“As a child, I was a James Bond film, Space: 1999 geek,” Napa Valley-based designer Richard Von Saal tells Architizer. Captivated by the glamour and “complex geometry of futuristic modernism,” of these movies, he developed a certain cinematic flair in his own interior design and fabrication practice, making it only fitting that the Napa Valley Film Festival would commission him annually to design its luxe VIP lounge.
For the film festival’s latest edition in November, he decided to evoke this childhood cinematic fixation. “I thought it would be a lot of fun to create a Space: 1999 environment,” he says, a play on the retrofuturism of the ’70s British sci-fi series. With his own inventory of midcentury modern furniture and an array of found objects — salvaged hospital oxygen tanks, old negatives of water-jet cut steel sheets, the chunks from a 200-year-old Monterey pine tree — he created his own take on the “futuristic space lounge,” one that reads as a visual mash-up of time periods: the cleanliness of modernism meets the vibrant camp of the ’70s, plus the haunting otherworldliness of knotty, ancient pine.
© Treve Johnson
© Treve Johnson
The lounge’s centerpiece was a space-age series of furniture that mixed and matched the classicism of marble and retro sheen of acrylic — without actually using either. The film festival had actually furnished Von Saal with five slabs of Caesarstone quartz, a highly resilient, sustainable alternative to marble.
“I was elated,” Von Saal says, praising the material’s uniform consistency compared to the occasional weak veins and pockets that can emerge when cutting into a piece of marble. The ease of working with Caesarstone, in addition to its wide selection of styles, colors, and textures, allowed Von Saal greater liberties with his designs. “It made my mind spin with inspirational delight.”
© Treve Johnson
© Treve Johnson
He took cuts of Calacatta Nuvo, a line of opaque white slabs lined with the same cascading grey veins of Calacatta marble, and fashioned them into service bars. In one instance, he replaced one leg with a polygonal base sculpted from Caesarstone’s glossy Red Shimmer. For other bars, he placed slabs of Caesarstone Coastal Grey, a new shade launched in January, on top of Red Shimmer sheets joined together as intersecting planes. He also used Red Shimmer to craft sharp-edged yet immaculately smooth single-plane benches; the dramatic angles bring to mind a sheet of metal that’s been folded down at the ends. Throughout the VIP lounge, Caesarstone slabs placed on wine barrel legs paid homage to the numerous vineyards of the region.
© Treve Johnson
© Treve Johnson
The material inspired not only a visual boldness, but a structural one. “I sent Caesarstone’s fabricator my shop drawings and stone selections, and they were not easy on the fabrications side,” says Von Saal, citing the compound miters, complex oval cuts, and abnormal angular butt joints of his designs. It took only a week, however, for Caesarstone’s team to finish the project. “It was a perfect partnership,” he says.