A Mirror Frame Borrowed From a Saddle

A round mirror is one of the least original objects you can own — the shape has existed forever, and there's not much room to reinvent a circle. Jacques Adnet found the opening anyway, not in the shape, but in the material wrapped around it.

In 1950, shortly after partnering with the leather house Hermès, Adnet began wrapping mirror frames in the same saddle-stitched leather and burnished brass used in equestrian tack — the kind of material vocabulary you'd expect on a riding crop or a luggage strap, not a piece of home decor. The Circulaire mirror was one of the first results, and it's still produced by Gubi in almost the same form today.

Photo: Gubi — official product page

Why Leather Changed Everything

A wood or metal mirror frame reads as furniture hardware — functional, a little cold, easy to ignore. Wrap that same frame in saddle-stitched leather and it reads as an accessory: something with the tactile warmth of a well-made bag or a tailored belt. Adnet's insight was that a mirror doesn't have to look like it belongs to the furniture category at all.

The leather strap running around the circumference does double duty: it's structural, holding tension against the glass, and it's the entire visual identity of the piece. Remove it, and you're left with an unremarkable circle of glass. Keep it, and the object becomes unmistakably itself from across a room.

A Small Detail With an Outsized Signature

What makes the Adnet mirror recognizable at a glance is really just one decision: visible stitching. Most leather-wrapped objects hide their seams. Adnet's mirrors put the saddle-stitching on full display, turning an assembly detail into the decorative feature. It's the same trick a well-made leather bag uses to signal quality — applied, for the first time, to something you hang on a wall.

What This Teaches About Choosing a Mirror

A mirror is one of the few objects in a room that has almost no functional variation — it reflects, full stop. Which means the entire decorating decision comes down to how the frame reads as an object:

• Material does more work than shape. A circle is a circle; what wraps it decides whether it reads as decor or as an accessory.
• Visible craft details can be the whole design. A seam, a stitch, or an edge treatment can carry more identity than an elaborate silhouette.
• Warm materials soften a hard object. Glass and metal read as cold on their own; leather, wood, or a soft frame edge changes the entire feel.

If you want that same soft-geometry approach to a round mirror without the leather price tag, our NORDIC-REFLECT Round Mirror follows the same brief — a clean circular silhouette engineered to feel like a considered accent piece, not just a reflective surface.

The Bottom Line

Jacques Adnet didn't reinvent the mirror. He just refused to accept that a mirror frame had to come from the furniture aisle instead of the leather workshop — and that one substitution is still, more than seventy years later, the reason his circular mirror looks like nothing else on the wall.