Dear Grandchild,
It is Sunday evening, and this brings an end to an intense and social weekend. I would like to tell you about three of the guests who came to our home yesterday and today.
Yesterday the photographer Yuki Sugiura came for lunch with her partner Simon, who is a product designer. I met Yuki on the plane returning from my Building Green lecture in Copenhagen last October. We had noticed one another at the dining room at Bror restaurant the previous evening, and as we happened to be on the same flight back to London, struck up conversation at the immigration queue when we arrived at Heathrow.
Bror restaurant was established by chefs who had trained at the celebrated Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, and so I felt some kinship with those who had also struck out from under the shelter of a world-famous establishment. I wish I had more space here to tell you about Bror, but I am afraid you will just have to dig it out of my black sketchbook from that time.
Yuki is a well-established food photographer, and the work she does is in my estimation closer to art than to documentation. Knowing her passion for food, your grandmother cooked an overwhelming array of traditional Korean foods. Of particular note was the GuJeolPan royal dish that she served in your great-great-grandmother’s sterling silver octagonal box. Your great-great-grandmother learned to prepare that dish from the head of the last royal kitchen of Korea, and she taught your grandmother when we were married. I hope that you will learn from your grandmother, and that the tradition, and that beautiful silver box, will live on in an unbroken line with you.
This evening, the fashion designer Yoojin Kim came to visit us for tea and examine my wardrobe. Yoojin approached me because of her interest in bringing exceptional fashion design to the wardrobes of the bicycle-to-work generation of London men. She saw my interest in the topic on Facebook and asked to see us. She has fantastic ideas about reversible suit jackets and collar lapels that flip up to reveal reflective fabric, and design of details for mobility. Although she is only in her early twenties, she shows incredible focus, and your grandmother thinks that she will be a well-known and successful designer someday. Depending on circumstance, we may ask her to design my work uniform.
After a weekend like this I feel more and more certain that our future as designers is to bring together these diverse fields, and through them become curators of beautiful and healthy lives.
Wishing you all the best, your grandfather. 11 January, 2015.
