Marie Claire
May 2008

Pulse
May/June 2008

JC Report
March 2008

Elle Decoration
March 2008

Dolce Vita
December 2007

For Men
December 2007

Elle Decor
October 2007

Travel in the Czech Republic
September-October 2007

Fastlane
Fall 2007

Shopping by the book

New high-end shopping guide hits Prague

Karen Feldman has no qualms owning up to her materialistic side. In fact, she thinks Prague could use more materialism. Her latest venture, Artěl Style, was created specifically to get those who visit and live in her adopted home city thinking about where to drop their hard-earned cash.
Her life goal seems to have become dispelling the notion that too many travelers are burdened with: that there’s not enough god shopping in Prague. The trick is to open your eyes, peek around corners and perhaps even go beyond your usual limits.  Feldman is making the adventure easier, having complied all of her favorite tricks of the Bohemian shopping trade into a handy, smartly packaged guide to Prague purchasing.
Feldman does admit that, when she moved here in 1994 to work for a shampoo company, the city’s poor shopping reputation was “absolutely true back then.”
But as Feldman followed her shopping instincts, she found herself collecting vintage Czech toys, children’s books and Arte Deco furniture, and inspired by a growing attraction to Czech glassworks. In 1998, she founded Artěl Glass, her own line of glass designs. The business has really taken off, but Feldman still takes time to explore the city’s emerging scene.
“Shopping has definitely evolved in Prague over the past few years, and it has taken time to find my favorites,” she says. “I am still finding new spots all the time.”
So to put all of her hours spent browsing to good use, Feldman poured her research and her heart into Artěl Style Prague, a 200-plus-page guide that she intends as a complement to other, “more generic” city guides on the market.
Its main purpose, she says, is to let people know “where and how” to spend their money in Prague.”
Feldman began Artěl Style as a way to share knowledge of high-quality Czech-made products but expanded it to include more comprehensive information to enrich a full-spectrum stay in Prague.  The finished product is divided into sections recommending hotels, shopping, services, dining and entertainment, and includes guidebook musts such as tips on getting around the city, key phrases in Czech and maps.
The book is both lovely to look at in terms of design and layout, beautifully accented by historic photos of Prague, and sturdy and immensely informative. Some sections could stand more fleshing out, notably the skimpy listings of spa services in town, but connoisseurs of the traveling high life will find a kindred spirit in Feldman’s “very personal” listing choices.
Artěl Style, she says, contains “the kind of insider information I always hope someone will give me when I visit their city.”  The book will be updated every two years (next edition to be released in May 2009), though an Artěl Style Prague city map to accompany the book will be available in November 2007.
“Finding great shops in Prague is the art of the find and having a vision,” Feldman says. “Sometimes you simply need to enter stores that, outside of Prague, you would never think of entering… as it is quite possible you will be pleasantly surprised.”
Artěl Style is available at various bookshops and other shopping outlets around Prague.
 
Brook Edge

Dolce Vita magazine
August 2007

Smithsonian magazine
August 2007

Americans In Prague

A second wave of expatriates is now playing a vital role in the renaissance of the Czech capital

By Jonathan Kandell
Photographs by Tomas Van Houtryve

Lobkowicz may be the most visible American here, but other prominent Yanks include Tonya Graves, an African-American singer linked to Prague’s reemergence as a center of popular music; Jack Stack, and Irish-American banker in the vanguard of the city’s rebirth as a financial capital; Karen Feldman, a suburban New Yorker who has almost single-handedly restored the tradition of fine, handmade Czech glassware; and David Minkowski, a former Hollywood producer who has led Prague’s revival as a world-class film capital.

