Lounge for 24 Mar 2012

New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Pune

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Saturday, March 24, 2012

Vol. 6 No. 12

LOUNGE THE WEEKEND MAGAZINE

The Dining Throne by Gun­ jan Gupta, whose works will be showcased at the Milan Furniture Fair next month.

VELVET ON THE CARPET >Page 11

LIVING IN THE FUTURE

Lidewij Edelkoort, the renowned Dutch trend forecaster, says the future of luxury will be time, peace, amazing natural scents... >Page 14

‘BACK TO DESIGNOCRACY’ For the world’s most prolific designer, Karim Rashid, the ultimate luxury is a world without door handles >Pages 16­17

The new frontier of luxury is design—functional, inventive and inspiring PUBLIC EYE

THE GOOD LIFE

SUNIL KHILNANI

THE INDIAN DESIGN MANIFESTO

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esign” and “designer” now function as trivial if not unglamorous terms in our globish lexicon—as in designer sunglasses and jeans, saris and salads. Design—like the vast labeliana it has spawned—is now deployed to define consumer lifestyle, incite consumer need. It sprinkles the logo-gold of desirability upon objects otherwise lost in the flotsam of overproduced banality that is so much of the modern economy. In India, design has become hostage to the big-jewel, big-print Ethnarchs and the... >Page 4

LUXURY CULT

SHOBA NARAYAN

DESIGN WITH A DOMESTIC LINK

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ven for design junkies such as myself, the world of product design is overwhelming. An obvious—and useful—constraint is budget: How much are you willing to spend to own an object by a designer you adore? But even there, the spread is pretty wide—you can own a beautifully designed object for a few thousand rupees, and it goes all the way to several crores. For example, a friend gifted me Philippe Starck’s Juicy... >Page 5

RADHA CHADHA

IS LESS REALLY MORE ALWAYS?

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ood design is as little design as possible —Dieter Rams I am at the Sabyasachi store in Delhi.

The salesgirl sizes me up and down—I have come in jeans and T-shirt—and picks out a “beautifully subtle”, cream-coloured sari for me.

As she mock-drapes it, I suck in my breath. It is beautiful, stunningly so. But subtle? Not by a yard. The fabric is lush Kanjeevaram silk, with an intricately woven black and gold zari border—look closely, and you will... >Page 6

MOLECULAR ALCHEMY As markets, ingredients and tastes change, the identity of a perfume has come to depend on its design and construction >Page 19

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First published in February 2007 to serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.

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ON THE COVER

LOUNGE EDITOR

PRIYA RAMANI DEPUTY EDITORS

SEEMA CHOWDHRY SANJUKTA SHARMA MINT EDITORIAL LEADERSHIP TEAM

R. SUKUMAR (EDITOR)

NIRANJAN RAJADHYAKSHA (EXECUTIVE EDITOR)

ANIL PADMANABHAN TAMAL BANDYOPADHYAY NABEEL MOHIDEEN MANAS CHAKRAVARTY MONIKA HALAN SHUCHI BANSAL SIDIN VADUKUT JASBIR LADI SUNDEEP KHANNA ©2012 HT Media Ltd All Rights Reserved

arim Rashid, the Bachelard­spouting design guru—whom we had a chance to meet at the first India Design Forum in New Delhi earlier this month—believes true luxury is living in a seamless world. A world in which objects aren’t obstacles. A world where products rise to the occasion to please you. Like the display of the new iPad, which has more pixels than the naked eye can see. Or Rashid’s own TV­Tub, a bathtub designed for the Korean brand Saturn Bath, which comes built in with a waterproof LCD screen with full­range television and Internet services. Priced upwards of a few lakhs, it’s made not with precious metal but lowly resin. The technology isn’t particularly elevated either. It commands the price it does for the sheer genius of its design.

Design is the new frontier of luxury.

In this special issue to complement Mint’s ongoing Luxury Conference in Mumbai (23­24 March), we asked our contributors to report and ruminate on where design meets luxury.

Columnists Sunil Khilnani and Radha Chadha (pages 4 and 6, respectively) comment on India’s “more is more” aesthetic code; they ponder how it will hold up against the clean lines and fluid forms that are redefining good design and high luxury across the world.

Design should be efficient and purposeful, only then can it pave the way for true luxury. Chadha offers her hypothesis in a quote by the legendary German designer Dieter Rams: “Good design is as little design as possible.”

