We've started working with The Ori House, an art and design practice built around the idea of connected living. The partnership has a simple premise: the art in a home shouldn't be an afterthought chosen to fill a wall. It should be commissioned for the space, by artists who have spent time in it.
That belief is the reason the collaboration happened. Both teams start from the same conviction — that spaces shape us, and that the environment you live in can give you clarity, grounding and a sharper sense of who you are. For a company whose homes are lived in for a few months at a time, often by people who have just arrived in a new city, that isn't an abstraction. It's the difference between a place to sleep and a place that helps you land.
The first apartment:
The collaboration launched with a single apartment in Charlottenburg, Berlin. The Ori House commissioned artist Thomas Delaroziere, whose work for the space draws on the landscapes of Martinique.
What made it work was the order of operations. Nothing was pre-selected. Delaroziere spent time in the apartment first and let the rooms determine what belonged in them — which pieces, at what scale, and at what emotional register. The result reads as though the work was made for those walls, because it was.
Four ways art enters the home
The partnership runs along four tracks, and they compound — a residency produces a commission, a commission gives a gathering somewhere to happen.
Commissioned work — pieces made for a specific apartment and integrated into its design, rather than bought to match a sofa.
Artist residencies — Artists inside the homes they go on to transform, so the space informs the work instead of the other way round.
Curated selections — chosen to reflect the cultural identity of the city an apartment is in, so a home in Berlin doesn't look like a home anywhere else.
Community experiences — dinners and cultural gatherings hosted in the homes themselves, which is where the art stops being decoration and starts being a reason for people to be in a room together.
A dinner, on film
During the Charlottenburg residency, filmmaker Sebastian Brune documented a dinner in the apartment. The guests were creatives and cultural thinkers, and the conversation went where you'd expect it to in a room full of people who have moved between places: home, migration, culture, identity — what any of it means when your sense of where you're from is plural.
It's a small thing to film a dinner party. But it captured the point of the exercise better than a set of interiors photographs would have: the apartment working as a place where something happened.
What comes next
As tenitt opens in new neighbourhoods and new cities, The Ori House will curate a set of signature apartments — homes built around commissioned work by artists from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the wider global Diaspora.
The ambition isn't a house style rolled out across a portfolio. It's the opposite: each apartment should be legible as belonging to its city and to the artist who worked in it. Charlottenburg is the first, and it set the method — commission for the space, let the artist lead, and treat the finished home as somewhere people gather rather than somewhere they simply stay.
Photography: Sebastian Brune, courtesy of The Ori House. Artwork by Thomas Delaroziere.