Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In home decor, shells are synonymous with a kind of kitschy seaside aesthetic that most try to avoid, their reputation on a par with driftwood signs bearing the words “live laugh love”. But a new range of contemporary designers is reclaiming the shell, as high design: objects that blend Rococo romance with childhood memories, a love of nature and the value of found objects. Mexico City-based Alana Burns creates candle holders, cutlery and light sconces using shells that feel rooted in antiquity. “In Mexican pre-Hispanic cultures, treasure was not only considered to be precious stones, but shells also. I think that’s where I find inspiration,” she says. Her Sol candle holders — recently on show at design gallery The Future Perfect — combine large lion’s paw scallop shells with brass fittings decorated with an edging of silver droplets. The Media Luna sconce contains the pearlescent shell of a green abalone sea snail, set against spiral-decorated nickel silver. A range of silver cutlery features different shells, such as cowrie and oyster, as decorative handles. For Burns, a psychotherapist by day, the work is all about playing with the meaning of objects; she calls it a “surreal language”. “All my art has been based on the idea of changing or transforming the meaning of what something is,” she says. Her pieces feel rich in nostalgia. “All of the shells I find have a story,” she says. She sources them at the beach, at antique markets and through friends.Beachcombing has been a hobby since childhood. But wracked by the guilty feeling she was “stealing” when she took these shells home, as she grew older Burns made a promise to herself — and the sea, she says — to use these gathered objects to create something, “to give them a new meaning”.Childhood memories and habits were also influential for the LA-based artist and designer Frank Traynor, whose project The Perfect Nothing Catalog comprises delightful versions of everyday household objects — bins, teapots, drawer handles — adorned with shells and pebbles. “I grew up in Miami collecting cockles and arks,” he says. “I think all kids are drawn to seashells: they’re free, beautiful, mysterious and mystical; Fibonacci from the bottom of the ocean.” Traynor’s work is defined by this almost obsessional collecting approach. “I kind of live in a constant state of shell collecting,” he says. “It activates my hunter-gatherer impulse, my hoarder impulse.” Traynor, like Burns, creates candles: his 40” Candlestick (2023) in tin bears scallop and cockle shells, clinging to it like the wall of a grotto, while his Candlestick — Shells (2023) places different shells at the end of tin wires, arranged like a bouquet. Chandelier 1 (2023), meanwhile, feels like a medieval relic from the bottom of the sea: a metal frame designed to hold 12 candles, dotted with shells that appear to have grown over it. In the recent work of Swedish artist and designer Ellen Hedin, large found shells take the place of handles on otherwise industrial, minimalist metal cabinets. But rather than a finishing touch, the shells actually drove the entire concepts for the pieces. “I started with the shells,” she says. “In a way, you could say that the furniture is custom-made out of the shell. It gives me the inspiration to create a piece.” But there are practical advantages of using shells for cabinet handles, too. “The organic surface of a shell has a tactile quality that makes it perfect for handles — a touch, a first impression,” she says. “It’s a kind of bridge between nature and culture.”Hedin, too, started collecting shells as a child. Now, based in Stockholm, she gathers them from secondhand stores, beach trips and even the supermarket. “You can go to the fish counter, buy yourself a lovely dinner, and end up with lots of oyster shells,” she says. She also visits her family’s summer home on Härön, an island off Sweden’s west coast, where she follows in her relatives’ footsteps. She learnt to find shells with her grandmother and shells were also a surprise inheritance from her grandfather, “which I had no idea he collected”, she says. “When he passed away, I wanted to do something special with them, and that’s how I made my first steel lamp.” In her inventive floor lamps, Hedin fashions large shells into kinds of lampshades, combined with bent steel pipes. Emma Witter, an artist and designer based in London who works with waste and found objects, often combines shells with copper, using the process of electroforming. In The Study of Ceremony (2024), an intriguing sculpture, clam shells kept aside from cooking are combined with a tangle of copper wire. Merman’s Goblet (2024) transforms an oyster shell from a London market stall into a cup, placed on a copper base. In Barnacle Mirror 1 (2023), which appears like an artefact from a shipwreck, a vintage mirror is covered in tiny sea snail shells that Witter beachcombed. All kids are drawn to seashells: they’re free, beautiful, mysterious and mystical; Fibonacci from the bottom of the ocean“Shells are seen to be very kitsch and twee, so I try to avoid symmetry and pattern by clustering them in a way that looks natural and unruly, as if they have grown, like barnacles, over my surreal objects,” Witter says.Witter’s pieces are currently on show at Casa al Mare, a group exhibition at London’s Gallery Fumi (until September 7) that seeks to evoke the feeling of a seaside home (without the stereotypical designs that might entail). After all, before shells were tacky, they were symbols of fertility and birth, love and beauty, pilgrimage and the unconscious, used in art and architecture across millennia. Through these designers, they are reclaiming their place as objects of desire.Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
