At home, life is lived. It unfolds again! its backdrop, impressing itself— materially, emotionally—onto the things that fill the rooms in which it moves. Jordan Roth’s To Think of the Tranquil Life of Things, his first foray into performative sculpture and functional design, revels in the role furniture plays in bearing witness to our lives and the changes that punctuate them.

The project was born of an exit. Roth was leaving a home of fifteen years—the apartment where he was married, where his son was born, where he transformed from the person he had been to the person he became. He took this opportunity to document himself, donning the varied garments of the many selves he had been while seated on the furniture that would soon be carted away. Roth printed the photo collages onto textiles and draped them over the objects, reminiscent of furniture shrouded in drop cloths preparing to be moved. These new forms both reflect their history and—fully functional—invite new futures to have a seat.

With Roth’s life in that apartment printed on the furniture, and the life to come imprinting itself on furniture that already carries its own picture, Roth has created a mise en abyme, an image within an image. This extends Roth’s enduring interest in images and identity, turning a personal archive of living into room for new stories. Debuting in partnership with Design Miami’s 2026 edition in Paris, this insallation of Roth’s work will take place at 72 Rue de l’Université, an hôtel particulier in the seventh arrondissement—a place with its own hi!ories, its own families who walked these rooms. Sofas, chairs, lamps, and sconces will fill the étage noble. The original objects—what lies beneath the cloths of images—have returned, mute witnesses heaped in a towering assemblage in the foyer, the past presiding over the present it produced. Hôtels particuliers were stages for the self—their enfilades designed for the performance of identity, their salons the original theaters of becoming, their parquets worn smooth by the traffic of life. It is this particular setting that illuminates Roth’s kinship with Georges Perec, whose Life: A User’s Manual lends the project its title, and with it, a shared attunement to the many lives that unfold within domestic space, and to the meaning these settings accrue as they witness so many acts of becoming.

Exhibition Design: Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Art Direction: Doug Lloyd Principal

Photography: Ben Hassett

In Partnership with Salon 94 Design + Design Miami