When the 27-year-old New Yorker Raquel Cayre snapped up the Instagram moniker of her favorite architect, @ettoresottsass, she recalls, “it wasn’t about being Insta-famous. I was just really into Sottsass.” Little did she know that her account—a colorful homage to the late Italian master filled with 1980s and ’90s design and architecture—would pique the interest of design dealer Marc Benda and, in a few months’ time, land her a meeting with Ettore Sottsass’s widow, Barbara Radice. Four years later, with nearly 100K followers and several furniture-advising gigs, Cayre has moved from just selecting imagery for the digital platform to curating IRL. For the month of May, she turned a four-story building in SoHo into Raquel’s Dream House, a showcase of vintage and contemporary design that embodied the radical ethos of her feed. Judging from the visitors (Gigi Hadid, Jeremy Scott, Katherine Bernhardt) and the sales—she could hardly keep Sottsass’s irreverent Shiva Vases in stock—Cayre is proving that an approachable take on collectible design is long overdue.
How Raquel Cayre Inadvertently Turned a Hobby Into a Career
Her social media musings have landed her curating gigs
At Raquel’s Dream House, Cayre lounges in Masanori Umeda’s 1981-designed boxing ring, surrounded by 1996 works on aluminum by Michel Majerus.Amy Lombard
