Melon District in Design Week Summer Issue CKECK PAGE 27-28 by Melon District

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INTERIORS SPRING/SUMMER 2008

INTERIORS IT’S WHAT’S ON THE INSIDE THAT COUNTS

SPRING/ SUMMER £10

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BUSINESS DESIGN CENTRE 3 – 5 JUNE 2008 Dedicated, edited, high-end, design-led contract products. Furniture, floor/wall coverings, textiles, accessories, screening, partitions, pods, etc…

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INTERIORS 04. 2008

PREFACE Editor-in-chief: Lynda Relph-Knight

WELCOME to the all-new Interiors magazine.

Editor: Henrietta Thompson

Why does the world need another design publication? To cut a long story short – quite literally. In a profession that is near breaking point with information overload this magazine exists so that interior designers and architects can finally live with tidy desks and clear brains – in as much as the creative process allows, of course.

Art director: Ivan Cottrell Production editor: Madeleine Minson Interiors project manager: Magda Ashman Project production managers: Neil Ayres and Jermaine Ivey Publisher: Declan Gough International correspondents Australia: Alison Horne China: Zijia Wong Japan: Junko Fuwa Middle East: Becky Lucas Scandinavia: Mark Isitt US: Remi Abbas

Design Week • Editor Lynda Relph-Knight (lyndark@centaur.co.uk) • Deputy editor Michael Exon (michael.exon@centaur.co.uk) • Senior reporter Gina Lovett (gina.lovett@centaur.co.uk) • Reporters Emily Pacey (emily.pacey@centaur.co.uk), Emma Germain (emma.germain@centaur.co.uk) • Editorial assistant Suzanne Hinchliffe (suzanne.hinchliffe@centaur.co.uk) • Production editor Madeleine Minson • Sub editor Martin Shelley • Art director Ivan Cottrell (ivan.cottrell@centaur.co.uk) • Group art director Colin McHenry • Group advertising manager Vicky Adams (victoria.adams@centaur.co.uk) • Commercial development director Kelly Campbell • Project manager Liz Pavitt (elizabeth.pavitt@centaur.co.uk) • Senior display sales executive Ed Swain (ed.swain@centaur.co.uk) • Display sales executives Polly McGillivray, Helen Richards • Recruitment manager Jessica Garland • Classified sales executives Esther Ademosu, Chris Lewis, Debbie Hodgson, Monique Needham, Rebecca O’Neill, Emma Williams, James Youern • Interiors project manager Magda Ashman (magda.ashman@centaur.co.uk) • Production manager Louise Edlington (louise.edlington@centaur.co.uk) • Marketing manager Joi Chuku (joi.chuku@centaur.co.uk) • Publisher Declan Gough (declan.gough@centaur.co.uk) • Office manager Aminah Marshall (aminah.marshall@centaur.co.uk) Design Week Editorial and advertising – Postal address: St Giles House, 50 Poland Street, London W1F 7AX; Messengers to 79 Wells Street, London W1T 3QN. Telephone 020 7970 4000 Fax 020 7970 6730 Subscriptions 020 7292 3704 Design Week accepts no responsibility for loss or damage, however caused, to material submitted for publication. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior permission from the publisher. Printed by Pensord, Gwent NP12 2YA. Cover printed on Galerie Art Silk 250gsm, text printed on Galerie Art Silk 130gsm, manufactured by M-real, www.m-real.com, supplied by the Publishing & Web Offset Division (020 7501 6010), a subsidiary of The James McNaughton Group, www.jmcpaper.co.uk. Registered at the Post Office as a newspaper. ISSN no: 0950-3676 Subscriptions: UK £85 for 50 issues, £162 for 100 issues, £223 for 150 issues Europe £138 for 50 issues Rest of World £160 for 50 issues. Audit period: July 2006-June 2007. Total net circulation of audited issue 8850. Average net circulation per issue during period 8074

Coming from the Design Week stable, the Interiors magazine provides you with an edited selection of what has been going on in the world of interior architecture and design and an informed analysis of what might happen next. When the RSS feeds are overflowing criticism and analysis can be all too easily drowned out, so Interiors takes the long view and – twice a year – sifts through it all for you and presents the real-world, realised projects for you to digest easily in one place. Design is ultimately all about people, of course, and an international network of correspondents – from New York to Shanghai – is crucial in making this possible. Alongside their informed reports and detailed case studies of the highlights, Interiors has assembled a distinguished panel of contributors and commentators to unpick the industry’s key issues for detailed dissection. In this issue, gallerist Libby Sellers has the last word on the design art definition, Stephen Bayley questions the current claims of design expertise in Hollywood, and our official office expert Jeremy Myerson explains that the Greenest design measures are not always what you might think. The biannual format of Interiors also allows us to take a step back and to analyse the industry trends that are sticking. Discussed in these pages are where Beijing’s design scene is heading now (Beijing in bloom, page 46), and whether retailers’ current efforts to be sustainable really are (Growing pains, page 52). Where should you look for the best practice in guerrilla galleries and pop-up shops? Meanwhile, mass-customisation and massclusivity are buzzwords affecting every area of manufacturing at the moment – but how will that impact on interior design? Read what Ken Olling thinks about it all in A personal touch, page 62. We hope you enjoy the issue and look forward to receiving your feedback. HENRIETTA THOMPSON, EDITOR

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STZ

Info: iGuzzini Illuminazione UK, Unit 3, Mitcham Industrial Estate, 85 Streatham Road, Mitcham Surrey CR4 2AP, Tel. 020 8646 4141, Fax 020 8640 0333, www.iguzzini.co.uk, info@iguzzini.co.uk

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Morgan Library & Museum, New York. Light as the harmonizing factor between contemporary steel and glass and the fine old bricks of the neo-Renaissance and patrician mansions of Madison Avenue. For over 30 years, iGuzzini has been working alongside great designers, architects and lighting designers (as well, of course, as clients sensitive to this issue) to give the world better light. Architectural design: Renzo Piano Building Workshop 1 in partnership with Beyer Blinder Belle LLP (New York). Lighting Consultants: Ove Arup & Partners. Client: The Morgan Library 3 . iGuzzini Partner Assistance 2 . Products: Le Perroquet, design by Piano Design.www.iguzzini.com, iGuzzini Illuminazione spa, Italy.

Better Light for a Better Life.

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INTERIORS 04. 2008

CONTENTS 7

INSIDER

The lowdown on 50 spaces around the world and a number of other good things. They’re not all secret (anymore), but it’s insider knowledge you need

The London-based design curator bemoans the current hype surrounding the ‘design art’ tag. It’s not new, it’s not accurate and it’s not all about the money

The design critic and self-styled ‘secondmost intelligent man in Britain’ doesn’t see a problem with Hollywood actors posing as designers and architects

The director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre says sustainable office design isn’t just about materials and energy consumption – people are part of the equation, too

With its rooftop terrace, swimming pool and ultra-spacious living quarters, Melon District is not your typical student accommodation, says Dominic Lutyens

Murray Moss’s store on Los Angeles’ Melrose Avenue is a departure from its original in New York, because California can cope with friendliness, says Caroline Roux

Hong Kong’s Delay No Mall lifestyle retail outlet is designed to assault the senses. It is consistent only in that it is unpredictable, says Zijia Wong

Faced with a meagre budget, Schemata Architecture decided to take a destructive approach to the Sayama Flats and tear the interior apart, says Junko Fuwa

China has been cultivating its own crop of design talent, no longer looking to the West for inspiration. Zijia Wong reports on the curious mix of design styles in Beijing

As companies flaunt Green offices and stores, the need for growth holds them back. Clare Dowdy argues business needs to be more creative with expansion plans

Short-lived but high-impact, brand spaces operate under new rules in the experience economy. Lucy Johnston goes in search of best practice in temporary interiors

Mark Isitt meets Ken Olling, entrepreneur, innovator and pioneer of ‘platform design’, to discuss the challenges posed by mass customisation and bespoke products

AFTER A FASHION

There is evidence of several emerging directions in interior design. From surveillance camera lighting to characterful bookends, we pick a few choice items

The veteran designer reveals what’s on his mind at the moment – teaching, a general lack of time and lots of inspiration, of course

OPINION JEREMY MYERSON

CASE STUDY DELAY NO MALL

TRENDS GROWING PAINS

OPINION LIBBY SELLERS

INSIGHT MELON DISTRICT

CASE STUDY SAYAMA FLATS

TRENDS SHAPE SHIFT

INSPIRATION RON ARAD

OPINION STEPHEN BAYLEY

INSIGHT MOSS

TRENDS BEIJING IN BLOOM

PROFILE A PERSONAL TOUCH

IT’S WHAT’S ON THE INSIDE THAT COUNTS

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Drawing by Guido Scarabottolo

Salone Internazionale del Mobile: excellence makes a come-back! Salone Internazionale del Mobile / Eurocucina, International Kitchen Furniture Exhibition SaloneUfficio, International Biennial Workspace Exhibition / International Bathroom Exhibition International Furnishing Accessories Exhibition / SaloneSatellite Milan Fairgrounds, Rho 16/21.04.08

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INSIDER A TREE-LOUNGE IN TOKYO COFFEE CUP CANOPIES IN KUALA LUMPUR LONDON GETS FIAT FEVER BEIJING’S OLD SCHOOL ART COMMUNES FLIGHTS OF FANCY AT SCHIPHOL AIRPORT CARDBOARD CUT-OUTS FOR AESOP SINGAPORE BLING THE IVY’S 18 NEW BARS IN SYDNEY SEOUL TRADERS A FAT DAY IN EAST LONDON PARTIES IN THE KITCHEN SHOES ON THE MENU AT SWAROVSKI A LIGHTING CONSPIRACY FOR TEMPLE CHURCH A KARRIERE-ON IN COPENHAGEN MACROBIOTIC TOKYO AND THEN SOME

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8 INSIDER

04. 2008 INTERIORS

A WORLDWIDE TOUR OF 50 NEW INTERIORS

POD ANTICS Waugh Thistleton has designed an environmentally aware, 70-seater eatery in the heart of London’s City. Pod, on Lloyd’s Avenue, combines a fast-food outlet with an environmentally friendly mission. The sophisticated design of the space leaves much of the existing structure untouched, only adding where absolutely necessary. A sweet chestnut-clad pod on the ground floor incorporates the kitchen, which is open to public view. The clientele is encouraged to recycle the various elements of their meal when they have finished. One bin is used to dispose of food for composting, then customers must wash out their food packaging in the sink, before discarding the containers in the second recycling bin. A third bin is supplied to throw away waste bound for the landfill. Best of all are the menu and graphics, designed by Neal Whittington of Present & Correct.

OBJECT BEAUTY A recent exhibition commissioned by the MGM Gallery in Oslo saw a collection of new limited edition pieces from prominent Scandinavian design group Norway Says. The items, which range from solid brass candle holders to a maple-wood pepper mill, are certainly collectable, but the consultancy protests loudly at the suggestion it is pretending to be an art collective, and explains that all the exhibited works are fully functional. Using its usual creative process, Norway Says has taken this opportunity to research materials and production techniques without the restraints of industrial rationalism and what’s often perceived as the marketplace for design objects. Every item was uniquely crafted by Norwegian small-scale industry.

1. SHIBUYA KOENDORI STORE Assistant, the design group charged with the interior design of Tokyo’s Design Tide 2007, is also responsible for Timberland’s inspired Shibuya Koendori Store. Taking ‘recycling and ecology’ as its theme, the result is an indoor forest of driftwood trees from which garments and accessories can hang. The entire interior being constructed from otherwise unwanted materials – in the thriftiest fashion, even leftover bits produced during the construction were not wasted – Assistant wants the retail environment to get Timberland’s staff and customers thinking about the wider world environment. 2. SPACE FURNITURE Perhaps Voonwong & Bensonsaw found its inspiration at the bottom of a teacup when it designed the cloud-like installation for the new Space Furniture showroom in Kuala Lumpur. The striking sculptural canopy has been created from polystyrene cups, and ‘plays with ideas that are the current interests of this practice, such as modularity, light and materiality’. Not as quite as obscure as it sounds, the installation forms a backdrop to the collection of bone china tableware, Setcast, by Voonwong & Bensonsaw and Asianera, that makes use of the material’s lightreflective properties. 3. FIAT Fiat’s London flagship showroom is worth a visit, whether or not you think the beefed up new Cinquecentos have nothing on the perfection of the original. Although the Marylebone store unapologetically channels Austin Powers, and features exhaust-pipeclad columns, it is fresh and entertaining in a way that car showrooms usually aren’t. The space is split over two floors. The first – shag-pile carpeted – is where the vehicles are displayed. Upstairs an abundance of white space works for corporate meetings, fashion shows and exhibitions.

4. PERCY & REED Considering the general aptitude for a good makeover in this sector, hair salons and barbershops have been surprisingly slow to innovate with their interior design. Enter Percy & Reed, a stylish new salon on London’s Great Portland Street, which has a moody New-York-loft feel, is furnished with vintage barber chairs, an original Panton ‘Flower Pot’ chandelier from the 1960s and Timorous Beasties’ wallpaper. You could happily sit and have them chop away at you for hours. 5. THE NEVAÏ Excessively celebrity-populated Alpine resort Verbier has welcomed a couple of new venues lately that ought to spruce up the après-ski proceedings. Coco Chalet, with its hand-painted wallpaper, white fur curtains, leather booths, crushed velvet stools and gold leaf plaster walls will probably keep the flash Harries happy, but for those looking for something a little classier, there is an alternative. The Nevaï is a striking four-star hotel designed by architect and interior designer Yasmine Mahmoudieh, who has a host of five-star hotels and awards under her haut couture belt. A ‘fusion of cutting-edge design and Alpine influences’ sees a combination of traditional wood and high quality synthetics, while two penthouses each provide a spacious living room with fireplace, private entrance, state-of-the-art sound systems and a secluded terrace with a jacuzzi. 6. NEWSEUM Not to be confused with New York’s recently opened New Museum, Philadelphia’s Newseum is a museum dedicated to the preservation of print media, and will open later this year. Built by architect Polshek, the museum features seven levels of galleries and has been created to foster greater understanding of the process behind the generation of news. 7. BLOCK 8 Be warned – Beijing’s Block 8 has drawn comments like ‘it’s just so much cooler than you are that at

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PHOTO EWOUT HUIBERS

8 ground floor is an oyster bar and drinks bar. It’s an ambitious and successful establishment, and the interior, by Strategisk Arkitektur in collaboration with Pontus Frankenstein, is pretty stunning.