If Lobkowicz identifies with the Prague of the Hapsburg era, Karen Feldman, another transplanted American, is drawn to the Prague of the decades between the world wars. “That was a time when the city was at the forefront of glassmaking design,” says Feldman, 38. Even before then, Prague was already the industrial hub of the Vienna0based Austro-Hungarian Empire.  And after independence, Czechoslovakia became one of the world’s most prosperous countries, thanks to booming exports of machinery, cars, shoes, farm products and fine glass. “Prague moved far ahead of Vienna in economic development,” says Milada Polisenska, a historian at the New Anglo-American College in Prague. “Independence also unleashed enormous energy in so many fields- art, music, literature, architecture and design.”
Much of it was concentrated in Prague’s thriving Jewish community, which reached 55,000 inhabitants, or one-fifth of the city’s population, on the eve of World War II. Though Jews lived throughout Prague, the community remained especially identified with the original Jewish neighborhood of Josefov, just north of Stare Mesto, or Old Town, a district that dates to the 12th century.  Two-thirds of Prague’s Jewish population perished during the Holocaust.  Currently, only an estimated 5,000 Jews remain in Prague. By 1900, Prague’s aristocracy had begun to move into the Josefov area. Today, its Art Nouveau apartment buildings – with their curvilinear facades and painted statues of mythological figures – recall the affluence of the early 20th century.
Feldman finds sources for her glass deigns in unexpected nooks and crannies of early 1900s Prague. “Inspiration can come from anything – old postcards, fabrics, children’s books and toys from decades ago,” she says. Aided by her new guidebook – Prague: Artel Style – visitors can explore some of the venues that most fire her imagination. In Mala Strana, the district at the foot of Prague Castle, a tiny shop, Antiques Ahasver, sells early 20th-century linens, fold costumes and jewelry. For porcelain place settings and figurines, there is Dum Porcelanu, in Vinohrady a trendy eastern neighborhood named for the vineyards that once grew there. Prague’s best hat shop – Druzstvo Model Praha – is on Wenceslas Square, site of the largest political demonstrations of the Velvet Revolution.
Most intriguing of all is the Museum of Czech Cubism at the House of the Black Madonna in Stare Mesto.  Though Cubism originated in Paris in the early 1900s, nowhere was the movement more passionately embraced than in Prague – in art, architecture and interior design.  The museum itself, considered a masterpiece of Czech Cubist architecture and completed in 1912 by Josef Gocar, specializes in paintings, sculptures, furniture and ceramics of the 1920s and ‘30s.
Feldman, who is from Scarsdale, New York, moved here in 1994 as a representative for an American shampoo company.  But she soon quit. A collector of glass since her student days at Bard College in upstate New York, Feldman became enthralled with fine Czech objects from the prewar period. Glass artisanship remained at a high level even under the Communists because – unlike literature, painting or sculpture – it was considered ideologically innocuous. “The talent survived, but glassmakers lost a sense of how to reinterpret designs to make them fresh and appealing to markets abroad,” says Feldman.
The glass artisans did not readily accept her earliest design suggestions, which included fruit bowls and flower vases whimsically decorated with bubble patterns – bublinka, or Czechified bubbles, as Feldman calls them. Older artisans were even more dubious about her shellfish and sardine motifs. But her designs became bestsellers abroad. At first, Feldman worked out of her apartment in Vinohrady – with the nearest phone three blocks away. But the Czech Republic offered advantages unavailable in Western Europe or the United States. “Here, I could go to a factory or workshop and ask them to make just one sample of a glass object for a hundred dollars or so,” says Feldman. “Back in the States, that would have cost me thousands of dollars.”
She called her new company Artel, after an early 20th century cooperative of Czech artisans who rejected assembly lines in favor of well-designed, functional handmade objects. At her first tradeshow in New York, in 1998, Feldman came away with just 30 orders. Today, Artel sells in 26 countries, with the United States, Great Britain and Japan as the largest markets.  One client is Rolls Royce, which buys custom-made Artel glasses and whiskey decanters for the bar in its top-of-the-line Phantom sedan.  She also designed a set of tumblers in a collaboration with Sol Lewitt, the American minimalist, who died this past April. “The city itself had nothing to do with my moving here,” Feldman says. “But in retrospect, we are a great match. I’m a very visual person, and every single day in Prague is a feast for the eyes.”