Varen Solid Walnut Wall Mirror

Details

Stand in front of Varen and you are looking at two shapes at once. The outer edge is a triangle with every corner rounded away: a wide arc over the top, a full turn down the right side, and a soft apex tapering off toward the lower left. The opening cut into it is a calm oval. Neither shape repeats the other, and that is the whole design.

The oval sits off to one side inside the triangle, so the walnut narrows to a slim line through the upper left and swells into a broad wedge down the right and along the bottom. In section the band is scooped and rounded, with no hard edge anywhere to catch the eye, and light reads it as a single unbroken highlight that runs the entire way around. The piece spreads along a wall instead of climbing it, which is what makes it easy to place over a sideboard, a run of hooks, or a hallway bench.

No joint anywhere in the band

Follow the grain around the frame. It moves with the curve the whole way, opening to honey where the light lands on the upper left and deepening to red-brown at the wide end. There is no seam, no glue line, no point where the color steps from one board to the next. A frame built up from segments always confesses at the turns. This one has nothing to confess: the band was shaped out of solid walnut rather than pieced together from it, and underneath the wood there is only more of the same wood.

The glass is recessed into the band instead of sitting flush with the front face, so the frame carries it from behind and the depth of the walnut is what reaches you first. Hang it and look at the wall underneath: the band stands proud of the surface and casts its own soft shadow.

Cut in Konya, after you order

Mehmet Ali shapes every piece himself in Konya, more than thirty-five years into his working life with wood, and these mirrors are a recent chapter in a workshop that was busy long before them. Nothing waits on a shelf here. Your Varen is cut once the order reaches him, in the size you choose, and the walnut he opens for it carries its own figure and its own weight of color, so expect a close relative of these photographs rather than a copy of them.

Which size for your wall

Eight sizes, from 50 x 38 cm (20 x 15 inch) up to 150 x 116 cm (59 x 46 inch), with the wider measurement given first. The form keeps its proportions all the way up, so the wedge never thins out: in the smaller sizes it is a detail you notice up close, and from 120 x 93 cm (47 x 37 inch) onward it is the first thing you see from the doorway. Leave some bare wall on the side the apex points toward and the shape has somewhere to go.

Packing and care

Mirrors from this workshop have found their way to around twenty countries. Yours leaves padded and boxed in protective materials, goes out worldwide, and travels with a tracking number so you can follow it. A soft dry cloth is all the upkeep it asks for, and the walnut would rather not live in a damp room. If you are caught between two sizes, send us your wall measurements before you order, we would far rather work it out with you than leave it to chance.

Among the walnut wall mirrors, only one other outline holds on to a corner: Nora, four of them, with every side between bending inward. If the oval opening is the part you are after and not the shape built around it, Mira is that opening on its own.