21/05/2025 - Robina Benson Design House, long known for its expansive spaces in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, has opened a new gallery on the corner of Broome and Crosby Streets in New York’s Soho neighborhood. In comparison to its other venues, this space favors intimacy over scale and atmosphere over showmanship.
This approach is embodied in the inaugural exhibition “Hana Arashi” - whose title translates from Japanese as “flower storm” - a collaboration between Nendo and Paola Lenti. The Japanese phrase refers to a precise moment in time when cherry blossom petals are swept up by a sudden breeze—a fleeting yet ineffably poetic event in which structure dissolves into movement. This same idea of lightness, transience, and suspended motion informs the installation.
“We envisioned the Soho gallery as a creative haven, a place where design transcends function to become art,” says founder Robina Benson. “With Hana Arashi, we invite guests to explore the harmony between contemporary design and poetic expression. This concept is a tribute to the ever-changing energy of Soho and the artistry that defines our brand."
The installation plays with perception. A flurry of textile fragments are hung - almost invisibly - in mid-air, drifting from ceiling to floor. The pieces – knotted, woven, or loosely cut – mimic a cloud of petals scattered across space, floating, overlapping, casting layered shadows in a sort of weightless choreography.
Within this “hovering haze”, a series of sculptural armchairs – curvaceous and softly oversized forms upholstered in dense textiles - focus the eye. On the walls, flat forms - abstracted botanical or cloud-like shapes – float against the white backdrop, rendering the spatial interplay even more layered and complex, visually pulling the seating from the horizontal floor to the vertical wall plane.
The Nendo-Lenti collaboration is not so much a furniture display as much as a suspended moment with intricate surfaces and a palette that ranges from clear blues to ember reds, creating an experience that tends toward wandering and imagining as opposed to observing. Nendo is known for distilling complex ideas into singular gestures, while Paola Lenti bridges the divide between textile innovation and furniture design. Hana Arashi merges their distinctive vocabularies in a spatial composition that invites attention through atmosphere rather than formality.
Paola Lenti on Archiproducts.com