times it becomes a tad exhausting’. The complex comprises a Spanish diner, a Japanese restaurant and a club. The formula of ‘something for everyone’ should be a sure-fire hit when Olympics fans storm the town later this year. 8. SCHIPHOL AIRPORT The new VIP centre at Schiphol Amsterdam Airport is a tribute to the golden age of travel and, given that the centre is only open to royalty, ministers, state secretaries, diplomats, trade delegations and top international business directors, so it should be. Designed by Amsterdam-based Concrete Architectural Associates, the new centre contains a separate Royal Lounge for members of the royal family, a press centre, a Company Lounge, plus various receptions and meeting rooms. The Royal Lounge is huge, with considerable sofas, royal family pictures on the bookshelves and wallpaper printed with the national coat of arms. 9. EASTERN ART COMMUNES 1 Art communes are all the rage and the overwhelming popularity of Beijing’s 798 District has driven Chinese artists to search for new Utopias, one of them being Caochangdi Village. Located in Beijing’s outskirts, it was first spotted by contemporary artist Wei Wei Ai, who also designed most of the other compounds for galleries that moved in subsequently. The Wujiaochang 800 Art Space, housed in a new five-floor building in the university area of Wujiaochang, is another independent art cluster. In Shanghai, former abattoir 1933 has been revamped into an entertainment venue that is now home to high-end art galleries and restaurants too. Amazingly, there are about 75 creative clusters in Shanghai, involving 3000 companies and 27 000 employees, in architecture, art and fashion. 10. EASTERN ART COMMUNES 2 Artists and art entrepreneurs in Singapore are taking things into their own hands as they venture into Old School – so named because the compound used to house an all-

10 girls’ school. The place still looks, well, old school, since the new tenants have made their offices look like labs and classrooms. The compound houses guerrilla retail store Commes des Garçons, ad agency Saatchi Lab, marketing communications consultancy Mercury Marketing and Communications, photography studios and one of Singapore’s most famous fashion designers, Wykidd Song. Over at the neighbouring hill Mount Emily, another group of creatives has taken up residence, including glass artist Tan Sock Fong, sculptor Sun Yu-li, art gallery Monsoonasia Gallery, the Theatre Training and Research Programme, landscape architecture firm Colin K Okashimo & Associates, a landscape architecture firm and Oakdale, a visual communications company. 11. PONTUS! Pontus! is the latest in a series of restaurants headed by young chef Pontus Frithiof in Stockholm. Downstairs is the widespread gourmet restaurant, and on the

12. SHUBIYA PUBLISHING Hiroshi Nakamura has turned a disused crème caramel factory into the new premises for a publisher and book shop in Tokyo. The long, narrow interior of Shubiya Publishing and Booksellers is emphasised with extended display tables. The books are arranged in chronological order on a series of design-classic bookshelves, with each shelving unit reflecting the period of the books it contains. 13. CLARION SIGN HOTEL The Clarion Sign Hotel, which opened during the Stockholm Furniture Fair in January, was designed by Sweden’s most successful architect for the past 30 years, Gert Wingårdh. The hotel is a new landmark for the city. More personal than anything the architect has realised before, it also exploits the timeless and sustainable qualities of Scandinavian design classics. The architect’s intention is for all the furniture to remain in place for at least 50 years, ageing with the hotel. 14. GIORGIO ARMANI BEAUTY Nuance-Watson has launched the first travel retail Giorgio Armani

Designers to watch Magnus

Wästberg

With the establishment of his eponymous company, the young Magnus Wästberg is waging a war on the over-lit, artificial office lighting we’ve all had to live with for decades. Wästberg believes it is possible to create beautiful lamps that also give out beautiful light – and has enlisted the help of Ilse Crawford, James Irvine, Jean-Marie Massaud and Claesson Koivisto Rune to prove it. The results will be available to buy this summer.

Mike

Meiré

Last year the German creative director Mike Meiré reconceived the basic notion of a kitchen in a collaboration with Dornbracht called The Farm Project. This year he is attempting to do the same with the bathroom. The Farm Project worked as a deliberate counterpoint to today’s ubiquitous Minimalist look with a sketch-like image of a farmhouse kitchen, where household goods, animals, food and families jostled for space. Very wellreceived and already proving influential across the design world, it will be interesting to see if he can pull it off again. Soundscapes – the bathroom version – was launched during the Cologne furniture fair. Recreating the bathroom as a sanctuary of Zen calm and luxury, the installation involved weary fair-goers being supplied with saké before being sent to lie down in a dark room to be hypnotised with visuals and meditative soundscapes. Meiré imagines the bathroom of the future might involve trippy projections on to the ceiling and soothing beats piped through the showerhead.

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Beauty Boutique in Asia. The 30m2 flagship opened at Hong Kong International Airport, an ideal location due to its ‘diverse and sophisticated passenger mix, with Chinese and Taiwanese purchasers representing a considerable proportion of the luxury cosmetics consumers’, according to the companies. The brand’s first standalone boutique in any airport worldwide, it includes Armani fashion, make-up stations, a skincare corner and a fragrance bar. 15. AESOP Aesop’s new signature pop-up store in Melbourne was entirely made of cardboard, from the display shelving to the counter tops. The temporary fit-out was put together in five days and designed by star interior architects Rodney Eggleston and Anne-Laure Cavigneaux of March Studio. Although the permanent design was supposed to be created in February, the cardboard seems to be serving its purpose better than expected, and will stay a little while longer – presumably until it starts to get soggy. 16. KARRIERE Karriere – a bar, restaurant and night club in Copenhagen’s meat district – is run by artists who have made their own art a large part of the social space. As a result, the venue’s design and functions are ‘artwork defined’, with the fixtures and furnishings creatively reinterpreted. Everything, including the tables, lamps, dance floor and bar counter, is a piece of art. ‘As a new space for the experience of art, Karriere is markedly different from the museum, art gallery or the local square with the lump of granite and iron plonked in the middle,’ reads the brochure. 17. ARMANI GINZA TOWER A huge number of new retail premises have opened in Tokyo in the past six months, with Armani Ginza Tower one of the most notable. The brand new flagship store, designed by Massimiliano and Doriano Fuksas, is not far from the iconic Sony Building and even closer to fellow luxury purveyor Dior.

04. 2008 INTERIORS

Behind the striking facade are 12 floors holding the complete Giorgio Armani and Emporio Armani collections, the Armani interior furniture line and a private bar on the top floor. It also hosts the first Armani Spa, with three private rooms offering three-hour courses that can run up to 60 000 yen (£300). 18. THE POND Set up for just 12 weeks over the Australian summer, The Pond is a pop-up bar that comes courtesy of Pure Blonde (the beer). Breathing new life into an ugly urban space, a derelict courtyard and a laneway has been converted with the cunning use of plants, recycled garden pots, and those Bose speakers that look like mushrooms. The Pond focuses on being environmentally sound and eco-friendly, and has the appeal of hanging out in someone’s (rather large) back yard. Designers offered anyone who donated an old plant pot a free beer. Other highlights include Tom Adelaide’s 27 hours of lo-fi audio bliss, a re-used silver birch grove entry, an organic food menu, a crop of hops and certified plantation-pine furniture that doesn’t give you splinters. It’s also rumoured that drinks are served in old jam jars. 19. GUCCI Gucci’s new flagship store on New York’s 5th Avenue is also its largest. With more than 4000m2 of space, the store has had to be imaginative about filling it, and among other initiatives the interior boasts a heritage area to celebrate Gucci’s illustrious past, as well as a café. Part of Trump Towers, the store represents a throwback to opulence, but not at the expense of the environment. A considerate token has been the energy-efficient lighting provided by LED Folio throughout. 20. SINGAPORE LUXURY RETAIL The country which allegedly boasted the fastest-growing number of highnet-worth individuals in the world in 2006, now sees the opening of St Regis Singapore and two new boutiques from luxury watch retailer Cortina Watch, one featuring display windows that can be adapted to

LIGHT OF GOD When Lighting Design International was bought in to relight Temple Church (which you may know as being one of the most historic and beautiful churches in London, or you may know as the church in Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code), the scheme it came up with apparently broke all the rules of lighting a church. Time those rules were updated, perhaps, says Deborah Wythe, LDI’s senior lighting designer. ‘Temple Church was built in the 12th century – way before electricity’, she adds. The brief was to refurbish and update all lighting to enhance the structure and LDI worked with English Heritage to design a scheme that would not cause further damage, and which would protect the fabric of the building from future deterioration. Another consideration was for the lighting to be removable or hidden when the church is used for filming. In a complex and sensitively produced project, designers Wythe and Graham Rollins replaced the old pendants with custom-made uplighters that sit on top of the columns, lighting up the ceiling and Gothic arches. Elsewhere, a new wooden bench and railings were designed to conceal bespoke LED lighting and catch key details of the architecture, such as the gargoyles. A number of the church’s stunning stained glass windows were backlit from outside, drawing greater focus and casting crisp shadows of the window frames on to the internal walls.

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different occasions, allowing customers to enjoy a new shopping experience each time they visit. The inaugural launch of Asia Luxury Travel Market in Shanghai last year is a sign that moneyed Asians are going places, but in case they ever think about leaving the country, Singapore’s new addition to its Changi Airport, Terminal 3, has been created to take full advantage. It has the first Guylian Belgian Chocolate Café outside Belgium, the first Ferrari travel retail outlet outside Europe, the first Fifa World store in the world, the first airport outlet for Apple and Sony, the first Vertu airport boutique in South East Asia, the first SK-II airport beauty cabin and the first Hard Rock Café in a major international airport. 21. BLOOM IN THE PARK Malmö restaurant Bloom in the Park has gone through a total makeover. In charge of the redesign has been Jonas Lindvall, one of Sweden’s most revered interior architects (of the same generation as Claesson Koivisto Rune). After a few years out of the limelight, the makeover, which sees ergonomic Functionalism interact with the luxury of Baroque, is getting rave reviews. 22. THE IVY The Ivy in Sydney, a $150m (£69m) behemoth, is well on its way to completion. Stage one is now ready with five bars and three restaurants open. The one-stop party shop will be finished in the middle of this year and will boast 18 bars, nine restaurants, a 1000-capacity ballroom, a 25m pool, complete with islands for bands, and a changing room/nightclub with five massive communal showers and its own DJ. There will also be a selection of high-end retail shops and a day spa that will offer everything from tattoos to botox. Hotelier Justin Hemmes apparently wants people to feel like they’re dropping over at his place. 23. CLASKA Claska, one of the landmark design hotels of Tokyo, has just reopened after an extensive refurbishment. Although some of the original

features remain, there are three new rooms designed by Kaname Okajima, ex-product designer at Idee, under the concept of Japanese Contemporary. The new Claska will be equipped with a multi-purpose studio for events and exhibitions and the ‘kio•kuh’ restaurant, with a new menu influenced by Japanese organic and macrobiotic food. It will also sell Claska-produced design products for the domestic and international market.

has just opened the Roman-style trattoria Giuseppe, Arnaldo & Sons. Unfortunately, it has opened at the casino. Even though Terzini has the midas touch, it will be interesting to see how it slots into the Melbourne dining culture with this address. Slick, black walls and tables are warmed up with earthy tiles handmade in Sicily. Three pods sit throughout the restaurant, each boasting its own mini atmosphere and unique music within the space.

24. JIA SHANGHAI Design hotels have hit Hong Kong at last with young hoteliers Yenn Wong and Loh Lik Peng from Singapore. Yenn, who opened Asia’s first Philippe Starck-designed hotel in Hong Kong, JIA Hong Kong, launched its Shanghai counterpart in 2007 and will be opening another one on the holiday island of Krabi, in Thailand. She’s also launched Muse in Singapore, after the success of her first restaurant Graze.

27. UNIVERSAL STUDIOS As travel authorities anticipate the loosening of visa regulations for the Chinese after the Olympics, and with China’s increasing wealth, neighbouring countries are preparing themselves to welcome the Chinese traveller. For one, Universal Studios is building a £1.6bn theme park and resort in South Korea. Seoul, well-known for its array of museums and design studios, is seeing a spurt in growth in the Shinsa-dong district with the setting up of cafés, studios and galleries.

25. ‘N’ ‘N’, formerly known as Restaurant Nimb in the Tivoli Gardens, has opened in what has always been a classic Copenhagen hang-out. Mattheo Thun was initially responsible for the total make-over, but rumour has it that he left after a clash with the owners. Apart from a brasserie, the establishment will house a gourmet restaurant, deli, dairy shop, bakery, small chocolate factory, wine cellar and 12-roomed hotel. 26. GIUSEPPE, ARNALDO & SONS One of the most anticipated new restaurant launches in Melbourne in the past six months comes from Maurice Terzini (of Icebergs and North Bondi Italian), who, with business partner Robert Marchetti,

28. DESIGN BOUTIQUES IN SINGAPORE With Singapore’s property boom, more homeowners are turning towards customisation and are taking pride in their own homes. New designer furniture stores have sprung up as a result and a couple, like Three3Three and Think Design, were opened by interior designers. Dutch designer Marcel Wanders also launched his Moooi Boutique there last December. 29. LAU’S FAMILY KITCHEN Lau’s Family Kitchen is a new little brother from the folk that brought Australia the famed Flower Drum (often voted one of the best restaurants in the country), but designed to be the affordable, everyday option. In a slick space that contrasts glossy timber and dark tones against industrial-chic exposed pipes, the restaurant is modest only by comparison with its elegant sibling. 30. NIGHTLIFE IN DUBAI 1 Dubai couldn’t open more hotels, shops, bars and restaurants every

Designers to watch Tim

Pyne

Tim Pyne’s M-Hotel, a new adaptation of the infamous M-House concept launched a few years ago, is a prefab hotel designed to make use of the many plots of land which – while unavailable for formally building on – sit unused for years while the owners do battle with each other, the planners and the banks. Once a plot can be secured for just five to ten years, a cheap steel frame is erected and the smart 50m2 flats can be slotted in – a bit like Corb’s Unite D’Habitation in Marseilles, or a filing cabinet. The hotel can be shipped away on the back of a truck, making it a perfect solution for site owners to earn a bit of cash, while also providing much-needed hotel accommodation in town.

Iwamoto

Scott

After recieveing widespread acclaim for its astonishing Jellyfish House in 2007, the success of the San Francisco-based design group Iwamoto Scott has been on a steep rise. Also in 2007 it won the Grand Prize in the History Channel’s (public voted) City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge, San Francisco – a week-long competition to rethink and envision San Francisco 100 years in the future. The group is also one of a 100 global architectural firms selected by Herzog & de Meuron to design a villa in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, during 2008.

