Disco Cube's Really Nice Ice
Photos by Leslie Kirchhoff
Leslie Kirchhoff lets me into her Mid Century house in Mt Washington and settles into her favorite chair with an expansive view of the city. Everything about her is lean and striking--her honey-colored hair piled onto her head, her big eyes, her expressive face and hands. She’s a hybrid, she tells me, part DJ, part creative consultant, part art director, part photographer, and part ice cube innovator. She’s DJ-ed around the globe for such brands as Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabana, and Cartier; she’s photographed for liquor and makeup brands and Flamingo Estate, done photo portraits and a crazy-funny series called Drunken Crustaceans, but it’s the innovator part that intrigues. It came about when she was photographing and DJ-ing fashion events while going to school at NYU’s prestigious Gallatin School.
“I just realized there was this blank spot,” she says. “And that no one was doing anything cool with ice….”
Kirchhoff wanted to be an inventor when she was little, so she threw herself into the experimenting and tinkering that followed. Now her Disco Cubes suspend flowers, plants and herbs inside ice cubes, square or spherical. And they’re in high demand. Since the pandemic ended, she can’t freeze enough, booking out four to five events a week, many of them celebrity parties, as well as working with Mindy Weiss, one of LA’s most sought after wedding planners.
“They (the event crowd) love to wow their guests,” Kirchhoff says. “Especially with something like a drink… One of my favorite ways to…serve the cubes is on a tray as people enter…People are immediately wowed…they compare cubes, talk to each other. It’s amazing to watch.”
The elements—from flowers, sourced from bud to bloom, herbs, leaves, or even her die cut monograms and logos from waterproof paper—are suspended in a multi stage secret process in her “ice room” down the street.
“It’s a small but mighty little machine,” Kirchhoff says.
It takes three days to complete an order, from the initial freeze, to the complicated suspension and second freeze, to the polishing and last freeze, before the cubes are packed into a negative 20 degree cooler for delivery. In her newest phase, she’s growing her own elements, controlling the botanicals and sourcing “cool herbs and edible flowers at all the amazing nurseries around here.”
Before I leave, we climb behind her house to a series of terraces crowded with pansies, geraniums, alyssum, a lemon tree and, in a little elevated nook, an inflatable hot tub where Kirchhoff hangs out at night. The delicious smell of lots of herbs and flowers are all around, and it strikes me that Kirchhoff’s created unexpected beauty with something we take for granted or hardly think of at all.
