What makes a purchase “worth it”? The answer is different for everybody, so we’re asking some of the coolest, most shopping-savvy people we know—from small-business owners to designers, artists, and actors—to tell us the story behind one of their most prized possessions.
Who?
If the name Sophie Lou Jacobsen doesn’t immediately ring a bell, chances are you’ve already spotted her wildly Instagrammable wavy glasswares while mindlessly scrolling. Her delightful designs include tableware, vases, and even menorahs rendered in dreamy candy-colored hues like pink, lilac, amber, green, and teal.
As prolific as her glassware career has been—spanning individual work and collaborations with brands like Areaware, Ghia, and In Common With—Sophie only began working with the material recently. She got her start as an industrial designer, moving to New York in 2015 and working at Ladies & Gentlemen Studio as a studio assistant. On the side, she continued to work on her own projects and designs, culminating in a 2018 show during New York’s design week called Furnishing Utopia where she debuted a buzzy home goods collection made entirely of glass. “That was the first time I worked with glass and I fell in love with the material and the process,” she explains. “I never tire of it.” Even so, she’s continuing to explore her range with a new collection of home goods, this time all in metal.
What and when?
Though Sophie grew up in the States, her family is based in France. Her parents recently moved from Paris to a town in the southwest of France where Sophie visits every summer. “In France, there are often these big flea markets in various cities in August,” she says while telling the story of how two summers ago, at a market in a neighboring town, she found a handsome table from Pierre Chapo—a French designer from the early 20th century.
“At one stall, there was a vendor that had a lot of really beautiful classic pieces,” Sophie says, which were also, blessedly, reasonably priced compared to what you might pay at a Paris flea market. “I recognized the table as soon as I saw it. I’ve coveted Pierre Chapo’s furniture and designs for a long, long time, so I got pretty lucky that I found it.”
Where?
Sophie and her partner share a loft apartment in Brooklyn that she describes as fairly small, but with “very, very high ceilings that give us a lot more sense of space than we have.” Still, the 600-square-foot home has proven challenging for finding pieces that maximize the space, which is where the Pierre Chapo table comes in. “It’s the absolute perfect size for our apartment,” she adds.
