by Alex Moshakis
This month LSA releases its latest film, “An Open Door”, a meditation on what it means to be a host and how it feels as a guest entering someone’s home. But the film’s concept has much deeper meaning. In this interview, we talk to LSA’s executive director Mark Jonas about the brand’s connection to Poland and the Ukraine, the personal history of LSA co-founder Janusz Lubkowski, father of Monika Lubkowska-Jonas, LSA’s creative director, and why an open door means an open mind.
Can you begin by explaining the concept of the film?
We’ve made three films to date – they form part of our digital marketing through which we are able to introduce new collections and share some of our core messaging and values. When we were discussing this film, there was a lot of conversation about what had happened in February, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It had struck a cord with Monika and I. Monika’s father was born in Lwow, in 1934, during the inter war years, when the city was still part of Poland. That personal history made us very aware of what was going on – the locality of it, how close it was to us. Many of the factories we work with are in Poland, near to the Ukrainian border, and when the war began we watched as Poland opened up its borders to let refugees in – the workers there, it was right on top of them. So it became very real to us very quickly, and it coincided with us making this film. It seemed logical that we needed to say something a little bit more about our values as a company, about how we felt about the invasion, about what was going on in the world.You titled the film “An Open Door”.
That really nailed it for us. You can read the title in two ways. There’s the face value thing, the idea of a ‘welcome’, and of hosting and being a guest, which taps into the LSA world. Our products fit that environment – they are used at home, they are used in the process of hosting, they are given as gifts by guests who have been invited into other people’s homes. But the deeper meaning, for Monika and I at least, was to do with the open door as a culture of understanding, one’s ability to open up, to welcome others in in their time of need, and how that can be beneficial to us as individuals. You start to see other people’s point of view. You better appreciate their circumstances. And you offer opportunity. When you open up to all, you open up your mind, too. An open door is an open mind.At the same time, we need to be transparent. We’re using the film to present products that are part of our new launch, and we feature brand new pieces in it, but we also showcase pieces that have been part of our collection for over 20 years, pieces that are now selling to a new, younger generation. That taps into messaging around versatility, sustainability and timeless design: we are, we can’t ignore it, part of an industry where new things are expected to appear every three to six months. That needs to change from an environmental point of view, and we’re trying to make that journey. We are launching less products each season. We’re going back through the catalogue, bringing pieces that have been around for 20 years to the fore again, and showing how they fit within the contemporary LSA environment, how they fit with the way we live now.
There’s a scene in the film in which a guest arrives with a gift of sunflowers…
That was particularly important. It relates to the culture of that region; rarely do people in Poland turn up at your house without a gift, even if they’ve only been invited around for a drink. And invariably the gift is a bunch of flowers. I remember seeing this when I first visited Poland in the 1980s – the number of flower stalls on the streets, just so many. We don’t have anything like it in the UK. We’d watch people, young and old, walk up to flower sellers and then toddle off, because maybe they’re going to see their grandmother, or they’re going to visit friends, and they planned to take flowers. Because of the premise of the film, because it was linked to Ukraine, we wanted to show someone come through a door with a gift, and we chose sunflowers because they are the national flower of Ukraine. And of course flowers sit brilliantly with LSA products; one of our main product categories is vases. In the film you see the flowers being put into a vase by the host, and together the host and the guest begin to make lunch.Can you tell us more about that trip to Poland?
Monika and I flew to Warsaw, and then we travelled south, towards Krakow and along to Krosno, where one of the factories we still work with is situated. The journey was a revelation. We were there during the Communist period, so there weren’t many cars on the road, and we were driving through old villages and towns and countryside that reminded me of Constable’s paintings: groups of people in fields with pitchforks and wagons, as though nothing had changed in 100 years.You were there to visit the factories?
Monika was on a trip to visit the factories and I went along. Monika’s father was born in Lwow, like I said, and her mum was born in Krakow. They both came over to the UK after the Second World War, though at slightly different times. I went to see what it was like there, and to meet members of Monika’s family that had stayed. In his early 20s, my father had been a glass buyer for Dunhill’s – he imported glass from the Scandinavian glass brands – so it was interesting for me to see it.LSA has deep roots in the region.
