Pier Righi0:00
Well, allow me a bit of a comparison into fashion. If you see these beautiful creations on the runway, you very often praise the designer, as Karl was always praised. But Karl would have been the first to say that the prize is actually not only to him—there are very important people behind the scene that make it possible to basically translate his vision, his designs, into reality with beautiful craftsmanship. That's the seamstresses, the people that really sew the product. When it comes to Haute Couture, it is actually the same in an architectural project. You have the vision, you have the idea, you've got the inspiration, but you need to have people that have the talent and the knowledge to translate your vision into reality and can basically apply the craftsmanship. And that is what we have found with Terra. When we met for the very first time, it became very clear and obvious that they understood where we were coming from, what our vision was, and that they were having very clearly the capabilities to translate that with their craftsmanship into reality. So that's the perfect match—it's like Haute Couture needs the designer, it needs the seamstress to bring a beautiful garment to the catwalk, and that is what we're doing here together with Terra.
As you know, Karl was not only about fashion. He was, yes, a fashion icon, but his areas of interest were so much broader. It was about photography, music, literature, places to go, people, architecture—and he brought it all very effortlessly together, wove it into a canvas, and amplified it to a bigger picture. That is pretty much also the starting point, the inspiration of what we're trying to do here—bringing different areas of interest together and applying it to a bigger canvas, to make it a beautiful frame for people to fill with their lives, with their experiences, with their points of interest. That is the idea behind it.
And very concretely, we took the inspiration from our Parisian Maison—an 18th-century Haussmannian house in the center of Paris that Karl was always fascinated by and loved—and basically took the structure of that architecture: the various flows of light, the staircase, the geography, the geometry of it, and translated it into the future through this very contemporary development that we're creating right now. So those were the two major areas, touching all the interest points of Karl at the same time, concretely going with an architectural idea that he was inspired by.
So, Karl Lagerfeld as a Maison—we have been a founding member of the Fashion Pact already in 2019, so sustainability is engraved, if you want, in our DNA and everything we do. And that also, of course, goes into our architectural project. We have and are having all these conversations and considerations with the Terra team. For example, the creek where this development is built on is very sustainably developed in the sense of consuming much, much less water—it's pretty self-sustained on water than others. That being only one example, so sustainability is of course an important element when we look into these types of projects such as this one.
So of course, always when we do this type of development in general, it's important that they do not live in isolation but form part of a bigger community. It starts with how a development is ideated—it should always be very respectful of the surrounding that is found, and also the nature that is found. That also applies to people living there. How this concretely will translate has to be seen, but of course it should not be a secluded element. It should nicely embrace the community and be embraced by it.