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week if it tried. Recent development the Submarine club has a notable reputation among the more arty and alternative of the city’s drinkers. Since converted warehouse club iBO, run by design group 9714, closed down last May, Dubai’s less mainstream crowd has been looking for a new home and they may have found it here. The Submarine has a retractable roof – which seems to be a trend in the Middle East, as Beirut’s most legendary club, BO18 also boasts one. Most of Dubai’s bars are located in hotels, so every time a new one opens, a flurry of new bars and restaurants cut their ribbons too. One of the biggest and most recent is Raffles Dubai, which has caused quite a stir, mainly due to its extortionate prices – more than £1000 for entry to their New Year’s Eve party – and also for its pyramid-shaped building. The glass triangular top contains the China Moon Champagne Bar, which, with its high ceilings, bad acoustics, black shiny floors and showy thronestyle armchairs, is attracting ostentatious crowds. 31. NIGHTLIFE IN DUBAI 2 The Intercontinental Dubai, Festival City, is a huge, high-end hotel with some very exciting new bars and restaurants. The hotel is located in Festival City, a multi-million dirham new mall, restaurant and marina complex, so its popularity will depend on how quickly people take to this entirely new end of town. However, already its Vista bar and Anise restaurant are rousing interest. Anise has been designed to create ‘a total sensory experience’, integrating the diner into the kitchen. Food is prepared and served from live cooking stations around the restaurant. Vista, by contrast, is a large and luxurious venue along the creek side of the hotel, framing stunning views. Its bar appears to be floating above the promenade at the edge of the infinity pool. 32. HENRY JONES ART HOTEL The Henry Jones Art Hotel in Tasmania bills itself as Australia’s ‘first and only dedicated art hotel’, and features a large selection of works

for sale. These are primarily by contemporary Tasmanian artists, including graduates from the hotel’s neighbouring Tasmanian School of Art. More than 250 original artworks are displayed throughout the 50room hotel. The hotel has already won 62 awards locally and internationally since its opening, so the next project from the developers is eagerly anticipated. It will be a property called Quamby, in Australia’s oldest surviving colonial house in the northern town of Hagley. The residence will be relaunching as a gourmet golfing retreat. 33. HOTEL DELMONA Williamsburg, NY, has been a hipster paradise for a while, but with the opening of the Hotel Delmona – Williamsburg’s first real cocktail bar – it has begun the process to maturation. Opened by Zeb Stewart, the person responsible for the interior of Manhattan eatery Balthazar, the design of Delmona has been dubbed ‘steampunk’. 34. IITTALA Cult Finnish brand Iittala has kindly opened its doors on London’s Regent Street, giving many more people access to what has always been Skandium’s best-selling brand. Stocking every line in production by the tableware manufacturer, the 120m2 store was designed to be an extension of the brand’s values:

‘lasting everyday design, against throwawayism’. 35. PROJECT H Beijing’s Project H, completing this year courtesy of the Spencer Grey Group, which operates famous Beijing establishments like Alfa, Muse and Le Hugo, is already claiming to have the ‘best patio in Sanlitun’. The group has been launching the 1000m2 project in phases since January, and it is confident that the currently seedy Sanlitun will be a new draw, including developments such as five-star hotels, Armani and LV shops.

Designers to watch Nigel

Coates

The Head of Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London is also one of the more ubiquitous names printed on all those Milan invitations this year. With a mischievous Scubist collection for Fratelli Boffi, a range for Varaschin entitled the Rollover collection, two curvaceous leather armchairs for Frag, and a red Venetian crystal chandelier, it’s hard to know where to look.

36. BAR BOULUD The new Bar Boulud, designed by Thomas Schleesser of the Design Bureaux, consists of a long and open passageway that resembles an underground tunnel leading to the main restaurant. Schleesser also designed the 15-seat table in the round, which was built by Aveum in Mexico City and is modelled on 18th- and 19th-century negociant tables where businessmen plied their clients with wine. 37. LEVI’S Levi’s has established its presence quite royally in Istanbul by setting up shop in a traditional Ottoman building, the interior of which was designed by New Zealand architect Christopher Hall. With lighting created by Beirut-based PSLAB, the store features custom suspended fixtures positioned on two parallel lines, and the lights themselves have long adjusting arms for directing the light where needed. 38. AFROART Afroart, located on shopping street Nybrogatan in Stockholm’s city centre and designed by the young and very promising duo TAF, is both elegant and rural. Founded in 1967 by Jytte Bonnier, Afroart has always specialised in Fairtrade products and projects from the third world, but, in 2003, when six textile designers took over, business boomed. This is the second store, and the designers have done a good job with a low budget and a sustainable brief. Using local

Tveit

& Tornøe

The views from its waterfront studio in an old sardine factory in Bergen are clearly inspiring, but the work being launched left, right and centre by Tveit & Tornøe at the moment must have something to do with an excess of talent as well. Fresh out of college Atle Tveit and Lars Tornøe already have several covetable products and furniture items in manufacture and can’t seem to stop winning awards – the latest was the domestic Unge Talenter award in 2007. Launched in Stockholm, the new Copenhagen chair for Fora Form is a classic in the making. Tveit & Tornøe will be exhibiting in London in September.

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INSIDER 15

INTERIORS 04. 2008

50 materials, and some canny recycling techniques, TAF used standard pine beams and fashioned them into a smart display system. The shelves, hooks and display boxes are not fixed and can easily be moved around in the grid of beams. 39. STADIUM Commissioning a collaboration between two of Sweden’s biggest design players, Thomas Eriksson, and Stockholm DesignLab, sports chain Stadium has won itself 4500m2 of very smart flagship space in Gothenburg. Going by the name XXL, this interesting marriage of architecture and graphics is setting a new standard for an otherwise quite dreary commercial area. 40. CARROTS Carrots, a boutique opened by two daughters of a farming family (hence the name), now occupies the premises of an old restaurant in San Francisco that was once used in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The store retains many of the classic features of the original restaurant, featuring French literature interspersed with the clothing lines. 41. ECO To recycle the most interesting (but probably least relevant) fact about the new Eco store in west London: it was co-founded by everyone’s favourite Mr Darcy – Colin Firth. But why would a successful actor want to open a shop in Chiswick? Because he cares about the planet. And because Eco is the first of its kind – a store, showroom, consultancy and destination that offers inspiration, ideas and domestic solutions for those who want to lead a Greener life. 42. NITTY GRITTY Nitty Gritty is a little Tokyo universe in a residential area of Stockholm. Although the store was established about five years ago, it has expanded along Krukmakargatan and today owns five stores. It’s interesting to see the original concept, because many of the city centre department stores are trying to copy its pared-down, eclectic style (among these, allegedly, is Pub

where Nina Persson, of Cardiganfame, art directs the third floor).

book on Biba (the 1970s retail legend that Thomas also designed).

43. GIANO Giano offers the kind of homely welcome that is becoming more commonplace in New York eateries. The part modern, part old-world restaurant is named after the Roman god Janus, while the twofaced interior provides a modern entry that segues into something more rustic. The personal connection offered by the chef to guests adds to the old-fashioned eatery feel. Keeping with the homely epicurean feel is Bobo in New York – using a West Village brownstone as a bohemian European-style dinner party setting. Fending off any accusations of bad acoustics, the noise is apparently part of the ambience – the voices of the guests working with the interior to give the sense of a raucous dinner party. Complete with lopsided floorboards and paintings of aristocrats, the stage is positively 19th century France.

46. THE KITCHEN Many private parties begin and end in the kitchen, so Berlin-based architect And Off decided it would also be an innovative theme for the interior of a private club in Stuttgart called, unsurprisingly, The Kitchen. Using a classic 1950s kitchen for the basis of the design, the architects covered floor, walls and ceiling in tiles. Intermittently, certain tiles were then extruded from the wall and used to disguise the sound system, as well as to create a chandelier and support random pieces of fruit.

44. MAC PRO The much awaited, fabulous, 557m2 MAC Pro space in New York occupies an entire floor at 7 West 22nd Street. Comprising a retail/studio and fullblown training area, as well as an ‘experimentation facility’ for makeup, its dramatic, open layout is dedicated to the professionals. There is a mixing station where they can hone their skills and test samples, a reference library of magazines for serious research and a photography studio for recording the results. There is also a separate training area, a kitchenette and bathrooms with showers. 45. APRIL77 Fashion and record label April77 has opened a retail space not far from the company’s headquarters in Paris. In a circular space that calls to mind a turntable with dark vinyllook floors and shiny steel beams, the metaphors are not subtle, but it still works. Vintage radios are dotted around the displays as well, just in case anyone doesn’t immediately get the link. Designer Brice Partouche allegedly tapped interiors guru Steven Thomas after reading a

47. SWAROVSKI CRYSTALLIZED Trailblazing its way as one of the most innovative design brands around, Swarovski established its new concept – Swarovski Crystallized – earlier this year. Housed over two floors (420m2) in part of the former Dickins & Jones department store on London’s Great Marlborough Street, Crystallized is a place where customers can go to assemble their own cut-glass pieces. The showroom, designed by Virgile & Stone, is defined by thousands of miniature transparent drawers, each containing a different shape, size and colour of cut glass, forming the perimeter along two sides of the shop. For added panache, peacock feather-covered black sculptures are set atop a number of internally lit black display cases in the middle of the store. Upstairs, the Lounge features a long, white table steeped in white crystal drops, and laid for a glittering dinner (where apparently shoes – placed on each dinner plate – are on the menu). Shanghai and New York are set to receive similar outlets later this year. 48. B&B ITALIA B&B Italia reopened its London flagship showroom in South Kensington with double the windows and more than 330m2 of extra floorspace. B&B Italia’s original London showroom, when it opened in 2001, was the result of a collaboration between John Pawson

and Antonio Citterio. To mark the new extension, B&B Italia commissioned award-winning gardener Stephen Woodhams to create a striking Italian garden concept inside to coincide with the launch of its first Outdoor collection – Canasta, designed by Patricia Urquiola, and Swell Seating and 1966 Collection by Richard Shultz. 49. KK OUTLET With their finely tuned radar for the bizarre, passing Hoxtonites are successfully being lured into the new KK Outlet, set up by Amsterdam-based communications agency KesselsKramer. The Fatdesigned premises in London’s Hoxton Square advertises dolphin meat and falafel, alongside communications services and books on a kebab-shop-style board above reception, and comprises a book shop and gallery along with the group’s offices. Fat, which was also responsible for the KesselsKramer office (a church in Amsterdam), has not held back. The interiorequivalent of a caricature of a children’s TV presenter is cartoonsurreal, but it certainly commands attention. 50. ADOUR ALAIN DUCASSE The Rockwell Group’s redesign of the Adour Alain Ducasse wine bar and restaurant at The St Regis New York sees a number of innovations raising the perfectly tweased Manhattanite eyebrows of its clientele. Inside the landmark Beaux Arts structure, the space is entered via a Makore wood portal and leather-wrapped vestibule, along which the bar is ‘comprised of a sculpted bronze base topped off by parchment goatskin’. Wine, glasses and carafes sit on bronze-framed glass shelving, while next to the bar a vertical screen of hand-blown glass spheres is suspended on bronze cables. And why not? Perusing the wine list is where it gets interesting though – using multiple projectors with motion sensor technology, the sommelier takes thirsty customers through a computerised projected menu activated by touching the bar top.

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OPINION 19

INTERIORS 04. 2008

LIBBY SELLERS

BEMOANS THE CURRENT HYPE AROUND THE ‘DESIGN ART’ PHENOMENON. IT’S NOT NEW, IT’S NOT ACCURATE, AND IT’S NOT – DESPITE WHAT YOU MIGHT HAVE HEARD – ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

THE IRONY in my questioning the ‘design art

ANDREW PAVITT

phenomenon’ is not lost on me. As curatorturned-design dealer, I’ve seen both sides of the limited edition cast bronze coin and am, I guess, part of its currency. Rather than encouraging the hype, my concern is with questioning the misnomer of ‘design art’ and the suggestion (accusation?) that it is a bandwagon on to which designers, dealers and collectors are all jumping. Coined in 1999 by Alexander Payne, design director of Phillips de Pury, the term ‘design art’ grew from a need to differentiate the fine arts, the applied arts and the design arts – that is, functional objects produced since the Industrial Revolution. For a brief period the auction house employed the term to describe a type of design that shared the traditionally perceived tenants of art (autonomy, exclusivity and expressivity), but subsequently it has dropped the ‘art’ and concluded that this is ‘design’, albeit one facet of it. In 2005, the academic and critic Alex Coles published his interpretation of design art through an investigation into artists working with design typologies. This spin on the term discussed works from Henri Matisse’s interiors for Rockefeller’s town house to the more recent fabric designs Takashi Murakami conceived with Marc Jacobs. Neither Phillips de Pury nor Coles are under scrutiny here. My gripe is with the subsequent appropriation of the term as a catch-all phrase for both 20th and 21st century objects that sell through gallery or auction environments, or for objects that seem more conceptually challenging than the designs readily available on the high street. Like many within the industry, I’m uncomfortable with the negative connotations and applications of the term, particularly the implied displacement of design as a marginalised sector of the art industry. It is also disheartening that the merits of this sector are primarily calculated through the prices fetched. Rarely is an article published on design art in which record-breaking prices aren’t mentioned in the opening paragraph. I’m certainly not innocent of this. Surely in an era in which the effects of globalisation and homogenisation are debated daily, and when advanced production techniques are liberating designers from the traditional designer/manufacturer relationship, there is scope for an assessment of the role of limited edition design beyond its monetary value. While I question the undertones of the term design art, I am often listed among the handful of dealers in London who are commissioning and promoting this ‘new market’. And therein lies the other half of my concern – the suggestion that this market is new.

Perhaps a more appropriate description might be ‘renewed’, for there are many parallels between what we are witnessing now – both from designers and collectors, and other significant moments in design history. Also criticised for attracting the attention of a wealthy clientele, the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late Victorian period emerged at the beginning of a serious economic recession and towards the end of a century in which efforts were being made to address what were seen as the devastating effects of industrialisation on the design and manufacture of goods. It was never suggested, implicitly or otherwise, that machine production and commercial manufacture were the enemy or should be abandoned. Instead, the 19th century movement sought to elevate the status of the craftsman and give due recognition to the individual through a reappraisal of the role of the applied arts in society as a whole. This liberal approach saw like-minded patrons commission entire environments – fine art, architectural features and furnishings – with consideration for the gestalt, or the unified whole. Similarly, the patrons of today’s market are seeking considered collections of both art and design – collections that go beyond what’s on their walls or plinths, to their physical surroundings. Even the Modernists, the arbiters of machine manufacturing and standardisation, created objects in small runs or that were beyond the capabilities of the contemporary manufacturing technologies. Eileen Gray, the Irish-born, French-based architect and designer, sold her own prototypes alongside those of her peers in her Parisian gallery in the 1920s, while Charles and Ray Eames designed pieces that often relied on handcraftsmanship or were too organic in form for industrial production. Then there are the examples of the designer/makers during the 1980s and 1990s who, lacking the support of the international manufacturers, could only realise their designs in small editions sold through galleries. Witness early examples of work by Ron Arad, Marc Newson and Tom Dixon. Like all creative activities, there are good designs and bad. Free from the constraints of industrial production and mass-marketing, designers today are being offered opportunities that increase the possibility of producing the latter. But this market is also encouraging the exploration of materials, processes and theories that will hopefully produce the former and, for this, it should be encouraged. • Libby Sellers is a design curator based in London, largely responsible for the current obsession with design art because of her Grandmateria exhibition

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hm85 design: Simon Pengelly

one of a broad and versatile range of contemporary seating designs for corporate, public and residential projects. To view the complete Hitch Mylius collection, visit our website or contact us on T +44 (0)20 8443 2616 E info@hitchmylius.co.uk www.hitchmylius.co.uk

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OPINION 21

INTERIORS 04. 2008

STEPHEN BAYLEY

DOESN’T SEE A PROBLEM WITH HOLLYWOOD ACTORS AND POP STARS POSING AS DESIGNERS AND ARCHITECTS. PERHAPS CELEBRITY AND CREATIVITY ARE BOTH JUST EFFECTIVE MARKETING TOOLS

