House Number .01 Is the Art-Forward Accessories Brand to Know
3 min readMarcela Vélez Osorno isn’t interested in playing by fashion’s so-called rules. Instead, she’d rather do things her own way by rethinking the way the current fashion system operates and repositioning accessories as collectible objects du jour that don’t adhere to any kind of typical traditional seasonal drops or production times. In 2012, she served as the co-founder of the successful, celebrity-loved bag brand M2Malletier, which had lasting power up until the pandemic, when things slowed down and she became a mother. Now, she’s launching her new project, House Number .01. Consider it a curation rather than a collection, with a slow fashion approach that offers shoppers one made-to-order product at a time, created out of top-tier materials, which can be totally customized.
“I started getting this urge to create again,” Osorno tells ELLE. “But this time it was different. I wanted this brand to be more artistic, and I didn’t want it to be seen as a fashion product brand.” Inspired by her time spent in nature, which just so happened to align with her moving to a new home in the middle of a forest in Zurich, Switzerland, she delved into research and development. Her home, designed by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, was formerly owned by Demna and has an emphasis on a fusion of striking Japanese design and clean European lines.
Enter: House Number .01’s very first product, dubbed the First Edition. The sculptural, spiral handbag silhouette draws from the golden spiral and Fibonacci sequence. Complex mathematical principles found in the natural world combined with geometric inspirations from artists such as Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint are her ultimate inspirations for the line. The pieces oscillate between bag and jewelry—each object has a precious metal element that can be customized with gemstones (diamonds! emeralds! rubies!) of the owner’s choosing. To start, only 50 of each bag will be produced on a made-to-order basis, by special inquiry from clients directly through the label’s website. Prices begin at $5,800, and clients will work directly with Osorno to choose everything from the leather (suede, nappa, and beyond) to colorways in 18 different shades.
“For me, it was very important to begin with the intention of how am I going to really do something different than what exists already?” she says. “I don’t want to compete with all those huge brands. I really wanted to propose something completely out of the ordinary and especially a brand with consciousness, a story, and values.” Beyond her experience with M2Malletier, Osorno lives and breathes leather goods. She comes from a family in the leather industry in Colombia. “Since I was very little, I was always exposed to this,” she says. She studied at Parsons in New York before learning the handbag industry inside and out in Barcelona. “Now, I really want to contribute to this world artistically,” she says of her new venture.
The great thing about not playing by the rules is that there are no boundaries. Osorno also plans to eventually launch jewelry and possibly even small-scale ceramics and sculptures in the near future, all inspired by her concept of intellectual geometry and numerology in the natural and mathematical world. She has already designed her next handbag releases, all produced in Italy, which will slowly roll out over the next few months. Each new bag amps up the drama a notch, incrementally becoming more extreme and art-worthy than the next. There’s a star-shaped option, for instance, a seashell-shaped bag, and even a half-moon. “Not everyone’s going to love it, and not everyone’s going to have it, and that’s okay,” she says. “We don’t have to just sell to sell or sell out to be super commercial. And for me, I just wanted to go back to this essence of true luxury, which is this type of experience.”