"Grottos, popular in 18th-century Britain as decorative follies in gardens and parks, have found contemporary fans in Adam Charlap Hyman, 32, and Andre Herrero, 33, the designer-architect duo behind the New York and Los Angeles-based design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero. They have often recontextualized this motif with humor and whimsy, once creating a sculpture by adorning defunct telephones and keyboards found in the basement of the New York nonprofit space the Storefront for Art and Architecture with barnacles and starfish. Their 'grotto hat,' as Charlap Hyman calls it, is composed of a straw boater hat decorated with an array of preserved undersea life: shells, sponges, coral and pearls. 'We love to work in the format of a homage,' says Charlap Hyman, who referenced the 20th-century British Surrealist Eileen Agar’s wearable sculpture 'The Ceremonial Hat for Eating Bouillabaisse' (1936), a cork basket painted blue and topped with lobster tails and fish skeletons."