In one of our interview features, Dutch trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort (page 14) says India NV M needs urgently to create its own design language, especially in industrial and craft design. And it is in the retelling of traditional design narratives in a contemporary language that this can be Sitting Indian: The Chipokke envisaged.

Seat from bent by design.

Indian designers such as Gunjan Gupta and the Bangalore­based furniture outfit bent by design are speaking in this new design pidgin already. Pieces from Gupta’s lifestyle furniture, product and art installation label Wrap will be part of the curated section of the Milan Furniture Fair from 17­22 April. They will also be part of Sotheby’s ‘Inspired by India’ exhibition in London in May. Evidently, her India­meets­the­world stories in gold and silver are dazzling the world. And it is young designers like her who will be the grammarians of this new language of luxury.

JAGADEESH

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Anindita Ghose Issue editor

Bedtime magic: Karim Rashid’s Rullo is a convert­ ible bed created for the Scan­ dinavian brand Softline.

unjan Gupta’s 24-carat gold leaf and silver Dining Throne (approximately `1.75 lakh) marries an Indian craft on the verge of obsolescence with contemporary techniques for an international luxury market. Gupta, who has a master’s in furniture design from the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, produced this under her label Wrap, which is a throwback to an ancient throne decoration technique where seats and stools were “wrapped” in silver and gold. Wrap was founded in New Delhi in 2006 in response to “the absence of internationally relevant Indian product design that explored the potential of luxury handcraft”. Gupta says her studio’s mission is to revive and invigorate India’s traditional crafts and position them at the heart of the contemporary home.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

COURTESY KARIM RASHID

ON THE COVER: PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY: GUNJAN GUPTA/WRAP

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SUNIL KHILNANI PUBLIC EYE QUEST PRODUCTION/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

Purposeful: Charles and Ray Eames visited India in the 1950s; (below) the National Institute of Design campus; and the matka is a sculptural object of extreme practicality.

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esign” and “designer” now And Nehru was also involved in getting Charles and Ray to function as trivial if not India in the mid-1950s, for the first of several visits. unglamorous terms in our globish The Eameses engaged most deeply with India (though, lexicon—as in designer sunglasses outside a small professional circle, they remain unknown and jeans, saris and salads. there). Their 1958 report on the role of design in India Design—like the vast labeliana it became the founding charter of the National Institute of has spawned—is now deployed to Design, Ahmedabad—in its early decades one of the most define consumer lifestyle, incite innovative talent hubs in the country. consumer need. It sprinkles the I thought about the Eames report as I recently walked logo-gold of desirability upon objects otherwise lost in the around their extraordinary home situated on a Los Angeles flotsam of overproduced banality that is so much of the cliffside: Built in 1949 from the then cheapest and most modern economy. In India, design has become hostage to easily available industrial materials (metal frames and the big-jewel, big-print Ethnarchs and the crimped-waist, sheets, glass, plywood), they made of it an example of how wan-cheeked fashionistas. to live with individuality in a mass age.

Yet there was a time when design was expressive of a Their India Report proposed a view of design and its role greater seriousness of purpose. It spoke of a hope to solve in the modern world far more radical than the catwalk ordinary problems of everyday living through efficient, “scandals” and gallery “outrages” of our current crop of large-scale means that might still retain a certain aesthetic designers and artistes, cupcake tyros all of them. It envisaged integrity. Such solutions drew on the accumulated learning an “institute of design, research and service”: each term vital of past answers to everyday problems, often craft-based and in its inter-relation. Design grew out of research into the real artisanal—solutions that by definition were local, small-scale, problems and needs of society, and by finding solutions at home-grown. One of the functions of the new activity of the big scale that India needed, it served a broader social design, as it came to be defined in the 20th century, was to purpose. Above all, the role of the modern designer was not find equivalent solutions for the problems of modern life, in proudly to offer his own signature solutions: Rather, it was ways that maintained aesthetic integrity but were “to help others solve their own problems”. economical and could be scaled to the magnitudes of the In India, Charles Eames was famously fascinated by new mass societies. Modern beauty now lay in a everyday objects like the lota and the matka (spherical water vessels). It now passes for academic insight to dismiss combination of all these elements: function, form, and such fascination as a Western, Orientalist mass accessibility. weakness for the primitive and craftsy; but It’s worth recovering that sense of the what’s more interesting is the ability to Designer: not as the herald of the latest recognize solutions that could not be high heel, but as a missionary of the improved upon. A sculptural object of well-made mundane. extreme practicality, the lota is a supremely The rise of the Designer as a public figure, intended object: Yet, though its purpose and of Design as a professional practice, is in cannot be mistaken, it is the product not fact the outcome of two convergent of any individual “design” intention but processes definitive of the modern age. of the coalescence of many The first was the rise of mass industrial generations of intention. As much as production, and consequent the the particular object, what interested imperative to invent signs of Eames was the organic process that distinction—distinctive signatures—in resulted in the lota. For him it order to market certain products as symbolized a necessary contemporary desirable. The second, parallel, process attitude, one “that will appraise and was the rise of mass democracy, and a solve the problems of our coming times desire on the part of certain thinkers, often with the same tremendous service, dignity visionary intellectuals, to create objects and and love that the Lota served its time.” ways of living for a democratic age that, while THINKSTOCK Design, then, is neither the gift of an artistic widely and cheaply available, would embody the temperament, nor the technical abilities of the accumulated wisdom and aesthetic integrity of past craft.

