kotoli for Ruinart

A picnic gift box and restaurant tray designed for Ruinart, the world’s oldest Champagne house. Every year, Ruinart collaborates with a different designer or artist to create a picnic box. The theme for this year’s collaboration was ‘urban escapade’.
Ruinart was interested in a new perspective on urban living that celebrates all the city has to offer through picnicking, rather than trying to escape from the city. Our design motif is the way that birds fly down to perch on an telephone wire for a moment’s rest. Tokyo is criss-crossed with telephone wires; how many of these might serve as a hammock, if we could only change the way we see them? This is the spirit that we hoped to capture. The stemless champagne flutes cannot stand on their own. Instead, the silver ring allows them to ‘perch’ for a rest on the bottle, the picnic box or the birds-nest restaurant tray, and for picnickers to enjoy champagne anywhere, even far from an even tabletop. And the birdcage cooler bag transforms into a champagne bucket when the top is opened. In this way, all of the pieces take advantage of existing infrastructure—the bottle, the edge of the box, the form of the cooler–to provide mobile sociability, allowing people to connect with each other wherever they would like, in a low-key, elegant way.