A life with overlapping chapters.
The places, encounters and choices behind her life.
Avel Lenttan grew up in Ljubljana and now lives in Milan. Houses, gardens, books and art have interested her since childhood. Years spent in other countries added encounters and attachments, including a lasting connection with South Africa. Some interests became work. Others remain personal, with a place in her home and in the objects she chooses to keep.
The early eye
Crystal and porcelain laid out for a meal were among the first things she noticed.
Avel grew up in Ljubljana among buildings by Jože Plečnik, in a family of doctors, architects and artists. Her mother collected books and magazines on architecture, interiors, gardens and art.
Mechanisms interested her too. At eight or nine, at a school friend's birthday party, she watched a game with spaceships moving across a screen. The other children went off to play. Avel stayed to see how the screen answered each movement, and afterward she wanted a computer of her own.
Hundreds of magazines and hundreds of books. Avel inherited many of them.
A lasting attachment
Each time she left South Africa, the sense of home stayed with her.
Avel first came to South Africa in her early twenties. Cape Town drew her in with its markets, galleries and life by the sea. She returned often.
In the bush she spent weeks watching wildlife: early outings, buffalo moving toward water, elephants passing at night. She learned the place through its animals and the quiet needed to notice them.
On her last morning, she spent nearly two hours watching elephants. On the drive to the airport, she cried. She wants to return and contribute to wildlife preservation alongside people already doing the work.
Colored stones, photographs and a bronze lioness. The lioness still has a place in her library.
Art in everyday life
Avel took artificial flowers apart and recomposed them inside her paintings.
She paints without a fixed composition, adding materials as she goes, and describes it as building a garden of her own. Around thirty works came from this private practice.
Years of looking at art came first. At fairs and exhibitions she studies how an artist works, and she values a language developed with consistency.
In Vietnam, a marble figure of a woman made her stop. She commissioned it for the garden of one of her homes and counted the days through six months of waiting.
Choosing to make
The instinct to build
Avel enjoys building, and in jewelry she found a link to architecture, form and matter. For her, a piece asks questions familiar from a house: how its parts fit together, how materials meet, how someone will live with it. Developing her own products meant making those choices visible in something another person would wear.
Writing it down
An event she funded in Milan in 2014 brought jewelry design, production and digital technology into discussion. Four years later, at her living-room table, she began writing about the industry and her place within it. Around two hundred pages gathered her thinking about objects, their owners and the business she wanted to build.
Passing a piece on
The fuller commitment to developing her own products came in 2020. Alongside the pleasure of construction was a wish to connect people through jewelry. She wanted someone to choose a piece, wear it through different periods of life, then pass it on with a story of their own.