ANDREW PAVITT

I FELL in love with the gorgeous goddess Fame, but ended up on a one night stand with the disgusting slut Celebrity. Or so they say. Fame is to architecture and design what brand value is to soap: if patiently acquired, if based on a fundamentally sound product that works and has, over time, delighted the consumer, then fame is precious and lasting. It is like a fine, mature wine: subtle and complex. Fame can’t be rushed. Celebrity is an alcopop: easily acquired, bright, trashy and not worth lingering over. Then there is the hangover. We are at a curious historical moment when architecture, design, celebrity and brand are chasing each other, not altogether attractively. The distinguished Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press has published a book (by Anna Klingmann) where architecture, once thought to be the mother of the arts, is described as ‘an effective marketing tool’. Today’s corporate clients don’t want Alberti’s proportions. Instead, they require morphic expressionism that photographs well, what Tom Wolfe called ‘kerbflash’. This is architecture as blinkgraphics: a shape, a colour, a profile, a bulk that makes an immediate impression. You can find a superlative example in Munich: architect Coop Himmelblau has built BMW-Welt, an apocalyptically effective marketing tool for the car manufacturer. But it builds the architect’s brand as well. Who is the celebrity here? Brad Pitt has been at it. A Business Week article in 2005 showed the actor in Frank Gehry’s studio. It was Gehry who designed the bodega in Pitt’s Normandy-style Beverly Hills chateau. And Pitt is said to have had a hand in Gehry’s attention-getting design for a deluxe high rise on the Hove seafront in Sussex. To research celebrity architecture, the following year Brad and Angelina visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, his 1938 house for the Kaufmann department store family. Unfortunately for his otherwise impeccably Green credentials, Brad was shuttled from the airport in an SUV and returned to it in a Rolls-Royce. Be that as it may, if you Google ‘Brad Pitt Gulfstream’ the first reference is not to the preferred private aircraft of the very rich but to an architectural project in New Orleans. This is Make It Right, announced in last year’s love-in of the liberal elite, The Clinton Global Initiative. Thirteen architects, including Adjaye Associates and Shigeru Ban, have been invited to design ecointelligent houses on stilts to replace houses that weren’t on stilts, thus devastated by Hurricane Katrina floods. Pitt donated $5m (£2.5m) to this high-concept salvage in the poor Lower Ninth Ward. Thwarted architectural ambitions have dominated his psychology: tectonic and

morphological metaphors feature in his discourse. Explaining the swap of lissom Aniston for buxom Jolie, Brad said that, like architecture and design, love is ‘sometimes changing shape’. Brad is responding to peculiar circumstances not just at home, but abroad. If architects and designers can become celebrities (as Norman goes global and Gehry lends his name to Tiffany jewellery) then – surely – celebrities can return the compliment and become architects. Habitat sensed this several years ago with a ‘Very Important Products’ promotion where television and sports personalities designed household and personal accoutrements. Three years ago Lenny Kravitz, a funkster nearing retirement as his polite middle-class sexiness paled before the brute ghetto carnality of rap, became a designer. At the end of last year his Florida Room opened in the painfully hip Delano Hotel. Appropriately, this was during the preposterous international conga-line of self-loving neophiliacs that is Art Basel Miami Beach, a celebrity billionaire boot sale of pseudo-art. Kravitz’s hotel lounge was, inevitably, described as iconic. He’s not alone in jumping the species barrier. Kylie Minogue has ‘designed’ bed linen, though if this was in the same sense that Norman Foster designed the sensational Millau Viaduct (engineered to stay aloft by the less celebrated Michel Virlogeux), I can’t say. The rush of actors, musicians and models to become architects and designers is partly a consequence of de-skilling. It used to be difficult to design buildings as you had to know about technical things. Now we have people to do it for us. Architecture and design used to be about problem-solving, now they make their own problems. Ask any engineer who has had to make a Zaha Hadid design stand up. If you can squiggle it, consultants or expert systems can make it work. Lenny can squiggle. He says, ‘I want to do architecture, but I’m not an architect’. I wanted to make a hit single, but I’m not a musician. Some recent US research showed that the share price of large corporations moved in the opposite direction to the chief executive’s media profile. The better-known the boss, the more the business sucked. Something similar is happening with architecture and design: Philippe Starck may be the most celebrated designer ever, but his lasting influence will be minimal. Truth is, designers are at their most influential when most obscure: ask Virlogeux. Novelist John Updike said, ‘Celebrity is a mask that eats the face.’ He should have said ‘facade’. • Stephen Bayley is a design critic and commentator. His own website also bills him as the second most intelligent man in Britain

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OPINION 23

INTERIORS 04. 2008

JEREMY MYERSON

SAYS SUSTAINABLE OFFICE DESIGN IS NOT ALL ABOUT CONSIDERED MATERIALS AND LOW-ENERGY LIGHT SOURCES – PEOPLE HAVE TO WANT TO WORK THERE AS WELL, DON’T FORGET

I RECENTLY paid a visit to the Greenest

ANDREW PAVITT

office building on the planet. Melbourne City Council’s CH2 facility is a ten-storey structure that sets a new world standard in sustainable design. Its architect, Mick Pearce, best known previously for studying termite ecology in to design an office building in Zimbabwe without air-conditioning, has really pushed the Green envelope in Melbourne to avoid any wasteful energy consumption. On my tour of the building, on a typically hot and dry Australian summer’s day in February, I marvelled at the intent from top to bottom – from the wind turbines, photovoltaic cells and solar panels on the roof, to the vertical planting, shower towers that collect rainwater and chilled ceiling panels which absorb heat. CH2 wears its sustainable credentials on its sleeve. In exterior form, it is demonstrably an icon of Green awareness in office design. But, as I wandered around, I couldn’t help wondering if the building will be as socially sustainable as it is ecologically correct. The wavy concrete ceilings, so essential to natural air-cooling, make for a gloomy interior ambience, especially when combined with dim, lowenergy light sources. In fact, the whole workplace has a feel more akin to an underground car park than a busy office environment. In such conditions, the spark of social animation so essential to the best-designed offices is too readily extinguished. The somewhat sparse human presence on the work floors of CH2 told its own story. Many employees clearly don’t find the environment conducive to hanging out with colleagues. And, when low energy use is set against low occupancy levels, the Green exemplar is immediately called into question. I am sure that, in time, CH2 will fix its initial interior design teething troubles and add meaningful social dynamics to the clever way in which it recycles air and water around the building. But therein lies a tale that will perhaps, inevitably, lead more office design professionals to make the assertion I’m making – that the most sustainable offices are not necessarily those that put a wind turbine or a solar panel on the roof, but those that use space and time most efficiently to guarantee high occupancy levels. The more intensely we people existing office space, the more efficient the use of energy to heat and light that space, and the less the need to build additional space. At a time when it is beginning to dawn on opinion-formers that the office property sector is far worse than the airlines when it comes to

wasting energy and polluting the planet, this message cannot be ignored. Anonymous office architects and developers, whose buildings boast occupancy rates of less than 30 per cent, and whose lights burn bright through the night, illuminating whole cities, have avoided airline-style direct action from the environmental lobby up to now. But such anonymity cannot be guaranteed any longer. What this means is that, in the rush to build more sustainable offices, all those consulting experts on space efficiency, who coined that phrase in the late 1990s, are back in business, albeit on a new Green ticket. Making sure that density of occupation is achieved throughout the working day is a devilish design exercise that combines the disciplines of mathematical modelling, space planning and facilities management in ways that few organisations get right on their own. Designers like Andrew Chadwick of Chadwick International, who introduced the first really sophisticated space-time efficiency models in places like Andersen Consulting a decade ago, are now warming to the theme of organisations being Greener by the simple expedient of using space more intensively. Last time around, the drive to reduce the property footprint of organisations was a pretty brutal affair. Loosening the grip of employees on ‘owning’ their own space, to achieve higher densities of occupation, was achieved by highly directed means in the late 1990s. Hot-desking, accordingly, became a dirty word. This time around, Chadwick concedes that the move from allocated or owned office space to bookable or informal space should be more gradual and, dare we say it, more organic. It should be accompanied by less of a Taylorist flourish and more of a nod in the direction of creating a proper, shared sense of place. In other words, office interiors must be seen to be socially sustainable by the people who use them. All of which brings me back to Melbourne’s CH2 office building. Here is a scheme that visibly signals its ecological sustainability to the people who use it, but fails to deliver the interior comfort, quality and buzz that will create a truly sustainable social community. When it comes to office interiors, saving the environment means much more than thermal gain, air-conditioning loads and shading strategy. • Jeremy Myerson is director of the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre and acknowleged expert on workplace design

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INSIGHT MELON DISTRICT 27

INTERIORS 04. 2008

Melon District, Barcelona, Spain WITH ITS ROOFTOP TERRACE, SWIMMING POOL AND ULTRA-SPACIOUS LIVING QUARTERS, MELON DISTRICT IS NOT YOUR TYPICAL STUDENT ACCOMMODATION BY A LONG WAY By Dominic Lutyens With the possible exception of the super-sized rooms of an Oxbridge undergraduate, student accommodation brings to mind depressing, insalubrious digs. But a new sevenstorey student accommodation complex in Barcelona called, exotically, the Melon District (just don’t refer to it as a hall of residence) is challenging this preconception. Designed by Zurich-based architect Gus Wustemann in collaboration with Barcelona communications agency Animal, it is set to open in September, and is more luxe than louche, more chic commune than Kafkaesque rabbit warren. Located, glamorously, in Barcelona’s central Poble Sec area, the building was originally designed by architect Elanch y Concha, but Wustemann was responsible for the interior design. It contains flats, some long-stay, some short-stay, each with ten rooms accommodating nine students altogether, all of whom have their own bedroom with en suite shower. There is also a single and a double studio flat. Reinforcing this idea of communal living is

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28 INSIGHT MELON DISTRICT

04. 2008 INTERIORS

1. Ground-floor café 2. Use of ‘unfinished’ concrete provides studied ruggedness 3. Main reception area and parking lot 4. A communal ‘lounge’ with open-plan kitchen 5. Floors are made of polyurethane and the walls made of concrete or covered in backlit polycarbonate panels 6. Rooms are fitted out with no-fuss utilitarian materials 3

Address: Calle Paralelo 101 BCN Client: Barcelona Lodging Furniture supplier/s : Mobelmol All photos: Bruno Helbling

an ultra-spacious ‘lounge’ (per flat) with an open-plan kitchen and dining area, as well as a roof terrace with a swimming pool. In addition, there is a reception, groundfloor café and parking lot. This emphasis on the communal is partly the result of consultation with prospective students. ‘They said they would like living rooms,’ says Wustemann. ‘So the social aspect is very important.’ Melon District is not luxe in the fashionable, Boho-chic sense, so forget aubergine banquettes and chandeliers. The brief was to create ‘a new low-budget student accommodation’, which partly explains why it is fitted out with no-fuss, utilitarian materials – white polyurethane for floors, walls in concrete or covered with backlit polycarbonate panels,‘bought off-the-peg from builder’s warehouses’. But there is another reason for this: clearly, Wustemann has a thing about spit ’n’ sawdust industrial materials, which he deems more right-on than ‘bourgeois’, polished surfaces. Certainly, surfaces as defiantly unfinished as those on the ceilings of Melon District’s bedrooms would be unacceptable by the standards of, say, your typical Chelsea Harbour interior decorator. But some of Wustemann’s rhetoric is naive. He earnestly equates these stripped-down surfaces with ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’. Yet their studied ruggedness is part of a highly mannered, long-established architectural idiom which first came into vogue in the 1970s, the chaotic, unfinished aesthetic of Frank Gehry’s home in Santa Monica (built in 1978) being a seminal example of this. Wustemann’s point is that taste is subjective – ‘There is no such thing as beautiful or non-beautiful,’ he says. Yet strangely conflicting with this admirable democratic philosophy and Functionalist aesthetic is a Romanticism, even a spirituality. The lounges’ walls are painted Russian icon gold because they are the ‘heart’ of the building. He calls the ovens in the kitchen ‘an altar’. The white floors are referred to, inexplicably, as ‘sacred’. These quasi-religious metaphors are at odds with Wustemann’s description of his practice as being ‘free of any judgment or programme’. Still, Melon District’s occupants will be blissfully unaware of all this chin-stroking theorising. Poolside cocktails on the roof terrace? Midnight swims in balmy Barcelona? Interiors mixing funky concrete with white-walled Minimalism? Student accommodation it might be, but not as we know it. •

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Moss, Los Angeles, US MURRAY MOSS’S STORE ON LA’S MELROSE AVENUE IS SOMETHING OF A DEPARTURE FROM ITS ORIGINAL IN NEW YORK’S SOHO, MOST NOTABLY BECAUSE CALIFORNIA CAN COPE WITH HEART-FELT FRIENDLINESS

By Caroline Roux In retail, you expect a second store to be pretty much like the first, trading on the language of the original to reinforce the brand. But in the case of Murray Moss’s Los Angeles venture, an act of cloning most certainly has not taken place. His New York Store, Moss, which launched in 1994, is the product of its savvy SoHo surroundings. It feels like a loft; it assumes a certain knowledge on the part of its customers. Or even a lot. ‘In fact, I think we’re becoming very presumptuous there. New Yorkers have a real understanding of this arena,’ says Moss – the arena being high-end design. While Moss has taken many of the same products to LA – he opened the store with a show called Glitter and Smoke, which featured chandeliers from the Swarovksi Crystal Palace collection and a 1938 Steinway baby grand

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Design: Murray Moss and Franklin Getchell Contractor: Peter Vracko Project management: Christopher Chiappa Lighting: Unistrut grid with Flos track and fixtures Floor: Sandblasted cement Engineer: ARC Consulting Steel contractor: Hollywood Welding 3

piano which had been fire-sculpted by Maarten Baas – he has set about selling them in a rather different way. And with some success: the piano sold on day two for a cool $155 000 (£78 000). ‘I felt smart that day,’ laughs Moss. First, Moss decided to position himself in the fashion market on Melrose Avenue as a way of communicating the creativity of his largely studio, not production, stock. This, after all, is Design rather than Furniture. LA is highly zoned, right down to which of side of the street you are on, so he struck lucky with APC next door, a fabulous Helmut Lang store around the corner and Paul Smith’s huge pink cube across the street. Alexander McQueen is about to open down the road and it is rumoured that Chanel will be putting in an appearance too. Then Moss decided to introduce a major dose of Californian friendliness. A huge sign reading ‘Hi’ hangs emphatically over the Corian counter at the back of the shop, drawing customers towards it. The staff wear suits, as in New York, but here the welcome has a generosity of spirit that would not wear in Manhattan. There is further generosity in panels that introduce the designers, with headshots and biographies (‘Who’s Who at Moss’). ‘We had to show people that these are real, living, interesting people,’ says Moss. The shop itself, while maintaining a neutrality necessary to background the expressive work within, has a strong sense of location and context. It is a single-storey 1930s building and Moss rediscovered its curved interior walls when he demolished all the interior interventions. He has re-stuccoed its front and revived the planters, which will be filled with grape ivy. In March, he had the shop logo moved forward so the ivy can grow behind it. The original concrete floor has been sandblasted, its patchiness showing the history of the building, and a 20m steel beam was installed from the front to the back of the space (following the original downward slope toward the back) to shore up the roof and from which to suspend a wall-to-wall ceiling grid. ‘You could hang a car from it,’ chuckles Moss, who has so far managed to prove the point with 18 chandeliers. The back has been blown out and a huge garage door installed. ‘We can use the gallery as a parking lot,’ says Moss. ‘This is California and we should be showing motorbikes and cars. We showed Ducatis once in New York, but it becomes clever there. Here it’s natural.’ And glass cabinets with white enamelled frames – containing Moss favourites such as Baccarat crystal, Lobmeyer glassware and Studio Job’s white Makken porcelain – are suspended from the grid to create smaller gallery spaces. A long way from New York in every sense, then, Moss’s LA store looks bound to repeat its East Coast sibling’s extraordinary success. •

