There’s something unexpectedly moving about standing before the HILDON WATER sculpture. Rising seven metres into the Hampshire sky, its stainless-steel curves shimmer in the light, catching reflections and holding space. You don’t just see this sculpture—you feel it. It speaks of stillness and motion, strength and softness, clarity and flow. Like Hildon natural mineral water itself, it’s hard to define but impossible to ignore.

And that is exactly how its creator, Gabriela von Habsburg, intends it to be.

An Artist Born of Contradiction

Gabriela von Habsburg’s life story reads like something from a European novel—one foot in royalty, the other firmly planted in the raw, unpredictable world of contemporary sculpture. Born in Luxembourg in 1956, she is the granddaughter of the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Yet it’s not aristocracy that defines her—it's steel, space and the quiet power of abstraction.

She studied philosophy before turning to sculpture, training in Munich under artists like Eduardo Paolozzi. It was there she discovered her lifelong material: stainless steel. Welding, she says, fascinated her. It wasn’t just the act of fusing metal—it was the idea of creating cohesion from separation, building something lasting from heat and tension.

The Geometry of Feeling

Von Habsburg doesn’t create figurative works. Instead, her sculptures are composed of rods, plates, discs—simple geometric elements brought into conversation. Through these forms, she explores ideas of balance, transformation, and pause. . A sculpture is an engagement with space.

That’s exactly what makes HILDON WATER so captivating. Commissioned in 2004, it’s not a literal depiction of water—but it evokes it all the same. Stillness. Bubbling. Solidity. Clarity. Every curve and plane is considered, echoing the ever-changing states of this life-giving element.

The Man Behind the Commission

The story of this sculpture is also the story of Christian Heppe. His legacy at Hildon runs as deep and quietly enduring as the natural aquifer that feeds the estate’s mineral water. Heppe bought the estate not out of grandeur, but for love-love of the English countryside and the polo horses he trained there, incidentally discovering the finest mineral water here in Broughton, Hampshire.  But he also held another passion: contemporary art.

Heppe amassed an impressive private collection, but it was HILDON WATER that serves as the crowning glory. The sculpture, with its shimmering clarity and structural grace, mirrored the values of Hildon: elegant, purposeful, and deeply rooted in nature. For Heppe, art wasn’t an accessory. It was part of the landscape, just like the trees, the horses, and the water that nourished them all. Its polished surfaces and structural elegance reflected the purity and clarity of the water drawn from beneath the estate.

Public Works and Quiet Power

While HILDON WATER remains one of von Habsburg’s more intimate works, her practice is often public and boldly monumental. From the Monument to the Three Powers in Georgia to the Rose Revolution Memorial, her sculptures live in the open, in parks and plazas, where people can walk around them, through them-even rest in their shadows.

What’s striking is her refusal to be decorative. Her works, even in their beauty, are not about surface. They are about space, structure, democracy. And perhaps that’s what makes her work so compelling. It doesn’t demand meaning. It invites it. Although it is physically imposing, it also invites the viewer to consider the positive and negative space, the space that the sculpture sits in .

Steel as Language

Von Habsburg’s choice of stainless steel is both practical and poetic. It interacts constantly with its environment; reflecting sunlight, changing colour with the weather, and encouraging viewers to move around it. This shifting quality ensures that no encounter with her work is ever quite the same.

In Coffee Bean (2009, Grünsfeld, Germany), 23 slightly tilted discs form an elongated oval, rotating slowly on a slim rod. The interplay of mass and void is central to its design.

Her Franke Coffee Bean (2007, Aarburg, Switzerland) expands this approach to monumental scale: 10 metres high, 26 steel slices, nearly 24 tonnes. Commissioned by a coffee machine manufacturer, it is corporate in origin but purely sculptural in execution.

In Five Continents (2001, Aarburg), five stainless-steel gates between five and eleven metres tall are arranged so that their reflective planes shift as the viewer moves past them, creating constantly changing compositions.

Public Works and Monumental Gestures

Von Habsburg has also created major public works. In Georgia, she produced the Monument to the Three Powers of the State (2009) in front of the Presidential Palace—a large-scale abstract installation. In Tbilisi, she co-created the Rose Revolution Memorial (2007), using sixty stones arranged in the form of a stylised rose.

Earlier projects include the Memorial to the Opening of the Border (1996) in Sopron, Hungary, commemorating the symbolic moment the Iron Curtain was lifted, and Horseshoe and Wheel in Astana, Kazakhstan, where sixteen stainless-steel horseshoes rise from a fountain in a crown-like arrangement.

A Life at the Crossroads

Von Habsburg’s career has been as international as her upbringing. In 1999, she visited Georgia and began teaching at the State Academy of Arts in Tbilisi. She later served as Georgia’s ambassador to Germany from 2009 to 2013, bridging the worlds of art and diplomacy. After her ambassadorship, she taught at the Visual Art, Architecture, and Design Faculty (VAADS) of the Free University of Tbilisi.

Her practice-whether in monumental public spaces or more intimate private commissions-remains rooted in the belief that sculpture is as much about the spaces it opens up as the material it occupies.

A Diplomat in Steel

It would be easy to assume von Habsburg’s titles and family name opened doors. But the truth is far more nuanced. She’s often described herself as feeling “stateless”-caught between worlds, speaking multiple languages, belonging everywhere and nowhere. That perspective, perhaps, explains her deep connection to Georgia, where she spent over a decade teaching and later served as ambassador to Germany.

Her diplomatic work and artistic practice are strangely aligned: both are about building bridges, finding structure in complexity, and holding space for difference.

Why the HILDON WATER Sculpture Matters

We live in a world that prizes noise. Flash. Speed. Attention. Von Habsburg's sculpture reminds us of something different. Something slower. It invites you to pause. To walk around it. To reflect-not just on what you see, but on what you feel. It is, in every sense, a sculpture about presence. From a distance, HILDON WATER sits comfortably within the sweep of the Hildon Estate, almost modest against its rolling fields and wide Hampshire skies. But step closer and the perspective changes. You find yourself dwarfed, craning your neck to follow its curves upward. It doesn’t shout for attention; instead, it draws your eye back to the land around it -amplifying the grandeur of the Hampshire landscape as well as its own presence. The very presence of natural mineral water on the HIldon estate is what has allowed the preservation and protection of this treasured place, and this sculpture beautifully references this fact.