Most objects are designed to look good in a photograph. The ones worth living with are designed for something harder to capture.
There was a clothing store in Manchester called L’homme — French for “the man” with a window display that stopped me in the street. Not because it was beautiful though it was but because it didn’t seem to want anything from me. No come-on, no obvious invitation. Just a total conviction about what it was.
Inside was Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, Jean Paul Gaultier and Giorgio Armani (Borgonuovo) this was the early nineties. The owner Richard Creme gave me a tour like I’d been admitted somewhere which, in a way, I had. What I was looking at wasn’t merchandise arranged on rails. It was a total environment: the architecture of the space, the weight of the fabric, the specific silence the room seemed to insist on. Fashion, yes. But also art, design, and a particular argument about how objects should occupy the world.
What I didn’t know then was that the store itself had been designed by Andrée Putman, with furniture from her Ecart International collection. Putman was one of the defining interior designers of the late twentieth century, the woman who designed the Morgans Hotel in New York, who understood that a room is never just a container for objects, it is itself an object. The space I was standing in wasn’t a backdrop for the clothes. It was making the same argument the clothes were making.
Eventually I went to work there. L’homme became my real education not just in fashion, but in what it means to sell objects that are genuinely worth owning. How a space should feel. How the things inside it should be presented. What a customer deserves to understand about what they’re buying. When I opened my own store in Manchester, I was building directly on what L’homme had taught me.
The fashion houses I worked with deepened that education further. They had a shared conviction that most people never see: construction is the work. The surface is just the evidence. A coat that drapes correctly does so because of decisions made in the lining, in the cut, in the relationship between panels that you’ll never examine. The outside is honest about the inside. When it isn’t, you can feel it even if you can’t name it. I think about this constantly when I look at furniture.
Most furniture sold today is optimized for the photograph. Clean lines, good lighting, a neutral room — it reads beautifully on a screen and reveals its shortcuts the moment you sit in it, open a drawer, run your hand along an edge. The joinery is hidden because it wouldn’t survive scrutiny. The material is approximated because the real thing costs more. The photograph doesn’t lie exactly; it just doesn’t tell you anything useful.
The brands at Rullow Jacobs are here because they don’t do that. A Carl Hansen chair looks the way it does because it is made the way it is made — the joinery is the aesthetic, not a problem to be concealed. A Flos light is designed from the quality of the light outward, not from a visual concept backward. String Furniture is honest about its logic: the system is the point, and the system is visible. These are objects that reward the same attention the L’homme window rewarded the closer you look, the more there is.
That’s the only standard I apply. Not whether something photographs well. Whether it earns its place in a room over years, not weeks.
The window in Manchester wasn’t selling anything. It was making a statement about what the store believed. I’ve been trying to do the same thing ever since.
Cliff, Founder · Rullow & Jacobs