Charlap Hyman & Herrero designed the loft of the VitraHaus as a lush landscape for living indoors; a surrealistic meditation on the tensions between inside and outside, public and private, old and new, modernity and adornment, uncanny and real. Binding the range of design pieces collected within is a thread of homages to artworks, films, characters, books, and places that have captivated CHH since the firm’s inception. What emerges from this carefully calibrated network of references is a deeply personal space full of humor, remembrance, and love.

Fictional characters like Des Esseintes from Huysman’s Au Rebours, Lidia Pontano from Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, and the artist from Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, have left behind props from their most iconic scenes. The terrace’s hand-shaped pillows and shell-trimmed topiary recall Dora Maar’s photograph of a hand crawling out from a shell. A writhing straw rug in the form of a snake, Verner Panton’s Living Tower, a screen made of giant profiles, and Noguchi’s Freeform Sofa take on an abstract quality, like elements in a painting by Tanguy, dotting the expanse of mossy green carpet that extends into the hills beyond.