"Tom" Leather Box Designed By Claude Bouchard For Oscar Maschera

"Tom" is a leather box, designed by Claude Bouchard and manufactured by Oscar Maschera, and is part of Foglia Couture collection. Genuine Italian leather vegetable tanned. Colors combination to be chosen from the available range: tan, sienna, orange, red, red-purple, dark brown, khaki, blue, black.DIMENSIONS:D. 11.4", W. 11.8", H. 4.3"Two hides together, one single layer of leather. Two different colors, one for the inside and the other for the outside. Few precise cuts on a whole surface, a few pleats held together by hand stitching: the object has taken shape. Strong thickness, raw edges, dyed edges, contrasting stitching: the details of craftsmanship. Leather, robust and soft, which maturates over time like wood, wine, brandy and cheese, is a material suitable for a living relationship with people and things it has to do with: it absorbs their scent and gives its own. It protects, gathers and changes shape, as it retains something of the life it once had.Past experiences in working with leather, with objects of common use transformed into their own form by the material of which they were made (baskets, boxes, trays, writing-desk items, small pieces of furniture, in addition to bags and cases, of course) have led Oscar Maschera to today’s production which has exceeded even the limits of explicit reality to get the pure form of the objects, reaching beyond the risky limit of mere functionality.CLAUDE BOUCHARD, interior architect and designer by training, is well known for his pieces of design in ceramics, porcelain, glass, metal and wood for firms such as Hermès, Puiforcat, Porcelaines Bernardaud, Faïenceries de Gien and the Musée des Arts décoratifs de Paris in France, Triangolo in Italy, Anthologie Quartett in Germany and Vista Alegre in Portugal.He has been artistic director of Puiforcat, the silversmith subsidiary of the Hermès group (2007 – 2009). Claude Bouchard’s work is focused on the physical, emotional and esthetic relationship between the object or space created and people who use or experience it. He has always questioned the simplicistic principle of “purity” and “functionalism”.During all his work Bouchard has been trying to bring a profoundly contemporary form of expression to traditional techniques and materials and thus to help the conservation and renewal of those endangered techniques. Claude Bouchard lectures both for the architecture Department of Columbia University and at the Camondo School of design and interior architecture.Claude Bouchard’s work has been shown at the Galleria Blanchaert in Milan, at the Biennale di Faenza, at Max Alto and the Square de Vergennes Gallery in Paris, at the Biennale de St. Etienne, and at the craft in several retrospective exhibits in France, Belgium and Japan and several of his works are now in museum collections (Musée des Arts décoratifs Paris, Musée des Arts décoratifs et des Textiles de Lyon, etc).