1. Window display for store’s opening exhibition, Glitter and Smoke 2. The facade of the single-storey 1930s building has been re-stuccoed 3. A huge ‘Hi’ sign draws customers to the Corian counter at the back of the store 4. Plan showing wall-to-wall ceiling grid from which cabinets can be hung to create gallery spaces 5. The store’s opening exhibition featured Swarovski crystal chandeliers and a Steinway baby grand piano

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34 CASE STUDY DELAY NO MALL

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HONG KONG’S NEW DELAY NO MALL LIFESTYLE RETAIL OUTLET IS DESIGNED TO ASSAULT THE SENSES. IT IS CONSISTENT ONLY IN THAT IT IS UNPREDICTABLE

Address: Delay No Mall, 68 Yee Wo Street, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong Interior designer: Atelier Paciﬁc Client: Goods of Desire Lighting supplier: World Shine Furniture supplier: God Completion date: January 2008 Fit-out contractor: Legend Interiors E&M contractor: CCP Engineering Images courtesy: Atelier Pacific Photos: John Butlin

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36 CASE STUDY DELAY NO MALL

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‘Each unit is installed with special lighting and sound effects, which activate when the toilet is used’ ATELIER PACIFIC DESIGN TEAM

By Zijia Wong Delay No Mall certainly lives up to its name (which some claim is a homonym for a local Cantonese cuss phrase). A Jumbotron screen on the facade harks back to the heyday of Hong Kong showbiz and the concept of time acts as the overarching theme, embellished by clockwork and pendulum motifs. But this is not a place for reminiscing. The mall, spanning three levels in a 17-storey building, is owned by design group Goods of Desire which clearly has an uncanny knack for creating controversial names. God carries a self-eponymous brand and Delay No More, which specialises in home furnishings and fashion. Both feature designs by God founders Douglas Young and Benjamin Lau. There is a Delay No More concept store within the mall. Sitting on the former site of a cinema, Delay No Mall faces the Philippe Starck-designed boutique hotel JIA Hong Kong. The launch party was the talk of blogs for weeks. Visitors could not stop talking about the eclectic design that gives a consistently unpredictable visual and experiential shopping journey. The design team from Atelier Pacific, led by Doris Tang, Rowena Gonzales and Leo Leung, sound most excited when they describe the mall’s toilets, ‘Each unit is installed with special lighting and sound effects, which activate when the toilet is used,’ they say. Since it was commissioned to work on the entire mall, Atelier Pacific had to accommodate all the needs of numerous tenants, while relying on inaccurate existing

building evaluation and management records. The team also recall how all the design elements had to be ‘nonrepetitive’. This meant ‘using lots of different computer 3D modelling for many different areas to help understand and study the space and furniture so that we could make the design workable and special’. The mall’s flagship store, Delay No More, features daring, dramatic curved strips of black and white on the floor (an optical illusion to draw in passers-by and ‘an interpretation of time warp’), which can be a little challenging to serious shoppers going through racks of Just Cavalli apparel and Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers watches. A mall with brands such as WowWee Robotics, Potato and Co, Galliano and Alessi is sure to draw fidgety youths in sneakers and baggy pants, so it was common sense to opt for low-maintenance materials. For this, durable galvanised steel floors were used, which at the same time play up the cement sand floor with embedded acrylic features and epoxy paint. The black-and-white floor was painted on to a resinbased cement using epoxy paint that is tough and longlasting. Roman balustrade columns (glass columns with customised self-adhesive film), white rattan armchairs, swinging pendulums, glass fibre elephants and scarlet draperies reside happily together, albeit making strange neighbours. ‘We did not want the experience to be too linear as we hope visitors will discover something new every time,’ the design team comments, although it insists that there was

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‘a flow that goes through the whole mall’ that makes navigation less tricky than it looks. The desire to constantly surprise and thrill is in line with the team and client’s want for a playground that can bring out the ‘inner child’ in the adult shopper, and is reinforced by the use of whimsical accessories such as robots and clock cogs. The mall’s design is not just a conversation piece: expect it to respond to you too. Upon detecting sound, an interactive display unit on the ground floor triggers the sensor to project images by different artists on to the ceiling. It is not just your visual sense under attack in here, either. In an irreverent fashion typical of God, a sonic sound speaker at the first-floor entrance cheekily ‘whispers’ to shoppers as they pass by. A colourful van, modified to become a DJ booth, has been brought in from the Philippines and is just waiting for installation, after which shoppers can spend their weekend evenings shaking their booties in the mall. Thankfully, the designers have also provided some respite, however, with the mall’s sleeping pod service. The futuristic-looking capsules are ideal for tired shoppers who can admire (real) plants flourishing on the wall via a hydroponic system and a shallow pond beneath their feet. God claims it is the first and only company in Hong Kong to operate this kind of service. In the end, and despite its name, this mall would be something even mothers would approve of. •

Opening spread. The mall’s flagship store, Delay No More 1. The mall’s site – which formerly housed a cinema – is reflected with a Jumbotron screen above the entrance 2. The space was extensively planned using 3D modelling 3. The floor of Delay No More is designed to hypnotise shoppers into spending more money 4. Plan of the ground- and first-floor layouts 5. The design elements had to be ‘non-repetitive’ while being ‘workable and special’ 6. Disco-shopping is tiring work – luckily sleeping pods are available for when it all gets too much

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FACED WITH AN OVERLY MEAGRE BUDGET, SCHEMATA ARCHITECTURE DECIDED TO TAKE A DESTRUCTIVE APPROACH TO THE SAYAMA FLATS AND TEAR THE INTERIOR APART

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Address: Sayama, Saitama, Japan Client: United Estate Design: Jo Nagasaka/Schemata Architecture Office, Izumi Okayasu (technical co-operation), K Hatakenaka/ T Kudo/H Umeki (design co-operation) Lighting: Kurage optical fibre lighting Furniture: Model rooms furnished by Jo Nagasaka/Schemata Architecture Office Completion date: January 2008 Flooring and materials: Mainly existing materials, including the concrete floors, walls and ceilings. For the ‘shiny’ floors, a surfacer was used as undercoating, with epoxy resin applied on top. Tatami mats, mortar and structural plywood were used for some flooring areas All photos: Takumi Oka

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42 CASE STUDY SAYAMA FLATS

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‘Nagasaka claims the Sayama Flats project has changed his attitude towards the suburbs in general – he used to regard them as merely messy and uninspiring areas surrounding big cities, but now realises that they could be just as exciting places as central Tokyo – or even more so’

By Junko Fuwa Stripping away the surface of an interior to reveal the ‘essence’ and history of a building is not a new practice. On the contrary, it is very fashionable. But when Schemata Architecture began the process with the Sayama Flats, it had no idea how drastically destructive it would need to be, nor how well prospective tenants would receive it. The site, originally a company dormitory building, is situated in Sayama, Saitama Prefecture (an hour’s train journey from central Tokyo), and the location is a far cry from the hip, urban living of the Japanese capital. Well, up until now. The 30 newly transformed rental apartments have proved massively popular among those attracted to the idea of stylish living in the tranquillity of the suburbs. From the beginning, this was no ordinary brief. The first hurdle Schemata had to overcome was the distinct lack of a generous budget. With this crucial restrictive factor it soon became clear that it would be almost impossible to complete the renovation at all unless it changed its usual ways of thinking and its approach to design. ‘We really did not want to end up with a half-baked, cheaply designed product, so we have instead decided to use the radical method of demolishing the existing space to create something new,’ says Schemata’s Jo Nagasaka. Encouraged by the freedom of creativity granted by the client, Schemata’s work began. The rather old and drab dormitory rooms came in different sizes and conditions. Nagasaka and his team responded by ‘relying on their instincts’ and regarding each room as a stage for a kind of architectural ‘jam session’. For Nagasaka, a devoted admirer of improvisational modern jazz group Medeski Martin and Wood, inventing accidental space as the design

process went along was an excitingly dynamic way to work. ‘I realise that under normal circumstances, architectural practices do not conjure up notions such as improvisation. But in this particular case, that is the exact word I would use to describe this project,’ he explains. Without really knowing what the outcome would be, Schemata soon started giving the aged rooms of Sayama Flats new life. Stripping down the 29-year-old wooden boards of the interior revealed that underneath were intriguing concrete structures and the mazes of wiring, ducting and pipes of the building’s service infrastructure. They would stay. Even the stains of adhesives were deliberately left on the wall surfaces and highlighted to create an artistic effect. And so it went on. The rooms were bare and exposed, called ‘naked’ by Nagasaka. While it enjoyed discovering unexpected beauty through its almost brutal process of destruction, Schemata never forgot to respect the pre-existing utilities. One thing which is particularly noticeable in every room is the traditional Japanese-style partitions, such as the fusuma (sliding door) and the shoji (sliding paper screen). These are the remains from the old dormitory rooms and somehow manage to co-exist with the modern and Western-style ambience. Moreover, the abandonment of solid walls has resulted in a freeing up of space, turning the small apartments into loft-style living areas. The communal rooftop terrace was, quite possibly, the only area where Schemata actually needed to build something new. The idea of using decking has led it to create a staircase-like structure, which people can stand on, sit on, or use as a table. Although the idea of an accidental and beautiful

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Opening spread. The traditional Japanese partitions escaped Schemata’s brutal attack, where party walls did not 1, 2 and 4. The ‘naked’ rooms still feature the adhesive stains from their previous incarnation 3. Floor plans

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44 CASE STUDY SAYAMA FLATS

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5. The roof terrace features benches and tables for people of all heights and all manner of seating preferences 6, 7 and 8. The large, open, lofty and affordable new flats are proving extremely popular with tenants, for some reason

living space was extremely well received by the client at first, in fact Schemata Architecture was only able to convert half of the Sayama Flats complex in this manner. The rest of the apartment rooms have still been made more modern, but only by using a much less adventurous white space, because of concerns about the possible negative reactions of potential tenants. These worries proved to be completely unfounded, probably a huge relief for Schemata, and the popularity of the ‘naked’ rooms with customers has far exceeded even that of the ‘standard’ spaces. Even the problem of vibration, endemic to bare concrete floors, did not bother the tenants much and all of the young-ish inhabitants seem to really appreciate the creative living space. ‘And the unexpected truth is,’ Nagasaka says, ‘that the “naked” rooms let the tenants improvise with various furnishings far more easily than the conventionally designed rooms. Maybe because the space was created accidentally, it also has a capacity for a mishmash of styles.’ Nagasaka claims the Sayama Flats project has taught him many lessons. Needless to say, he values the unique experience of creating artistic space by demolition. It also changed his attitude towards the suburbs in general – he used to regard them as merely messy and uninspiring areas surrounding big cities, but now realises that they could be just as exciting places as central Tokyo – or even more so – for Schemata to apply its imagination and design skills. With this prospect, the acres of utilitarian buildings in Sayama must look like gems in the rough, just waiting to be polished. And if you ever have a chance to stand on the roof of the Sayama Flats complex and admire the view beneath, you may see what Nagasaka means. •

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BEIJING IN CHINA HAS BEEN CULTIVATING ITS OWN CROP OF DESIGN TALENT WHICH IS NO LONGER LOOKING TO THE WEST FOR INSPIRATION BUT TO THE COUNTRY’S OWN CULTURAL ROOTS. ZIJIA WONG REPORTS ON THE CURIOUS MIX OF DESIGN STYLES IN BEIJING

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BLOOM

TRENDS CHINA 47

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48 TRENDS CHINA

MPERORS once lorded over it and now designers are doing the same. With hip hotels and homes sprouting up, and the likes of Rem Koolhaas and Paul Andreu vamping up the skyline, Beijing is a blossoming kingdom for design breakthroughs. This is a great leap forward from the grey-suited, Communist world of the late 1970s. During the three decades that China was shut off from the rest of the world, designers went wild from Modernism to Postmodernism, finally settling down to Minimalism. ‘Chaos emerged,’ wrote SY Zheng in an essay called Contemporary China’s Interior Design after 1978’s liberalisation. Designers had barely grasped Modernism when Postmodernism came hurtling in. Forced up a steep learning curve, they created a mish-mash of styles, almost as if in a cruel parallel to Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers campaign. (During the 1956 campaign – whose slogan was ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend’ – the Chinese Communist Party encouraged people to give their opinions and solutions to problems.) A skyscraper topped with a pagoda roof is a regular sight. By the 1990s, Yue Mingjun, Fang Linjun and the Luo Brothers burst forth with garish-coloured sculptures and Maoist graphic icons, taking pot shots at politics and society in the Cynical Realism and Political Pop movements. Designers, such as Li Hu and Chang Yungho, returned from studies or work in the US to join their counterparts, such as Ai Weiwei, in shaking up the scene. ‘China has been gradually getting its confidence back after the fast development of its economy,’ says Hank Chao, who heads award-winning

04. 2008 INTERIORS

Shanghai group MoHen Design. He believes that Chinese designers are learning to value their past, but says that they still do not know how to best use traditional design elements. ‘They first learnt more from adjacent countries such as Japan, or from other Chinese provinces like Hong Kong. These places Westernised much earlier, and have learnt how to mix their own design language from the past with contemporary elements,’ he says. One ‘returnee’, Zhu Pei, gave artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s 200-year-old house in the heart of Beijing a Minimalist treatment, with traditional Chinese furnishings, light wood and glass panelling to add a subtle touch of modernity, while retaining rugged brick walls. Musician, tea-master and artist JinR – multi-hyphenated talents are common in the large city of big dreams – is renowned for her signature über-chic, yoke-back chairs, latticed doors and folding screens, which are reinterpretations of the Ming- and Qing-era furniture that dominate Beijing’s traditional homes, and are inspired by the Chinese philosophy of Tao or ‘the way’. Beijing design would have a strong Chinese touch, says Hong Kong designer Kinney Chan, marking the difference emerging from it and Shanghai. Chan noted it is usually larger in scale and developed from an architectural way of thinking, whereas Shanghai designs are more ‘boutique’ and smaller in scale. Hong Kong designs are more conservative and commercial. Douglas Young, founder of Hong Kong label Goods of Desire, finds that even the Chinese consumers are different. ‘Don’t be surprised to find that many mainland Chinese customers are more “with it” than local Hong Kong people,’ cautions Young. ‘They are often more open to new ideas than

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CHINA IN YOUR HANDS Who’s who in Beijing’s design world

Fake Design This is run by Ai Weiwei, who started Caochangdi, now the alternative to 798 for creative professionals. Ai is a conceptual artist, curator and architect who designed Where to Go? Restaurant and worked with Herzog & de Meuron on the Beijing National Stadium.

