M&O Living

Where the hills soften into dusk. A sofa that holds the evening. Santa Agnes continues with Lunara. Our new sofa, made for slow night.

A valley in the north of Ibiza. A chair you loose your afternoon in. We are proud to announce our new collection Santa Agnes beginning with our new lounge chair Flora.

Before sunrise on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, a man wades into the sea carrying nothing but a rod.

He climbs a wooden pole planted in the reef and settles onto a crossbar barely wider than his hand. There he sits, two metres above the water, still as the pole itself. He will stay for hours. This is ritipanna stilt fishing and it looks ancient. It isn’t.

It began in the 1940s, in the hungry years around the Second World War. Food was scarce and the shoreline was crowded with men trying to feed their families. The rocks were taken. So some began casting from shipwrecks and fallen trees offshore and when those ran out, they planted poles in the coral reef and built themselves a seat above the waves. A place of one’s own, where no place was left.

Those poles became inheritance. A father passed his son the spot, the skill, and everything that came with it: how to read the tide, when the herring run, which wind brings fish and which brings nothing. Knowledge held in families, never written down.

And here is what strikes us most the method asks everything of the fisherman and almost nothing of the sea. A rod and line, not a net. One fish at a time. The reef stays whole. The stocks survive. Restraint, practiced daily for eighty years, long before anyone called it sustainability.

Today the stilts are emptying. The 2004 tsunami redrew this coastline, and fishing from a pole earns less than posing on one for photographs. Fewer sons take the seat. But where the practice survives, it remains what it has always been: patience, made visible.

We think about ritipanna more than you might expect. It is the same patience we ask of everything we make.

Before sunrise on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, a man wades into the sea carrying nothing but a rod.

He climbs a wooden pole planted in the reef and settles onto a crossbar barely wider than his hand. There he sits, two metres above the water, still as the pole itself. He will stay for hours. This is ritipanna, stilt fishing,and it looks ancient. It isn’t.

It began in the 1940s, in the hungry years around the Second World War. Food was scarce and the shoreline was crowded with men trying to feed their families. The rocks were taken. So some began casting from shipwrecks and fallen trees offshore and when those ran out, they planted poles in the coral reef and built themselves a seat above the waves. A place of one’s own, where no place was left.

Those poles became inheritance. A father passed his son the spot, the skill, and everything that came with it: how to read the tide, when the herring run, which wind brings fish and which brings nothing. Knowledge held in families, never written down.

And here is what strikes us most the method asks everything of the fisherman and almost nothing of the sea. A rod and line, not a net. One fish at a time. The reef stays whole. The stocks survive. Restraint, practiced daily for eighty years, long before anyone called it sustainability.

Today the stilts are emptying. The 2004 tsunami redrew this coastline, and fishing from a pole earns less than posing on one for photographs. Fewer sons take the seat. But where the practice survives, it remains what it has always been: patience, made visible.

We think about ritipanna more than you might expect. It is the same patience we ask of everything we make.

New design. New texture. New you

Surrounding yourself with art sharpens your eye for design. An inspiring afternoon in Barcelonas, discovering the beautiful work of