Historic Charleston Foundation
Build a world within a single room.
- Art Curation
- Installation
- Interior Design
- Styling and Decor
Historic Charleston Foundation is an advocacy organization advancing the mission of historic preservation. As historic preservation has evolved into more than a movement to simply save historic buildings, the Foundation has broadened its scope into balancing the needs of modern society with protecting the sensitive fabric of the historic district.
As part of The Charleston Festival, a month-long spring programming event that celebrates houses, design and culture, Historic Charleston presented unique, site-specific designer vignettes at the Aiken-Rhett House Museum. The preserved-as-found historic property served as a canvas for a mix of designers. We, along with other designers and artisans, were invited to create a vignette installation.
We envisioned the gentleman’s dressing room as a mode of transport to explore and immerse oneself in the complexities of history.
That is, the stories we tell and those that go untold. The notions of beauty, age, patina, and decay — in the built environment, the natural world, and in people.
The vignette explores our relationship with nature, often blurring the lines between the built and native environment, asking where the wild lives in each of us and listening to her answer.
In addition to lectures set in the early 19th-century Second Presbyterian Church…local designers thoughtfully contemporized the Aiken-Rhett House Museum with a series of theatrical vignettes.
In the room, tall grasses and florals appear as if they’re part of the architecture, as if they’ve always been there, and subtly acknowledging they are where we’ll all return.
Antique furniture, tapestries, paper forms, draperies, and mirrors create a unique landscape for reflection, reimagining, and revelation.
