House of Sea is a creative studio founded by artist and curator Kira von Heuer, with romance at the center of its practice. Through social art practice, large-scale installations, and curatorial projects, the studio explores romance as both a lens and a way of relating—heightening attention, reverence, and receptivity to the world around us.

Rooted in surrealism and a curiosity about the affinities between human imagination and the natural world, Von Heuer’s practice draws upon the rituals, symbols, and gestures through which we have historically given form to our most imaginative human impulses.

From the written word to movement and ceremony, her work asks what becomes possible when nature is invited into this exchange—not simply as something to observe, but as a participant in a more reciprocal relationship

Kira von Heuer is a California-born artist and curator working across social art practice, installation, and participatory works. Raised near the ocean in Southern California, she began her creative life as a dancer, later studying ballet and philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Her practice has been shaped as much by place as by discipline. Raised in a small beach town in Southern California, von Heuer’s earliest visual language was shaped by the landscape and light of the Pacific and the particular culture that surrounds life by the sea. She later spent more than a decade living in London, followed by time in Paris, where proximity to centuries of art, architecture, literature, and ideas introduced another kind of landscape altogether. 

The meeting of these worlds—the elemental and the cultural, the irreverence of Southern California’s surf, skate, and punk rock cultures and the accumulated histories of Europe—continues to shape the way she sees and makes work. Artist residencies in Hydra, Rome, and Oaxaca further extended this dialogue, allowing place itself to become an active part of her practice.

Von Heuer’s work moves between the intimate and the collective, often beginning with familiar human gestures—writing a letter, gathering, moving together—and reimagining them as artistic forms. Her ongoing social art practice, Love Letters to the Ocean, began with the simple proposition of addressing the ocean directly and has since taken form through participatory works and large-scale installations in Hydra, Puerto Escondido, Ischia, and Aviemore.

Alongside her artistic practice, von Heuer has developed a curatorial career spanning exhibitions, site-specific commissions, large-scale projects, and private collections. Her authored curatorial series Her Nature brings together artists whose work explores the female as an environment, considering the feminine not simply in relationship to the natural world, but as an intelligence embedded within it. Her broader curatorial practice creates dialogues between artists, architecture, place, and cultural context.
She is the founder of House of Sea, the creative studio through which her artistic and curatorial practices come together.


Von Heuer’s work has been featured in:

• The New York Times
  
• Vogue
  
• Financial Times, HTSI
  
• Elle Decor 
  
• Architectural Digest
  
• InStyle
  
• Bridge for Design
  
• Stylist
  
• Country & Town House 
  
• Homes & Gardens
  

• Venice Biennale Fondazione Giorgio Cini
  
• Bischoff/Weiss
  
• LAXART
  
• Le Bon Marché
  

• Del Vaz Projects
  
• Otis College of Art and Design
  
• Opus 1 Foundation
  
• Women in the Arts UK
  
• Plastic Pollution Coalition