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BAXTER IN COLLABORATION WITH ARTIST CHEN LIN
Eileen: when design entrusts itself to the gesture of artist Chen Lin. A special collaboration that has given life to a one-of-a-kind piece, rare like a work of art.
Eileen: when design entrusts itself to the gesture of artist Chen Lin. A special collaboration that has given life to a one-of-a-kind piece, rare like a work of art.
There was the scent of new leather in the air that June evening of 2025. A warm, enveloping aroma, like the prelude to something important. Outside, Hangzhou drifted slowly, lights reflected on the water, while inside the new Baxter Gallery time seemed suspended. Voices had grown hushed, as if everyone were waiting for a sign.
Then Chen Lin entered. In China, he is known as the father of luxury restaurant design, yet when he speaks about himself, he prefers to say he is simply a man in search of beauty in everyday things. Architect, interior designer and artist, Chen Lin is a leading figure in the Chinese design scene: winner of prestigious awards, creator of iconic spaces, and author of a language that blends Eastern elegance with Western poetry. Yet that evening, in the heart of Hangzhou, he did not come to display his reputation. He came to tell an emotion.
He carried neither a microphone nor a prepared speech — only a brush and a tray of paints. Before him, not a canvas, but a Baxter sofa: Eileen.
Chen Lin opens a jar of paint and begins to paint directly onto the leather. No predefined drawing, no words: only the sound of the brush meeting the material.
His hand moves slowly yet confidently, tracing marks that seem to emerge from a distant thought. Every curve of the sofa becomes a landscape, every touch a sentence. Those who know him understand that for him art is never an isolated gesture: it is a dialogue, a way of connecting with the people he loves.
Since his daughter was born nine years ago, Chen Lin has drawn something for her every day — a small ritual of love and presence, even when work takes him far away. Soft and gentle — just like the bond between a father and his daughter — the leather of the Eileen sofa welcomes the brushstrokes in a perfect balance of strength and tenderness, discipline and freedom, matter and emotion. Then, when the performance comes to an end, a sense of reverence fills the space, as if everyone had witnessed something too intimate to interrupt.
The sofa, now one of a kind in the world, bears the traces of the gesture, the delicacy of color, the silent voice of a man who, through design, has found a way to say that beauty is an emotion that can be touched.
That name, Eileen, lingers in the air like a caress — the same one Chen Lin traced on the leather of the sofa, transforming a Baxter object into a fragment of life.
A unique piece, born in June 2025, in that suspended moment during the Hangzhou Opening. A collaboration that, like the story just experienced, reveals Baxter’s ability to transform matter into emotion and uniqueness into an unrepeatable sensory experience.
