James Turrell, Into the Light, on view through 2025 at MASS MoCA (Massachussetts Museum of Contemporary Art), North Adams.
A three-hour drive from the Big Apple and near the aristocratic Boston, Berkshire County, Western Massachusetts, is considered a sort of an antithesis to the Hamptons, a seaside holiday destination for true New Yorkers: little worldly life, a lot of culture and generally an open-air lifestyle. The locations are sophisticated, the calendar is rich with quality events and the community is overall well cultured. After all, Boston – full of British heritage and America’s renowned hub for academia – is just a few miles away. And New York cannot offer something near as cool as Berkshire.
What makes the region attractive is above all the extraordinary number of art galleries, theaters and museums. The MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, is reputed among the most prestigious institutions on the American art scene. During the summer, the Boston Symphony Orchestra moves to the city of Lenox vivifying an annual symphony music festival that attracts visitors from all over the country.
Berkshire has been elected as a second home by celebrities who prefer to keep a low profile and appreciate an authentic modus vivendi: Meryl Streep, James Taylor and the cellist prodigy Yo-Yo Ma, are just to name a few. The landscape offers a lot, from the monumental Appalachian Mountains to natural parks and botanical gardens.
This region of Massachusetts seems to be the ideal destination also for Paola Lenti collections. Here, the nature reveals itself in an infinite range of colours – the emerald green of the forests, the blue of the streams and the magenta of the leaves in autumn – which seem to have been designed to evoke the nuances of the company’s furnishings. The selection of the pieces with which the new monobrand store in the centre of Great Barrington was outfitted reflects this philosophy: suggesting correspondences between shades, materials, and the surrounding environment. The choice of products for the store, an open space with exposed brick walls and large loft-style windows, focused on outdoor furniture made with innovative technical materials and yarns, capable of withstanding difficult weather conditions such as rain, wind and humidity.
Writer and poet Edith Wharton, the first woman to receive the Pulitzer for The Age of Innocence, was also in love with the pristine landscape of Berkshire. Today The Mount, the residence that she designed in 1902 so as to retire and write, is a museum open to the public. Wharton, with a talent for design and a sense of proportion as that of a professional architect, had observed that magic is created where there is continuity between inside and outside, in the “subtle transition from the fixed and formal lines of art to the shifting and irregular lines of nature”. A principle shared by Paola Lenti, always looking for a harmonious dialogue between the domestic environment and the landscape, between the interiors and the exteriors.
Paola Lenti by HUNDRED MILE
47 RAILROAD ST, Great Barrington, MA 01230
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