Review: Art for the Home - The Transcendent Printmaking of Stellavie

The best home decoration manages to say something about you, without calling undue attention to itself. In this regard, the Hamburg-based printmaking firm Stellavie deserves the highest praise: Stellavie prints can blend in with the rest of your furnishings while giving any guests with the good taste to notice them something to talk about. At least as of this writing, Stellavie offers a few distinct series -- the true-to-name Star Map prints, the Exceptionally Great Espresso prints, and the most recent, the Movie Director Portait prints -- all of which are executed in two colors. But when those two colors are gold on black, or gold on emerald green, or an exceptionally crisp white on blue, who could ask for more?

Stellavie is owned and operated by Steffen Heidemann and Viktoria Klein, who have persisted with a unified, functional, minimalistic aesthetic that is only positioned to grow in popularity in the years to come. (Artistically executed maps, infographics, and diagrams are now a mainstay of fashionable apartments. Anyway, they're a mainstay of mine.) After developing the star maps and espresso guides in an array of colors, Steffen and Viktoria partnered with illustrator Julian Rentzsch to develop the filmmakers series, which now includes montage-style images of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, and Stanley Kubrick, and could conceivably keep on going to include everyone from Paul Thomas Anderson to Orson Welles.

In a few short sweeps, each filmmaker portrait combines the visage of a famed director with images from one of his most famed films: along the bottom runs a list of life events and major accomplishments, cleverly formatted in the fonts and styles usually reserved for film credits. "Clever" is also the right description for the glow-in-the-dark Home Is Where Your Heart Is print that Steffen and Viktoria have devised. Feel free to buy these for the bedroom of a freakishly sophisticated child, or for the apartment or hallway of anyone who remains admirably young at soul.

Delightful though all these are, it's a marriage of art and functionality that defines Stellavie and that makes the star maps and the espresso guide its most adaptable yet most impactful design choices. Images of both the Northern and the Southern Sky are available and beg to be paired off. They are great for transforming a long and formerly empty stretch of wall into a quiet thought piece, while the espresso diagram is equally at home in your office or near your kitchen, somewhere busy with real life implements and activity to complement its small army of illustrations. In a stroke of irony that may or may as good as I think it is, I have one hanging right above my bar cart. But to see these in prints hanging is to realize how well they transcend the "information as decoration" trend that is prompting many to buy and hang images of liquor bottles, patent applications, maps of Antarctica, you name it. Spend a little time with these, and you just might find yourself matching Northern Sky constellations to signs of the Zodiac, or mulling over the difference between Arabica and Robusta coffee beans. These prints pull you in -- cerebral, functional, in their own way perfect.

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