perspectives, questions existing hierarchies and dominance, and explores new stories and possibilities to promote social innovation and create a more equitable and sustainable world. “Worlding” emphasises the importance of mindfulness and care towards non-human actors.
Leni Piech embodies a visionary who influences the field of product design and interior design with her inspiring idea of the power of worlding.
Leni Piëch
