Although Yakusha launched her architecture and interiors practice in 2006, she describes the year 2014 as a significant “turning point” in her career. It was a year of unrest in the Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity unfolded on the streets – a popular uprising against the kleptocratic rule of former president Viktor Yanukovych. With tensions running high in the country, Yakusha felt the need to create a brand that would support and promote Ukrainian culture, which felt very much under threat at that time. “We were so close to losing our land and identity,” she remembers. “I felt my mission was to preserve and pass on the story."
Victoria Yakusha defines her design philosophy as 'live minimalism', for although she employs clean lines and a restrained use of color, there is nothing clinical or hard-lined about her work. Instead, her own cozy brand of minimalism embraces warm, tactile materials with imperfect surfaces, such as dimpled clay and rough-hewn wood. Shapes are rounded and undulating and imbued with a strong sense of female sensuality. How does she want people to feel in the spaces and around the objects she creates? “I want them to feel free, ” she says without hesitation. “Live minimalism is about freedom — inner and outer.”
Ukrainian artisans working with clay, a material prevalent in Yakusha's designs.
The result was the launch of a new design brand called Faina, which means 'sweet' or 'beautiful' in Ukrainian. Faina produces handmade furniture and objects using traditional Ukrainian craft techniques and local “living” materials such as clay, wood, willow and flax. Designed and developed by Yakusha and her team, pieces are made in collaboration with local artisans from across the country whose crafts are at risk of dying out due to lack of interest and very low profitability. The aim is to use these endangered techniques to create new objects with modern forms that will bring the craftspeople’s work to a new audience and ensure their survival.
Among the brand’s first pieces was a collection of ash-framed cabinets with ceramic doors. The collection’s name, Pechyvo, means ‘crackers’, and refers to the wafer-like appearance of the ceramic panels. The studio worked with more than 10 local artisans over a period of eight months before they were able to create panels that were durable enough to withstand use. This detail-oriented and material-driven approach set the standard for what was to come.
For the Ztista series – meaning ‘made of dough’ – the studio developed a dough-like clay composite material that will decompose into the earth at the end of its life. Each piece in the collection – which comprises a chair, bar stool bench and table – has a recycled steel frame onto which clay blended with straw, recycled paper, wood chips and other natural components is applied by hand in thick layers. The technique was inspired by a traditional construction method known as valkuvannya that was historically used to build the type of clay huts that were common across much of Ukraine and the surrounding region before stone and brick became popular at the start of the 20th century.
A trio of Ztista Bar Stools in a private residence.
Faina doesn’t push a message of sustainability as a marketing tool but rather embraces it by default. “The Ztista material continues our philosophy of live design. It’s important for us to live in harmony with nature, as our ancestors did a long time ago,” says Yakusha. “Their lives were closely linked to the changing seasons and fertility of the earth. They were looking for ways to be beneficial to nature, not just exploit its resources. In Faina and Yakusha Design we appreciate nature and treat resources very respectfully incorporating sustainable materials like reclaimed wood, steel and stone into our interiors.”
Yakusha believes that the strong connection to the earth that she feels, and which she channels into all of her design work, can be traced back to her childhood growing up in a small Ukrainian village in what she describes as “an ordinary family of engineers”. A lot of her time, she says, was spent outdoors drawing the nature she saw around her. "Since I remember I have been drawing,” she recalls. "It always fulfilled me, helped me to better know myself and the world around me. I can’t say it was the beginning of my ‘love of design’, more aesthetics. I was learning to see the beauty.”
Her passion for Ukraine, and in particular its rural communities, is clear to see; each piece in the collection tells a story about the country’s local craft traditions or folklore. For instance, the 1.6-metre-wide Strikha pendant lamp – meaning ‘straw roof’ – is handcrafted from willow vine by a carpet weaving master. Its broad circular form is intended to resemble the straw roof of a traditional Ukrainian hut from which they take their name. Similarly, the studio’s Bandura vases are named after the Ukrainian folk instrument that their tear-shaped outlines recall.
Full, rounded forms such as these are a recurring theme in Faina's vocabulary and the power of femininity is a topic that Yakusha's work touches upon often. This is particularly pertinent in Domna – a plump armchair made up of two cushioned elements joined together. Launched last year, its form is based upon an ancient clay artifact that was found by archaeologists on Cetatuia Hill in Romania in 1942. Believed to have been made by the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture around approximately 5,400 to 2,700 BC, the sculpture depicts the bodily form of a goddess. “Domna is my manifest of Ukrainian modern female design with a strong connection to our cultural roots," explains Yakusha. “In Ukrainian, Domna is an ancient word for a stove, and the design piece symbolizes the warmth of a home. It is made to serve as the home's amulet, a protector, because of its living spirit."
The Domna Armchair is a design with a soft but strong female presence.
Faina's home fragrance line puts nature in a bottle.