To some that was an impossible ambition, and indeed one engineer. It is an act of intellection, the encounter of historically enriched imagination with the constraints of the of the strongest responses to mass production was of course real, in search of scalable solutions to practical problems. to reject it altogether—in favour of small-scale, local And it embodies “a relentless search for quality that must be craftwork. That was the 19th century English critique of maintained”, as the Eames report put it, “if this new smoky industrialism—from William Blake to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. In India, Gandhi (himself Republic is to survive.”

Market success today rests increasingly on the ability to much influenced by the anti-industrialism of men like produce and trade in ideas, not goods. Think, for instance, of Morris and Thomas Carlyle) represented our own aversive Jonathan Ive’s brilliant work for Apple: It’s that design response to the decline of handcraft and artisanal making. intelligence, not any particular manufacturing skill, which Others, however, embraced the possibilities opened by has defined Apple and given it a stock market value of industrial production—the new materials, and the ability to approaching $500 billion, or around `24.95 trillion (more produce cheaply and on a large-scale—while at the same than a quarter of India’s total annual GDP). Apple’s designs time working to retain the qualities, the special tactility and are of course as much entrapping as enabling: They lock us ferocious attention to detail, that was the hallmark of into a particular technical architecture. artisanal making.

But great design should not be proprietary, and we in Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school in Germany; Le India are going to need to reinvent our conception of design.

Corbusier in France; Charles and Ray Eames in the US. In that effort, we could do worse than revisit the ideas that Each of these figures, and the movements they inspired, sought to harness the materials of the new age—steel, glass, Nehru helped introduce into India in the 1950s. We’ll need to develop arenas—institutes—where science, technology, concrete, plastic, plywood—to make buildings, furniture the arts and the social sciences meld together through and everyday objects that met real needs, that could be design, and invent anew. produced on a mass scale, and yet retained a human “In a country that faces the food, shelter and distribution dimension and at-handness. Strikingly, each of these problems that India does,” Charles and Ray wrote in 1958, three—and in particular Corbusier and the “it might be well to take a close look at those things that Eameses—would leave an impression on India’s built constitute a ‘Standard of Living’ in India… What are the landscape and its design cultures. real values? To what degree is snobbery and pretension Both Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru, linked with standard of living? How much pretension can a aesthetes in their own ways, didn’t follow Mahatma Gandhi young Republic afford? What does India ultimately desire? in rejecting modern technology and production. Tagore What do Indians desire for themselves and for India?” visited the Bauhaus and at his invitation an exhibition of These questions from over half a century ago resonate their work travelled to Calcutta (now Kolkata) as early as 1922. After independence, Nehru of course invited Corbusier today as we build and make, design and market, more energetically than ever before. to erect his new designs for living on the India landscape.

Sunil Khilnani, Avantha professor and director, King’s India Institute, is the author of The Idea of India, published in a new edition.