MAD Headed by Ma Yansong, from Beijing, the architecture design studio is working on several big schemes including the Ordos project in Inner Mongolia. Ma was with Zaha Hadid Architects in London and Eisenman Architects in New York before founding MAD in 2004. Ma’s list of achievements include the 2002 Samuel J Fogelson Memorial Award of Design Excellence, as well as the American Institute of Architects Scholarship for Advanced Architecture Research in 2001.

MADA s.p.a.m The Shanghai-based architecture and design practice has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an and Los Angeles, and is working with OMA on the CCTV headquarters in Beijing. The founder Ma Qingyun, also the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California, is the chief curator of the 2007 Shenzhen-Hong Kong, Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism: The City of Expiration and Regeneration.

Studio Pei-Zhu Trained at Berkeley, Zhu Pei is one of China’s ‘starchitects’. His signature look combines Chinese motifs with startling futuristic imagery using digital media, while the Beijing-based studio is building the microchip-lookalike Digital Beijing, which will be the digital command centre for the Olympics. Its Art Museum of Yue Minjun will launch in October.

Opening spread: MAD’s vision of Beijing in 2050 Main picture and above: MAD’s Hong Luo Club House floats on the Hong Luo Lake in northern Beijing Top: The restored Red Capital Club Above right and centre: The antique-filled Hotel Côté Cour is an eye-catching mix of traditional and contemporary themes

customers from “established” communities. Mainlanders appreciate our sense of humour, expressed through cultural irony.’ Young is known for his irreverent home accessories using Chinese text, images of Hong Kong and graphics from Maoist propaganda materials. ‘Chinese people want a complete change in their lifestyle. They want something that nobody else (including the Italians) have had before.’ Life for designers has not always been so rosy. Just ten years ago, according to Chan, Beijing developers used Hong Kong designers from foreign-based companies. Imported furnishings were in fashion, as local products were inferior in quality, and, due to political issues, ‘there were many restrictions in the [local] design style’. But improvements in China’s manufacturing capabilities – which is why it became the ‘factory of the world’ – has reversed the trend, so that local materials and foreign designs are now preferred. The burgeoning purchasing power of the Chinese market and the draw of the Middle Kingdom is not lost on foreign companies. With the country’s retail sales expected to quintuple in the next decade to 30 trillion RMB (£2.15 trillion), international brands are fighting to get a piece of the pie. Brands such as Cappellini, Poltrona Frau and Hansgrohe made themselves household names in Beijing, while Philippe Starck created the LAN restaurant-club-bar, a pastiche of Mongolian tents, powder rooms, rhino heads, ornate mirrors, leather seats and plastic chandeliers. Atlanta-based interior design consultancy HBA has also been stamping its mark all over the 3000-year-old city, with not less than 13 projects, including the Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott. Multi-entertainment venue Legation Quarter, whose proprietary

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STYLE OLYMPICS Between cheering the synchronised swimmers at the Beijing National Aquatics Centre and feasting on exotic food at Wangfujing, these new hotspots are well worth a visit

The Emperor ‘Sound caves’ or carved-out areas of this hotel’s hallways are outfitted with suede and feature flat screens describing Beijing’s history and culture. Day beds in one section of the SHI restaurant are separated by translucent curtains, which, when aligned, form the Chinese character for the word ‘eat’. The Emperor is the only Chinese member of Design Hotels and will be launched this year.

Legation Quarter Lawyer Handel Lee, who spearheaded Shanghai’s Three on the Bund venture, has shifted his attention to Beijing. Retaining its name from the Qing dynasty, when it was used as the American embassy, Legation Quarter will include a nightclub for Beijing’s jet set.

Green T House Living JinR’s lifestyle retreat based on her Green T brand draws on the traditions of the tea house as a social gathering place. It will add accommodation this year and host exhibitions and other events.

Hotel Kapok In what locals call the ‘first design hotel’, special frosted Fibreglass was created and used for the latticed building facade. The modular chaise lounges and print wallpaper speak of a contemporary European influence, yet the courtyard with bamboo plants, curiously, still evokes sword-fighting scenes.

Commune by the Great Wall This daring project is the brainchild of 12 renowned Asian architects such as Shigeru Ban, Seung H-Sang and Chang Yung Ho. It features furnishings from Serge Mouille, Karim Rashid and Marc Newson, even though the brief was to use local materials and traditional building methods.

Zenspa Why go to Ko Samui for a Thai massage when you can get one in a siheyuan? The stylised silhouettes of chairs, opium beds and cabinets are tempered with material such as naturally aged, hundredyear-old timber and bright accessories.

Top: The traditional grey courtyard buildings of the Hotel Côté Cour set around a lily pond and century-old date tree Above and right: Green T House. The latticed doors and folding screens are re-interpretations of the Ming- and Qing-era furniture that dominate Beijing’s traditional homes

venues ‘don’t have any Chinese-inspired interior design’, will open near the Forbidden City this year. The 10 220m2 area will include an outpost of the London nightclub Boujis, a Daniel Boulud restaurant and a Patek Philippe store. Near the Great Wall – the only man-made structure visible from space – is Jackson Hole, which looks like a set from a Western movie. However, elsewhere there are stalwarts of tradition such as Red Capital Club and Hotel Côté Cour that take up Beijing’s famous enclosed atrium houses or siheyuan (courtyard dwellings). The US-owned Red Capital Club ‘once belonged to a notorious female spy and Manchurian revivalist who plied her trade using all assets at her disposal’. Stolen away in a hutong near the courtyard homes of many of China’s past and present leaders, it took one year for traditional craftsmen to restore. The cigar lounge is outfitted with Marshal Lin Biao’s (Mao’s ill-fated successor) chairs and the dining room decked with imperial robes and calligraphy paintings. Hotel Côté Cour, meanwhile, is a sanctuary of Venetian plaster, glass mosaic tiles and Chinese antiques, set around a lily pond and a century-old date tree. ‘Beijing has grey courtyard dwellings and the red-brick walls and glass tiles of the Imperial Palace. Various design styles live here together harmoniously,’ muses Meng En, chief executive officer of the DCB group, a non-profit-making, on-line organisation for designers. ‘It can be counted as a signature style of China. Such a unique characteristic will continue to exist, especially after China has truly connected with the world through the Olympics. Through the collision of Chinese and Western cultures, more and better works will be produced.’ •

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GROWING PAINS

AS COMPANIES FLAUNT THEIR EVER-GREEN PREMISES AND OUTLETS, ONE MAJOR ISSUE HOLDS THEM BACK – THE NEED FOR GROWTH. CLARE DOWDY ARGUES BUSINESS NEEDS TO BE MORE CREATIVE WITH EXPANSION PLANS Illustrations by Andrew Pavitt

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54 TRENDS ECO RETAIL EPENDING on who you talk to, it is the elephant in the room, the gorilla in the corner or the inconvenient truth of retailing. Over the past few years, every retailer worth its salt has been setting out its Green strategy. The general gist being that they will try to make their stores and the products they stock better for the environment. Some, like Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Rose, have been shouting about their Green ethics from the (soon to be solar-panelled, no doubt) rooftops. Over the next five years, M&S is pledging £200m towards environmental initiatives, including making the business carbon neutral and not sending any waste to landfill by 2012. All of this is largely welcomed by those who have to make it happen through design. In fact, most of them are ahead of their clients in the eco game. ‘Designers have been able to deliver this for ten to 15 years,’ says Portland Design director Lewis Allen. That’s not to say there aren’t any serious hurdles to get over to implement a Greener design strategy. It is at this point that so-called value engineering raises its head. According to Checkland Kindleysides director Jeff Kindleysides, however, ‘You can almost guarantee that this [value engineering] route won’t hang on to a Green element. The nature of retail and shopfitting is about cost and pound per square foot. Until sustainable Green materials and lighting reach a point where they are a cost benefit, it’s always going to be a push-and-pull situation in terms of how you design a store.’ We all know these things will be sorted out as prices for the sustainable alternatives go down, or governmental or customer pressure goes up. But that is not the elephant in the room. The obvious but unspoken contradiction is between retailers trumpeting their carbon offsetting credentials and, at the same time, continuing to expand. Howard Saunders, director of retail consultancy Echo Chamber, describes a recent scenario. ‘I was doing a talk for a major high-street store, and when global warming came up, they talked about how they’ve made their stores more efficient. In the same breath, they announced they would double their store numbers. It’s just ridiculous,’ he says. Such growth can’t avoid being damaging to the environment, however

04. 2008 INTERIORS

much less energy each new store uses. Or, as Saunders puts it, ‘The planet doesn’t care.’ Of course, the idea of not expanding is completely counter to our Capitalist consumer society. This is business, after all, and Mintel consultant Richard Perks can understand why it’s not an issue that exercises the retailers at all, ‘because if they want their businesses to succeed, it is not an option’. In fact, he doesn’t think they’d even see much of a contradiction. ‘Retailers need to compete for customers and they need to grow. Businesses that don’t aim to grow, go backwards. They can’t get together and agree not to invest in stores, because that would be to act as a cartel and break the law,’ he says. Some retail designers echo this. ‘As retailers or any business take in the opportunity of new markets and locations, it’s just a fact of life,’ says Kindleysides. ‘No business model would stifle its growth for the principle of replicating its footprint. It’s not [financially] sustainable, because a good retail location now won’t be one in five years’ time.’ Lucy Richardson is managing partner of Brand Legacy, a new strategic marketing agency focused on developing sustainable growth strategies. She thinks that retailers recognise the tension, ‘but they are paralysed because they are about growth’. That paralysis means that designers will inevitably be continuing to design future roll-outs and expansions. Yet the UK is already a chain-store haven; Tesco has 1897 outlets here, slightly more than the combined efforts of the next four biggest retailers, which between them have 1823, according to Mintel’s 2007 UK Retail Rankings. Altogether the top three (Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Asda) boast 5330m2 of sales area. Current expansion includes two of M&S’s brand new eco stores, the first in Glasgow, and the second, its first eco Simply Food, in Galashiels. Both of them opened in October. Meanwhile, even destination store Liberty is getting on the expansion bandwagon. This June, its first ‘flagship concept store’ opened on London’s Sloane Street, by Paris-based architects Pierre Beucler and Jean-Christophe Poggioli. A Liberty spokeswoman explains that this one will act as ‘the blueprint for concept stores throughout the global marketplace’.

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Some designers recognise the beneficial role they can play in this process. ‘New concepts are the lifeblood of the high street and, if developed with the right level of creativity and practicality, can bring great rewards to a retailer. That is why they do it, and those who do it well are thriving,’ says Dalziel & Pow creative director David Dalziel. ‘Retail design may not be the most socially aware discipline, but our work uplifts those who experience it and those who are employed within it. Without it life would be duller.’ At the same time, some consultancies are recognising that life (and work) can’t go on this way. Sooner, but more probably later, retail clients will wake up to their own inconvenient truth. ‘They are not fundamentally changing their business model because they have short-term growth targets. They need to be thinking more creatively about expansion,’ says Richardson who, as chief executive of Added Value, worked for Sainsbury’s last year. ‘Supermarkets need to rewrite the paradigm, and think about innovation in a systemic way.’ Saunders agrees. ‘M&S has led the way and that’s good, but I’m warning them that it could be their come-uppance. In five years’ time, we will still be here and we will still be trying to save the planet, and they will still be trying to sell us another V-neck sweater.’ It’s difficult with shareholders’ needs for immediate satisfaction, but designers who are starting to look further ahead can perhaps advise clients. Many in consultancies are talking about the need to expand distribution networks. ‘They should integrate on-line into their business,’ says Richardson, citing Ebay. She suggests that conventional retailers could learn from that model, ‘if they thought of themselves as a space and not just a shop’. For example, a fashion outlet ‘could re-embrace its own second-hand clothing’ and devote a corner to a vintage range. Allen at Portland has been considering how brands should be about more than just traditional transactions. ‘For the consumption of material things through traditional channels, we have to build shopping centres,’ he says, which inevitably rely on a fast turnaround of disposable goods. ‘We are looking at ways to dematerialise both

TRENDS ECO RETAIL 55 steps,’ he says, for example, reducing the need for stores by upping Web-, phone- or catalogue-based shopping, and, more radically, reducing the amount of consumption. ‘We propose a switch from consuming things towards consuming experiences,’ he says, which could mean learning, personal development, social networking and so on. In other words, ‘expressing ourselves not through what we wear, but through what we think’. He calls this gratification through growth, self-worth and a sense of esteem that we can share with others, rather than gratification through the bling of life. ‘It’s no longer “I shop therefore I am”. It’s “I consume, therefore I am”.’ His idea is that brands that help people to be Greener can encourage that ever-waning quality in consumers – loyalty. ‘There’s a stronger chance that consumers will spend their money with you and, proportionally, consumption can go down if brands inspire more loyalty. We need people to buy less.’ Adidas and Nike are two fashion brands whose customisation schemes – Nike ID and Adidas’ Mi Innovation Centre in Paris – lend themselves to this. If you design your own shoes and pay a slightly higher price for them, there’s a chance that you’ll keep them longer. And if that brand has inspired loyalty in you through its cultural or social events, then you may buy fewer pairs of shoes, but more of them may be that brand. ‘It’s about finding ways to avoid the consumption cycle we’re in now that’s too fast and too often,’ says Allen, who believes that his ‘dematerialisation’ thinking is relevant to every brand, institution, retailer, developer and consumer. If there really does come a time when conventional retail design is needed less, where does that leave the designers? Allen, for one, isn’t concerned. ‘There’ll be no less demand for creativity,’ he believes, ‘as there’ll be a continuing need for people to engage. It’s not just about designing shops, it’s about helping brands connect with people.’ So maybe some designers will migrate to other disciplines, like on-line or event planning, but, in the meantime, the roll-out is their (rather stale) bread and butter. •

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SHAPE SHIFT

PHOTOGRAPHY: VIRGILE SIMON BERTRAND

THEY ARE SHORT-LIVED, BUT MUST BE HIGH-IMPACT: IN THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY THERE ARE NEW RULES WHEN IT COMES TO CREATING BRAND SPACE. LUCY JOHNSTON GOES IN SEARCH OF BEST PRACTICE IN TEMPORARY INTERIORS