Recently, Faina switched up its production calendar so that it can produce two collections per year that are launched during winter and summer solstice – these auspicious days, Yakusha says, are times “of natural renewal”. The collections include furniture, decor, lighting, and since 2019, home fragrances. "When we defined our studio’s style as ‘live minimalism’, we discovered that it’s crucial for us to embrace all the senses,” Yakusha says of her decision to add scent to her ever-widening oeuvre. “To see, touch, even smell – I am always deep in details and love to approach design holistically.” To date, the home fragrance collection includes three earthy scents that evoke fresh rainfall in the forest. Polyn contains notes of juniper, wormwood, oak, mountain pine, sweet thyme and fresh grass; Cvit blends sage and calamus, fern and amber; while Móchar smells like wet soil with spring water, birch moss and grey lichen.
Since 2014, through her work with Faina, Yakusha has done much to support and highlight the endangered craft skills and design talent within the Ukraine, but four years into this journey, she felt that there was still more that she could do. In 2018, eager to further communicate the stories of the craftspeople, Yakusha organized a series of design expeditions called Land Inspires. The five-day trips, held in the autumn of 2018 and summer of 2019, saw a group of five designers and journalists gather to experience local Ukrainian crafts – such as weaving, pottery and woodworking – in remote locations across the country. “Land Inspires was born from my desire to show rich Ukrainian cultural heritage and millennia-old crafts to the world," she says. “Many of these crafts are endangered. For example, one of the destinations we visited is the only Ukrainian village that still produces unique black smoked ceramics. We aim to preserve the technique and keep telling the story through time. Returning to nature and our roots, we return to our true selves.”
A petite workspace in Ya Vsesvit.
2019 also saw the launch of Ya Vsesvit, Yakusha Design's self-designed office and showroom in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. Meaning ‘I am the Universe’ in Ukrainian, Ya Vsesvit serves as a collaborative space for creatives, encompassing a studio, a Faina showroom and an 80-seat lecture room for events. Yakusha, who trained at the Prydniprovska Academy of Architecture in Ukraine and then the Institut National des Sciences Appliqués in France, describes it as her most important interior project to date. “It's modern and minimalist, but at the same time ancestral and rooted in Ukrainian crafts and traditions,” she enthuses. “The interior is built on contrasts with clay walls, brick masonry, steel elements, and a table hand carved from a single piece of stone. I love mixing authentic and modern, high and low, textures and materials with different, sometimes even opposite, messages in one holistic living organism. You come in and feel the living spirit.”
FAINA House, a residential gallery in Brussels, Belgium, is contemporary design gallery with a wide exposition of live minimalist furniture and décor by Victoria Yakusha.
The launch of Ya Vsesvit was closely followed in 2020 by the opening of Faina House, a second showroom, this time in Brussels, where Yakusha is currently based. Why Brussels? “I love Belgium, especially their approach to design," she says, counting Belgians Axel Vervoordt and Vincent Van Duysen among her design heroes. Located in a two-story, timber-frame, family house in the city’s upmarket Prince d'Orange district, the gallery has a calming interior with white walls and generous windows that allow plenty of natural light into the space. Yakusha says it was her ambition to create a homely, welcoming space that makes visitors feel as if they “were visiting an old friend”.
While visits to the gallery in Brussels are currently by appointment only, the space in Kyiv is open to visitors throughout the week. Both showrooms host a permanent exhibition of Faina design pieces, including the new Soniah lamps, which were first presented at the Rossana Orlandi Gallery in Milan. The clay lamps – which come in four sizes with the tallest standing at two-meters-high – are an homage to sunflowers, the national flower of Ukraine.
In spring 2020, Yakusha decided to merge her two teams across Faina and Yakusha Design to create one integrated multidisciplinary design studio under the name of YD / Yakusha Design. The 17-strong team is split across the two locations and includes architects, designers, project managers and a PR and marketing department. Yakusha oversees all of the projects and is especially involved with conceptual development. "I don’t divide projects into large and small, " she explains, when asked about the challenges of working at different scales. "I have only one rule – to do projects I believe in with people who share our values. Every architecture or interior has its own project manager and architect in charge."
The first Ukrainian eco-friendly development of its kind, designed by Yakusha and her studio.
"Both furniture and interior design are about telling the story," she continues. "The creation of Faina objects starts from investigating ancient crafts, traditions, and symbols, while interior design is more about communication between you and your client – investigating the site, needs, the universe of the person that will live or work there. So it’s also a story, but told in a different form."
Yakusha describes herself as a proactive person who needs “constant change” to give her drive and energy – perhaps an unsurprising revelation given her studio's output. This spring will see the studio exhibiting new Faina pieces at Belgian design fair Collectible 2021, and her team is already working on a new collection, which will be presented later this year on summer solstice. Meanwhile the architecture and interiors teams are working on the design of 22 eco-friendly houses with straw panel walls and natural reed roofs that boast high thermal protection and energy-saving design features.
After a year of reflection and unprecedented slowdown across the globe, when many of us have had a chance to pause and observe the things we perhaps once took for granted, the themes that are woven into Yakusha's work have taken on a new relevance. As things return to a “new normal” and the pace of life picks up once more, reconnecting to nature and appreciating the skills and traditions that we have in front of us, are practices that we can all agree to take with us going forward.
Article by Ali Morris
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