Very much so. LSA was formed as a company in the 1960s by Monika’s father, Janusz. He would visit Poland to see his family in the 50s and 60s, and on one of his trips he came across some enamelware and he brought it back with him, and his wife, Ewa, encouraged him to take it down to a shop that had just opened in Fulham. That shop was Habitat, run by the late Sir Terence Conran. Sir Terence was already buying beautiful enamelware from Japan, which was, at the time, coincidentally supplied by my father’s company, Goods & Chattels. But this Polish man walked in to see Sir Terence with this enamel samples in an old suitcase, and Sir Terence, always with an eye on a bargain, liked the Polish enamel, and saw that it was cheaper than the Japanese enamel, and so Janusz got the job. That was the start of LSA, and the beginning of a relationship between Janusz and Sir Terence, who used to see each other a lot. (This always made me laugh: they used to have lunch together, and Sir Terence would chose one of his restaurants but Janusz would always ended up paying, though I don’t think he minded. When Janusz died, he wrote a personal message referencing their first meeting and the suitcase.) The company later moved on from trading in enamelware. Janusz started to find other products in Poland – beautiful leather bags and stoneware – and then they started importing glass and ceramics. Eventually Monika joined the company, and she and Janusz worked together to design their own collections.Janusz Lubkowski
Still using the same factories in Poland?
Yes, we still work with many of the original Polish factories.You’ve said previously that if Britain hadn’t opened its doors to Monika’s parents after the war, that LSA probably wouldn’t exist…
No. It wouldn’t have existed. Both Janusz and Ewa had a torrid childhood. The Nazis invaded Poland from the west, and the Soviets appeared from the east, and Poland opened its borders to the Soviets believing they were there to fight the Germans, which they weren’t – they were there to carve up the country. Janusz’s father, an officer in the Free Polish Army, escaped to the south. Janusz and his mother were rounded up and, like many thousand of others like them, shipped off to Siberia. Eventually they made it down through Persia into what was then British Palestine; they snuck onto a train meant for troops. And sometime after the war they were able to get onto a ship and come to the UK, because Janusz’s father had fought on behalf of the Allies. That was the opportunity. Janusz was sent to boarding school to receive an education, he became a civil engineer, and then he worked for Building Design Partnership, where he met Tony Saunders, and eventually he and Tony formed LSA. Here we are, 56 years later. The opportunity Janusz was given has created employment for hundreds of people. That’s what happens when you open doors, you give people an opportunity. Not everyone will take it – perhaps some won’t be able to take it. But there are many who will, and then they will contribute to society. There is a pertinent line in the film: “Offering what we have and appreciating what others contribute.”The UK has not operated with an open door policy in recent years.
No, in my opinion it hasn’t. It absolutely hasn’t. The concept of the film, as I’ve said, is that with an open door comes an open mind. But if you flip it round the other way, what do you get? The opposite of being welcoming is to shun, to reject, to spurn. I see that as a kind of contraction. It’s the mind closing. And it’s people becoming fearful. That’s what we’re seeing everywhere, not just in the UK. The world has so many problems at the moment, but there’s so much knowledge and so many ideas, if only people had open minds, if only we worked together. We could resolve so many of these problems.This film was excellently put together by our art director, Charlotte Heal, and its brilliant script, by the writer Claire Aitken, is so pertinent. At one point the script reads, “ ‘Welcome’ is a noun, something we experience when we’re made to feel at home. It’s also a verb. It’s something we do.” I was really keen to get across both of these aspects. This film could have been just about hosting. But it needed to be more. We needed to ask, “What does it feel like to be a guest?” We’ve all been to parties where we haven’t felt truly welcome, where we’ve been the stranger. And it’s not a nice experience. It was important for me to show that there is a shared dynamic – you must be generous as both a host and a guest. The final part of the script is important here. It reads, “We’re all hosts, we’re all guests, we all bring something to the table.” That’s the heart of it.
Watch the film An Open Door.
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An Open Door
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