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58 TRENDS TEMPORARY SPACE

HETHER they come under the banner of ‘guerrilla’, ‘pop-up’, ‘touring’, or all three, temporary commercial spaces are playing a key role in brand strategy. Chasing the fickle attentions of today’s consumers in an advanced social culture where the traditions of retail and hospitality continue to merge, businesses are under pressure to create worthwhile experiences in all categories and ever greater value is placed on ‘time well spent’ over wealth of possessions. Combine that with the fast pace of consumer demand, short attention spans for commercial messages, and the result is a new commercial landscape where changeability and disruption of expectations are the main influencing factors. In this ‘experience economy’, the role of design is critical – but the threedimensional manifestations of a brand’s mindset, shared values and positioning as both a commercial and cultural proposition are more short-lived than ever. What’s more, although they have indisputable commercial value the majority of temporary spaces are still allocated relatively small budgets. So what does it take to create a stand-out temporary interior? Smart design, curation of local talents and resources, and a strong, simple idea. A number of innovations have recently taken the genre to new heights. Beyond ensuring that the brand transcends traditional expectations, differentiates itself from the competition and forges connections with its audience in crowded markets, these temporary commercial spaces have important roles in educating, entertaining and building enhanced relationships with their audiences. They also allow for experimentation, interaction, greater freedom of expression and the opportunity to talk to new markets. The Campana Brothers’ Camper boutique in Berlin is an excellent execution of the concept of a temporary interior design in its simplest form. It is also an example of ‘freedom of expression’ being offered from a brand – allowing consumers to make their mark within the space. Part of the ongoing Camper Together campaign of iconic creative collaborations, the concept is called Torn Leftovers. It consists of piles of discarded test print advertising hoardings that have been turned into a huge wall collage of multiple layers. Customers are encouraged to interact, tearing off random sections to reveal the underlying patterns and thus constantly changing the appearance of the space. The store furniture has also been produced from recycled materials: the tables are constructed from wood layered with old Camper publicity material, and the window display units are formed from blocks of recycled, shredded paper. The installation is due to be in situ for a year before the space is redesigned. Reclaimed fixtures and fittings are a popular and economical design solution that can be exploited in the design of guerrilla temporary spaces. When the Phone House, a German telecoms retailer, launched a temporary retail space in Cologne, designed by Coordination and Berlinomat, the aim was to raise awareness and promote the brand’s products in preparation for the opening of a new flagship store, and to generate interest from a younger, edgier consumer than its stores usually attracted. The pop-up store offered a showcase area for trialling the products, a lounge space and a quieter consultation space where customers could sign up for new contracts – most of the furniture was constructed by innovatively rethinking the existing industrial fixtures, combined with wooden crates and complemented by in-situ graphic work. Due to its popularity and commercial success, the venture continued to trade for four months longer than originally scheduled, overlapping with the launch of the flagship store. Taking the strategy of pop-up retail and moving it a stage further, Sidecar Eventi illustrates the transition from temporary retail as a promotional activity to an ongoing commercial proposition and consumer destination. With a decrease in the number of permanent stores being opened (down 35 per cent in Italy in the past five years), Sidecar Eventi – a spin-off of Sidecar Diffusion, an Italian fashion brand distributor – saw a business opportunity for a welllocated venue offering temporary retail space for one or more brands at a time. Situated in Milan, and designed by Perengo & Perbellini & Radaelli, this ‘shop sharing’ concept has attracted high-profile international brands, which rent all or part of the space for a period of two to four weeks. An in-house visual merchandising team creates bespoke fixtures for each installation and typical build time is just one or two days. It’s not always about rough and ready, however. In some cases, a relatively high budget (and flair for spending it) can lead to impressive results. As part of a strategy to better promote the quality of Sony Bravia products through physical media, Sony launched a three-dimensional experience to bring the essence of the products to life. Designed by Odd and Naked

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Opening spread. Mobile Art: The Chanel Contemporary Art Container, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, opened in Hong Kong in March and will tour the world over three years Clockwise from above left. Torn Leftovers temporary retail interior concept, created by the Campana Brothers for the Camper boutique in Berlin; food magazine Bon Appétit’s pop-up supper club in New York, designed by the Rockwell Group; the Starbucks Salon in New York, a combined café, gallery and performance space, created by Formavision and Wieden & Kennedy; The Colour Rooms, an event space by Odd and Naked Communications for Sony to promote its Bravia screen technology; Italian fashion distributor Sidecar Diffusion’s Eventi shop-sharing concept in Milan, designed by Perengo & Perbellini & Radaelli; German telecoms retailer Phone House’s temporary retail space in Cologne, designed by Coordination and Berlinomat

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Top to bottom. The Illycaffè Push Button House, based on an installation by artist-architect Adam Kalkin, offers visitors to the Venice Biennale a place to drink coffee and relax within the ‘world of art’ (above); the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (below and bottom)

PHOTOGRAPHY: VIRGILE SIMON BERTRAND

Communications, two temporary event spaces – The Colour Rooms – were launched simultaneously, one in a former electric plant in Berlin, the other in a converted railway arch in East London. The unexpected, multifunctional venues boasted intimate lounge areas, a large event space, galleries and screening rooms, a stage and a bar/bistro and integrated Bravia screen technology throughout. The venues were available for hire for events such as private screenings, parties, presentations and photo-shoots, while a contained gallery space housed exhibitions from local artists, designers and craftsmen. This proved a good example of temporary branded space creating an added value. Staying with the theme of hospitality as a tool to connect with audiences, the Bon Appétit Supper Club in New York demonstrates the growing trend for ‘media embodiment’ where two-dimensional media entities are creating threedimensional, experiential activities. In this case, the food magazine Bon Appétit hosted a pop-up supper club offering two contrasting dining experiences for daytime and evening guests. Each day, a different high-profile chef was invited to take over the kitchen and customise the menu, providing a physical, sensory manifestation of the content of the publication – ‘living media’ at its best. Designed by the Rockwell Group, a daytime café space open to the public hosted events such as book signings, chef appearances and food exhibits, while in the evenings, the main dining area was converted into an invitation-only venue, hosting parties, premieres and fundraisers. The café itself was given a bright, fresh appearance with bold graphics, and the evening club – including a dining room, lounge and bar – was designed as a dramatic, theatrical space and created a visual representation of the city at night. One of the most effective examples in recent times of a brand using temporary commercial space for experimentation and expansion into other media is the Starbucks Salon in New York, which positioned the brand as a cultural patron. Combining a coffeehouse, gallery and performance space, this temporary, nomadic venue provided days of free music, book and poetry readings, art exhibitions and fashion events. Created and curated by Formavision with Wieden & Kennedy, the concept aimed to showcase Starbucks as a locally relevant brand, providing a cultural focus that supported and featured work from local creative individuals, both established and upand-coming artists, authors, performers and DJs. The venue was open for ten days only, from 10am to 10pm, with plans to tour the concept globally. The design of the space drew on the talents of local graffiti artists. Starbucks Salon’s full-roasted nemesis, of course, is the Illycaffè. For the fourth year in a row, coffee brand Illy has partnered with the Venice Biennale to provide visitors with a version of the its ‘Illymind’ concept – a place to pause for rest, reflection and refreshment within the exhibition. The chosen method for the last event was an installation that aimed to further link Illy with the creative arts industry and strengthen its visible patronage. The feature – Push Button House – was originally a work by artist-architect Adam Kalkin, and provided visitors with coffee and a place to relax within the ‘world of art’. At the touch of a button, and in just 90 seconds, the unit unfolds from a compact shipping container into a fully furnished living space. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this genre of late, however, is the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. A travelling art space that hosts an exhibition of artworks inspired by Chanel bags, even the building itself was inspired by the brand’s signature quilted handbag. The architects developed a hi-tech facade from fibre-reinforced plastic to keep the weight down to make shipping easy. Designing the gallery, which is intended to have a lifetime of three years (rather than 30) as it tours, was, according to project architect Thomas Vietzke, ‘More like designing a product than a building – it’s not so rooted in its context so the parameters were very different. Assembly and disassembly were obviously crucial.’ The concept of temporary brand spaces is one that has attracted a lot of activity, but there is still huge potential for future development. In an advanced consumer market where traditional brand-messaging and communications so often falls on deaf ears, three-dimensional brand experiences that provide unexpected scenarios are a powerful tool. Reflecting the increasingly transient nature of lifestyles, spatial design concepts that allow for a regularly changing proposition attuned to psychographics rather than demographics – becoming active social commentators – will find that they enable brands to build a much longer-lived and positive rapport with consumers. • Lucy Johnston is executive editor of the Global Innovation Report, published by GDR

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A PERSONAL TOUCH

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L IN AN AGE OF MASS CUSTOMISATION AND BESPOKE PRODUCTS, THE FUTURE IS IN THE HANDS OF THE CONSUMER. BUT WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE DESIGNERS? SUPER-SKILLED AND EGO FREE, SAYS KEN OLLING – ENTREPRENEUR, INNOVATOR AND PIONEER OF ‘PLATFORM DESIGN’. MARK ISITT MEETS HIM All photos Kim Saatvedt

OU may be vastly proud of that Eames chair you picked up at a flea market a week ago, but unique it ain’t – turned out in a good 100 000 copies since Charles and Ray designed it back in the 1940s. But it is still far too impressive a piece for you to think of pimping it up, revarnishing it or replacing the seat. Just imagine what that would do to its second-hand value. Henry Ford’s famed quote, nearly a century old now, springs to mind, that you can have the car in any colour provided it’s black. In these days of increased individualism and personal assertion, the words have a significant resonance, because even if we seem to live in a hedonist era of shifting shapes and conceptual craziness, mass production still reveals palpable limitations. It is still the manufacturer that sets the defining frameworks, just as in Ford’s day. But while the discussion was then about colour, today’s consumers are into form and texture and patterns and anything else that is thought to express personality. The desires are nowadays so specific that more and more companies are beginning to find ways to enable the consumer to personalise mass-produced products. Few, however, have carried this concept as far as Meld. ‘My passion and goal is to never ever create a product that I will see in someone else’s home,’ Meld founder Ken Olling asserts, with the intensity and candour of a true revolutionary. ‘A similar product maybe, but never ever my product.’ Olling was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, but today lives in the little, but cosmopolitan, district of Tøyen in Oslo. He describes himself as an untrained generalist with a passion for graphic design. What he forgets to add is that he is an overly understated person: Nippon, Nissan, Nike, Vodafone, Visa, Canal Plus, Sony – Olling appears to possess an almost Forrest Gump flair for finding himself in the right firm at the right time. He has spent the past 12 years working in the fields of international branding and interactive media communication across three continents. And to top it all he is both visiting lecturer at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Professor of Design at Beijing University. ‘I never got into art school in LA,’ he says. ‘They told me to go away, said I had no talent’. So I moved to Japan, went to Hamburg from there, on to Oslo and then back to Japan. Japan has pretty much shaped who I am. I plan to move back to Tokyo with my wife and son within the next year or so. No country inspires me more.’ He seems reasonably inspired even in Oslo. In addition to being one of Norway’s most sought after graphic designers, for the past six months he has also run Meld. The company is

into what is known as mass customisation, an attempt to achieve near mass-manufacturing efficiency while offering a unique product to a single person. This is the kind of grandiose policy programme that smacks of large-scale enterprises, and to date only a scattering of multinational companies, mainly in the sport shoe industry, have succeeded in implementing a similar customer approach. But Olling runs his company all on his own. The fees he gets are all shunted into the firm, which doesn’t just design products but produces them and distributes them too. Up to now his investment hovers round the $50 000 mark (£25 000), and it is likely to be higher before Meld presents itself in earnest to the world at the London Design Week in September. A trial chair is going to be on show there. Or rather ten different chairs from ten different designers, all of them originating from a basic chair designed by Olling himself. This situation is no novelty for Olling. Two years ago he visited the same city and the same fair, if not with the same concept, with another mass-produced rarity, the standard housing project Løvetann. Snøhetta, the renowned architecture group, had designed a modular system in glass and aluminium, which in less than three weeks could be hobbled together and equipped to meet the client’s highly specific requirements. Olling, part-owner in the practice, had a field day at the fair. ‘We had 600 people waiting in line to buy houses; the selling was super easy,’ he says. But when it finally came to mass production it turned out that the design just didn’t permit the low price and high ecological levels that the company had vouched for. Løvetann folded a couple of months later. A total of 40 modular structures had been completed, 30 of them for a (much-criticised) day nursery outside of Oslo. This experience was an eye-opener for Olling. ‘The Løvetann project proved at least one point, that masscustomised products were highly desirable,’ he says. ‘I already had this idea for a chair and when Løvetann didn’t go well I took it up again. I’ve spent the last year and a half concentrating on getting the principle to work in practice.’ The process comes in three stages: system, design, customisation. The system is like a DNA sample, it is here the product’s characteristics are defined. These consist mainly of a series of technical co-efficients drawn up by Olling. These vary depending on what type of product you want to manufacture – clothes or toys or cutlery or, in this case, furniture (in time, Olling plans to produce the lot). The way the system is structured determines the product’s initial expression. Or rather lack of it. ‘Because I’m designing the system for

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Not everyone is ready for total freedom. I notice that in my Norwegian friends. If they go to the States, they go static, there’s simply too much to choose from. KEN OLLING that is particularly environmentally friendly, and the four screws of 100 per cent recycled stainless steel. Olling estimates the life of the chair at a minimum of 50 years, ‘possibly even 100’. And the plywood itself is made in a factory in China that is free of child labour – Olling has been there himself and inspected. At present, he is working on developing an environmentally friendly distribution system. ‘I am forcing an ethic on to the design. That’s the most interesting bit for me. No matter what is done to the product after I’ve released it, it will remain environmentally and ethically correct. You may change the way it functions or the way it looks, but the ethical element is always maintained, inherent in the product. Nobody can change that.’ The only part of the process that he does not seem to have full control over, strangely enough, is the actual design stage. For that he has called upon the help of the youthful design duo Stokke Austad. ‘But it hasn’t been a matter of very much design,’ says Jonas Ravlo Stokke. ‘We’ve had a look at the ergonomics and helped Ken solve a few product engineering details. The assignment was rather to design a chair that doesn’t look designed – the chair of chairs. We’ve been steadily paring away at its personality. If we had been allowed to design the chair to our own wishes it would have looked very different.’ ‘When I did Løvetann I thought I was a genius,’ Olling concludes. ‘But now I’ve realised that the idea of mass customisation was talked about by professors back in the early 1980s. In a not too distant future, you will go on-line, upload your designs, hit ‘Print’ and instead of an HP laser jet you will have an HP 3D jet and print your own tableware, your own chair. That’s what we are reaching for. Meld is merely a first step.’ •

COURTESY MELD

other designers the product is quite toned down,’ he says. ‘Rather anti-climactic, actually. If I were to put a lot more of my style on it designers wouldn’t touch it. I wouldn’t dream of asking Philippe Starck to do one of these chairs if it screams Ken Olling. There isn’t room for two egos in this environment.’ When the basic chair is finalised Olling provides the ‘real’ designers with an Illustrator file. Apart from a number of key points in the chair frame needed to hold the structure together, the designers are free to redraw as they see fit. ‘If they want to change the shape of the chair they’re welcome to. And if they don’t, then they can use it as their canvas, paint it, sandblast it, laser engrave it, whatever. If I’ve designed a good enough system most of their desires will be able to be executed.’ When the designers have had their day with the basic chair it’s time for the next revolution. The people’s revolution. This is ultimately where the chair comes into its own and – over time – the star designer will be largely cut out of the equation. ‘When you buy the chair it comes in a flatpack. The various parts are cut in plywood and you just pop them out the same way you would a plastic model. The chair is made of six parts, with four screws. Each part is perfectly symmetrical, which means that each part can be flipped. All in all, there are 36 ways to put each chair together. And if you buy another version, you can combine the two. Take the armrests from one and put it on the other, turn the lounge chair into a rocking chair or into a high chair.’ The aim of enabling the customer to personalise the product as freely as possible is what Meld and its website (www.platformdesign.org) is concerned with ultimately. The greater the range of choice the stronger the sales potential, Olling explains – though even he accepts that the range of choices can be too many. ‘Not everyone is ready for total freedom. I notice that in my Norwegian friends. If they go to the States, they go static, there’s simply too much to choose from. That’ll change in time, but it can take ten years or so. Less in the US and Asia.’ To avoid this overload of choices, he has chosen to collaborate with product designers, illustrators and artists before the London release. This time it will be their versions he uses in a preliminary product run of 300 copies per chair. But, in time, the intention is that others will have a chance to try the technique. As with the Løvetann project, ethical considerations have been given top priority. The chair is made of bamboo plywood

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INNOVATIVE & UNIQUE DISPLAY CABINETS STANDARD & BESPOKE COMPONENTS

Shopkit Group Ltd Units B & C 100 Cecil Street Watford WD24 5AD T. 01923 818282 F. 01923 818280 E. sales@shopkit.com www.shopkit.com

. . .

