Daniel Rozensztroch – Collectors’ Island
March 15, 2021 11:43 amDaniel Rozensztroch is a collector of household utensils. His apartment in the Marais district of Paris is filled with a beautiful curation of common objects such as knives, glassware, hairbrushes, herring pots, oil lamps, spoons, hangers, pottery and toothbrushes.
“I do not believe that I have the soul of a collector,” Daniel Rozensztroch said. “I consider myself instead to be an observer. It’s what the objects have to say that interests me, how they compare, what distinguishes them, how they can be grouped to establish a nomenclature, a chronology, typologies, how the diversity of their forms describes the evolutionary history of actions and functions. This is the motivation behind my collections. They are numerous, often simultaneous, determined by some common point: my passion for the most ordinary utility object, something that is often discarded and quickly forgotten, thus rarely noted.”
Each year the Genevan watchmaker Vacheron Constantin releases an art book titled Collectors’ Island, this year I photographed the entire book and this is one of nine stories included.
Many thanks to Creative Director Bradley Seymour, and to Editorial Manager Lara Lo Calzo. Captions and interview by Virginie Bertrand.
Daniel Rozensztroch sits with some of the nineteenth-century glass cruets dear to him. Others in various shapes and colors sit behind him on shelves from the 1950s by the French designer Mathieu Matégot.
Rozensztroch envisioned his Parisian loft with his architect friend Valérie Mazerat “as an open space to feature the maximum number of objects grouped the way I like them.”
Rozensztroch has a collection of over 2,000 spoons made of wood, mother of pearl, bone, glass, metal, enamel, porcelain, and horn. “Anything but silver,” he said.
Chinese pottery from the Liao dynasty, a ceramic fish by Dieulefit (1930) and earthenware teapots from La Borne (France), as well as a major piece by Élisabeth Joulia alongside a bronze Sabiro lamp (1950).
The entrance to Rozensztroch’s loft presents a selection of objects from his collections as on a mood board: kitchen implements, Christmas tree decorations from Gablonz, knives and spoons amidst cards and inspirational memos.
The living area is separated from the kitchen by a collection of vintage industrial cabinets. Nineteenth-century ceramics from Çanakkale, a pottery centre of Asia Minor, and a braided ceramic dish by Émile Tessier (1950) from the Malicorne earthenware factory sit on a table by the Italian designer Paola Navone.
Rozensztroch’s library is organized on metal shelves occupying an entire wall of his apartment. It is classified by subject and contains hundreds of books that provide him with a constant source of inspiration.
A selection of Japanese, African and Greek wooden, bamboo and coconut spoons.
Rozensztroch showing his collection of toothbrushes made of wood, bamboo, ivory or bone, illustrating the evolution of lifestyles over the centuries.
Pitchers and wooden bottles made of monoxyl wood and made by shepherds in southwest France in the nineteenth century sit on an eighteenth-century sculptor’s table from the Carrara Academy of Fine Arts (Italy).