Athena Calderone has spent years operating at the intersection of fashion, food, and design, building an empire of taste through her lifestyle platform EyeSwoon—as well as two books (including the James Beard Award-winning Cook Beautiful), and an acclaimed interior design practice. (Her new Tribeca apartment graced the cover of Architectural Digest this past March.)

Now, with the debut of Studio Athena Calderone’s Assembler I—a 14-piece furniture and lighting suite unveiled exclusively at The Future Perfect, in New York—she arrives somewhere altogether new. Or rather, somewhere she has been heading all along.

Photo: Billal Taright

Photo: Billal Taright

Drawing on the lessons of French Art Deco design, Assembler I is a study in materiality and proportion. High-gloss wood, lacquer, parchment, and nickel accents sing in harmony, evoking a past that’s been fine-tuned for the present. Calderone, whose first forays into furniture design were in collaboration with Crate & Barrel, likened the process of making the collection to learning a new language. “This was the first time that my studio really owned the drawings, owned the proportions, owned the minute iterations and changes that have occurred over the past two years [of development],” she says.

Photo: Billal Taright