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AFTER A FASHION

THERE IS EVIDENCE OF SEVERAL EMERGING TRENDS IN INTERIOR DESIGN. HELPFULLY, PRODUCT AND FURNITURE DESIGN ARE IN TUNE – FROM SURVEILLANCE CAMERA LIGHTING TO CHARACTERFUL BOOKENDS, THERE ARE NUMEROUS OPTIONS FOR THE DIRECTIONAL DESIGNER. 67 CLINICAL 68 SPEAKEASY 69 MULTIFUNCTIONAL 71 HOMELY 73 ORIENTAL

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CLINICAL 1. The Edge tables by Pearson Lloyd for Danerka can be easily fitted with cable management, and also come with a range of similarly Mac-compatible in-trays 2. MDF Italia’s new Aluminium Cabinet system is made of medium-density, wood fibreboards clad with aluminium

Bar-goers in countries like Taiwan and Singapore might appear healthier than most, thanks to a medical theme that is sweeping the area. In Taipei, DS Music Restaurant was launched recently, echoing the success that Singapore’s The Clinic had when it opened in 2006. Visitors at DS Music order ‘medicine’ from a menu before it is dripped into their glasses from a transparent, ceiling-suspended vat. Visitors can sit around each ‘bed’ and chat up the ‘nurses’ whose rabbit-ears complement their starched white uniforms. Disregarding the oddball entries, clinical doesn’t always sound sirens. The i-ultra lounge (someone stop this i-craze, please) in the InterContinental Hong Kong, for example, just goes with the pure white effect and an iHealth menu. Interiors in the Middle East are becoming increasingly minimalist, too. Keva, 360° and Chi@The Lodge are all new bars following the same design principle – pared-down, stylish and plenty of white. iKandy in Dubai is trying on the trend, al fresco-style, with its outdoor rooftop spot and pool surrounded by white drapes and decor. What it has got wrong, however, is the name. Since opening its Portland branch last year, the Ace Hotel has also been celebrated for its pared-down style. This year sees the extension of the brand with a branch opening in Palm Springs and another planned in New York.

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68 AFTER A FASHION

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SPEAKEASY 1-4. The Made by Memories collection from 22 Masters students at the School of Design and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden includes a lamp of surveillance cameras, a haphazard shoe storage and display system, a louche mirror and a number of rocking and wonky chairs. This is new design with history Low-key, slightly battered and well-hidden are important criteria for a whole slew of new ventures around the world. The idea is to make customers and clients feel like they’re chilling at home or in a friend’s house, but – like ‘natural’ make-up and perfectly messed up hair – you can be sure it’s taken ages to get it to look this casual. Allegedly the hardest bar to find in Melbourne in Australia (which is saying something), Handsome Steve’s House of Refreshment is situated in the Abbotsford Convent, where you can also find an artists’ studio space, theatre, school, radio station and a bakery. Lined with Laminex and wood paneling, there’s usually a noir film or surf flick on the badly tuned TV and the ‘attitude’ is palpable. Joe’s Shoe Store is a new bar in Northcote, also in Australia, that used to be a shoe store and decided – in the interests of recycling, perhaps – that it would be easier just to keep the same sign outside. Inside, the concrete-floored space is sparsely decorated with carefully placed ornaments that run the gamut from giant paella pans to fencing paraphernalia. It probably all started in London’s Shoreditch, of course, where secret dens are still springing up everywhere. The East Room has opened up next to Shosho Match (even the doorbell is well hidden), while Lounge Bohemia on Great Eastern Street only has a mobile number by way of contact, as if a landline might make it traceable. This is one interior design trend that – by definition – can be found where you least expect it, but it’s still surprising to see that even airports are getting in on the act. The new Fly Bar in Melbourne Airport is modelled on a Brunswick Street café – making it a bit shabby, full of ‘character’, and quite unique. The speakeasy vibe is just as prevalent in retail – possibly partly because its universal style works on a budget to suit the temporary pop-up format that is currently so popular. Oak in Nolita uses found and new objects to create an austere bar-room aesthetic. Another recent example is Trovata – a clothing label that set up a temporary store in New York’s Meatpacking District. Designer John Whitledge artfully arranged the collection around piles of old books and battered furniture with a result that could be described as being part chic boutique, part messy student bedroom.

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MULTIFUNCTIONAL 1. Wall art, covetable design and a very effective coat rack in one. One in a Million by Zurich-based Yuniic Design is made from powder-coated steel and comes in a range of colours

Is it a teashop? Is it a bowling alley? No, it’s a drive-in movie tapas bar. Multifunctional venues are on the rise – as well as shops that are also galleries, we are seeing bars that double up as grocery stores, car showrooms where you can also have a head massage, and so on. On the one hand, doubling up on business is a great way to make the most of a single site; on the other, the poor unsuspecting interior designer can go slightly schizophrenic as a result of all the conflicting requirements. Across the world, true professionals are showing admirable clout in the face of diversity. In Los Angeles, Ooga Booga is a new multifunctional outlet offering a mix of art, retail and hanging space. Held up as a welcome antidote to Hollywood, Ooga Booga is ‘primarily’ a fashion store, but also offers mixtapes by legendary West Coast musicians like Calvin Johnson and art books by Wolfgang Tillmans. Over in Philadelphia, the Ubiq store similarly gives the illusion of being a premium sneaker store, but on closer inspection customers will suddenly find themselves inside a gallery space. Luring unsuspecting sneaker-heads into the cultural realm while they clothes shop is so far proving very successful, and sales are high. Multipurpose is a current trend in retail design in the spatially challenged Tokyo, too. Venues such as Tokyo Midtown and Gyre have been hugely influential, as have initiatives by some of the major international brands, such as Armani and Bulgari, which have both opened their own multi-retail complex with own-brand bar and restaurant area in Ginza.

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Real flame – no flue, no smoke

Portable real flame for every room Planika Fires are contemporary furniture pieces that provide fire. They can be set in any desired space, even the middle of a living room, without the need of any installation or chimney. Their presence, in an interior, is quickly recognised as Planika Fires create a unique atmosphere with dancing flames of a naturally intense tone.The innovative technology lies in the process of burning special liquid – Fanola® based on alcohol, in a patented container. Simplicity of use and variety of the products give interior designers a wide range of possibilities. Showrooms: Mscheme Collection Manchester Tel: +44 (0) 161 236 6746 Orchard – furniture for living King Langley Tel: +44 (0) 144 283 2500

www.planikafires.com info@planika.co.uk Tel: +44 (0) 7985 932 630

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1 PHOTO HENRIK LINDAL

HOMELY 1. Haberdashery influences are sew hot right now, as demonstrated by the Party pouf, by Jantze Brogård Asshoff 2. Twine tables by WIS Design 3. Textile designer Sari Syvaluoma’s homely new range of throws could only be more inviting with a hot mug of glögg in hand 4. The pared-down-to-earth collections by E15’s Philipp Mainzer are a magnet for nature-loving homebodies. New for 2008 are the tartan textile collection and the SL05 Pardis bed

Staying in might be the new going out, but going out can also be quite homely. Even in Las Vegas. Lo-fi, earthy design was, until recently, anathema to the brash, flash casino capital, but Social House, a new Japanese-inspired restaurant designed by New York-based architectural firm AvroKO is one new venue changing that with abundant use of organic materials. Back in London, designers having been digging for victory for years, of course, and already do a nice trade in down-toearth and wholesome. Camden newcomer Market is the latest British no-frills, fuss-free eatery on a small, cosy site with blasted brick walls, zinc-topped tables and an open kitchen. The organic movement is at last taking hold in New York, too, and although for now the top trends within this market relate to food provenance, it is reflecting the same ideas as interior design. Acting as an interesting counter to the more scientific approach to cuisine that has been popular over the past few years, a few new outlets are bucking the trend: Roasting Plant is a new Lower East Side coffee shop that roasts beans on site. Merging technology and a traditional coffee-shop feel, Roasting Plant is all about demonstrating the ‘realness’ of the product through design. With its locally produced, sustainable and organic fare, BLT market – at the Ritz-Carlton on 59th Street – plays up the rustic, artisanal feel as well. The interior echoes the French-style grocery store and the fresh produce itself becomes a valuable part of the design. Photographs of the restaurant’s purveyors with their truffles and barnyard ducks line the walls, while an old plough stands by the entrance. Water is served in milk bottles and waiters are dressed in kitchen aprons. You can almost smell the mud. Bacaro takes the trend into the eastern fringes of New York’s Chinatown. In a converted former aquarium, the new restaurant is all exposed brick, salvaged barn wood, and nooks and crannies all serving to make the whole place resemble a farmhouse kitchen, rather than an upscale restaurant in Manhattan. Cookshop, too, situated in Chelsea, is setting a new trend for the city by putting up a chalk-board, in a stylistic nod towards the European farmhouse restaurant.

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lo de ve sig n

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DESIGN SHOW LIVERPOOL 19-22 June 2008

Shop for unique contemporary design Big brands to emerging designers New product launches

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1 ORIENTAL 1. The character for ‘double happiness’ can be divided into two characters that each means ‘happiness’, as Beijing-based Goods of Desire demonstrates with these bookends 2. Inspired by the Chinese folding screen, Goods of Desire has designed a walnut and matt white lattice screen

The world seems to be going mad for Asian design, with huge numbers of venues opening to answer the global demand for sashimi, dim sum and oodles of noodles. Residents at the new Raffles Dubai have a vast choice of six different Asian experiences, while in Australia’s Melbourne new bars Cho Gao, the Red Hummingbird, Seamstress, Double Happiness and New Gold Mountain all channel the Chinese vibe almost as well as we do in Europe. Meanwhile, the new glamorous midtown Manhattan venue Wakiya – a much-hyped collaboration between Ian Schrager and chef Yuji Wakiya – filters Chinese gastronomy through a Japanese prism, resulting in an Asian-fusion design perspective. In London, there’s the new venture from Alan Yau (he of Wagamama, Hakkasan and Yauatcha fame). Sake no Hana, designed by Kengo Kuma, transports its clientele by the means of two gold and black escalators before depositing them in an otherworldly space full of Eastern promise with a network of blond wood poles floating overhead and timber-lined walls. Diners can choose whether to eat Japanese-style on tatami mats or to keep their shoes on and sit on a chair. The trend is not altogether new, but it has been growing considerably this past year, and what seems to have happened lately is an interesting shift in the balance. For all the years spent plundering the West for design ideas and influence, China’s new generation are at last tapping into their own heritage, and the Japanese have developed a clear preference for traditional Japanese design over Western intrusions. It seems Japan, in fact, is more confident than ever in persuing its own traditions. Although Tokyo has seen chains of newly opened luxury hotels by various international large corporations – Peninsula, Conrad and Mandarin Oriental, for example – in the past year or two, hotels in Japan have been generally getting smaller. It looks like Japanese consumers want a better, more personalised and intimate service from hotels. In Kyoto, for example, there has been a series of renovations of machiya (traditional Kyoto town houses or tea-houses) into new accommodation, keeping the old styles, but improving them with contemporary modern conveniences.

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74 INSPIRATION RON ARAD

WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND TODAY? RON ARAD Illustration by Andrew Pavitt

04. 2008 INTERIORS

My exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It opens on 19 November. They wanted to do a retrospective, but I’m more interested in showing current work.

The funny thing about success is that it can make you stale or it can encourage you to do more. I am in the second bracket. If I have an idea I don’t hesitate, I just do it.

I am doing a lot of architecture at the moment, but it’s hard to show in an exhibition. You can’t give a real impression of a building using models, photographs and drawings. I want to show the real thing, so we are taking a real piece of architecture and reproducing it one to one in the gallery.

Everyone is talking about the environment. What is my stance? I try to be a good citizen and avoid toxic stuff as much as I can. I do things that will be kept. Ultimately, I am more interested in what people do to each other politically. I work in the decadent world of fashion – people do not need more chairs – but do we want to live in a society that cuts down on choice and luxury?

In London I am working with a new gallerist, Timothy Taylor. We are planning an exhibition for spring 2009. I am not co-operating with this monster that is ‘design art’. People have jumped on this niche and there is nothing constructive about it. I advise my students not to bow to the pressure to be part of it either, but you can’t tell them – they have to find out for themselves. I often say that at the Royal College of Art we take in employable people and, in two years, we render them unemployable. I probably shouldn’t be teaching... I am working today on the latest series of Bodyguards – it is an evolution of a concept that I’ve been developing for years. The way I work hasn’t changed, but the tools have. The more sophisticated the machine gets, the less machine-like the product.

I am solving problems that don’t exist. There is no solution because there is no problem

My biggest problem is time. I am working on a lot of projects – I’m very lucky that I get to do architectural work and industrial design at the same time. I recently designed a perfume bottle, a light (Pizza Kobra for iGuzzini) and the new Design Museum in Holon, Israel, is on-site. I want to go on doing this. Teaching is one of the best rewards. I love it when the students come up with something brilliant. It’s not me – I’m not doing anything – I have no religion or doctrine when teaching. I am alarmed when my students just want to be in the place that I am now – and also when you see that everyone wants to be the next Martino Gamper, Tord Boontje and so on. It’s alarming. There is no quality that unites all these great talents – it doesn’t work like that. Some people are just very good. Finding inspiration is never a problem for me. My problem is editing it – deciding what ideas to go with and what to leave. Ideas are cheap, but you have to try them out before you know if they will work. Talking is a very important tool when trying out ideas – talking is as much a part of the process as the crafting and modelling and so on. As a creator, I am grateful to the people who are interested enough in what I do to support my playground.

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A V&A exhibition Until 13 July 2008 For exhibition tickets book now 08456 429760 or www.vam.ac.uk A booking fee is payable on all pre-booked tickets

u South Kensington

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Media Partner

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