Write to him at publiceye@livemint.com

www.livemint.com Read Sunil’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/sunil­khilnani

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ven for design junkies such as myself, the world of product design is overwhelming. An obvious—and useful—constraint is budget: How much are you willing to spend to own an object by a designer you adore? But even there, the spread is pretty wide—you can own a beautifully designed object for a few thousand rupees, and it goes all the way to several crores. For example, a friend gifted me Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif citrus squeezer, an iconic piece that Starck designed. It costs almost $100 (around `4,900) on Amazon and it doesn’t work. It sits on my kitchen counter as a decorative object. Even Starck admitted that his Juicy Salif was a conversation opener as much as it was a functional object. Buying well-designed but functionally poor objects is not sustainable long-term because there is only so much “stuff” that your home can accommodate. But for those with huge homes, unlimited space and an extendable budget, the world of design offers a pleasure that is nonpareil. Here are a few well-designed objects to add to your collection. Each has an Indian link: Either the designer is Indian or the inspiration is Indian or it is created in India.

Pi ke puht

BY MELBOURNE­BASED SIAN PASCALE Kulhad chai is a great north Indian invention. I haven’t seen it much in south India but the experience of drinking tea from an earthen cup and then tossing it without any guilt offers a pleasure that is hard to quantify. Designer Sian Pascale has taken this notion of biodegradable, hygienic teacups to the next level by embedding seeds in them. The idea is that the seeds will sprout from the broken teacups, continuing the circle of life. From destruction comes creation. This Melbourne-based designer plans to move to Mumbai this year. For details, visit http://sianpascale.blogspot.in/2011/11/ chai-time.html

Lace Fence

BY DUTCH DESIGN FIRM DEMAKERSVAN Dutch brothers Joep and Jeroen Verhoeven used to spend half their time in India. Today, they collaborate with Bangalore-based designer Vivek Radhakrishnan to create this “high-end metal fabric” that combines the Indian art of lacemaking with metal fabrication (http://www.lacefence.com/). The product is developed and manufactured in Bangalore by Radhakrishnan, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, the Netherlands, arguably the best design school in the world today. Radhakrishnan’s design firm Kynkyny specializes in wood furniture. I saw his dining table at my friend Gauri Manepally’s home in Bangalore and fell in love with it.

It is simple, square and made of a dark wood that is the colour of rich dark chocolate. For details, visit http://www.kynkyny.com/ home/index.php

Objects of desire: (from left) Flexie totes; Pi ke puht; and (top) Leather Lampshades.

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Leather Lampshades

BY DUTCH DESIGNER PEPE HEYKOOP Amsterdam-based Heykoop, also a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, is interested in handmade objects using low-tech techniques.

His design sensibility veers towards sustainability and recycling. In 2009, he began a project with Hamara Foundation, Mumbai, for the assembly of these objects. Funded by the not-for-profit organization Tiny Miracles Foundation, this project has created Leather Lampshades. “Nowadays,” he says, “street children are going to school while their mothers help in the production of the lamps.” Heykoop is currently setting up a workplace at Hamara Foundation specifically for the school dropouts of this community with whom he designs and develops products using mainly recycled materials such as matkas (spherical water vessels) and leather scrap. For product inquiries, call Mohan Chauhan at 022-24978844/55.

Flexie totes

BY CHENNAI­BASED NUPUR GOENKA Chennai-based designer Nupur Goenka looks to garbage for inspiration. Her Flexie totes, which retail for $25, use fabric waste, leather scraps and plastic from all those giant billboards erected in our cities. A single billboard can make about 20 totes, each of which is unique because they cut out the plastic and convert it into bags. Zurich-based Freitag, which makes bags and accessories, does the same thing: They use traffic billboards to make messenger bags that cost a whole lot more than Goenka’s bags. I love her Sit orphan chair that has been converted with neon-bright woven seats. For details, visit http://www.letsontheweb.com/home.html

Honest by

BY ANTWERP­BASED BRUNO PIETERS On a sabbatical in south India, Antwerp-based designer Bruno Pieters, previously with Hugo Boss, observed how local fashion was traceable to its source. I am not sure this is universally true in India, given our chain stores, but certainly for Indian women who buy bolts of fabric and then have it tailored, the experience of fashion is completely different from buying a global luxury product without any knowledge of its provenance. Pieters started his “Honest by” line, conceived during his south Indian experience. The idea is to give a complete breakdown of the cost of every jacket, sweater or dress that you buy from his website. As the website says, “Honest by wants to shed light on the questions: where is it made and by whom.” And for how much, I might add. For details, visit http://www.honestby.com/en/page/ 16/about.html

Shoba Narayan plans to drink vetiver-soaked water from a matka this summer. She is waiting for Aarohi Singh (www.artbyaarohi.com/blog/) to come up with a customized version. Write to her at thegoodlife@livemint.com

www.livemint.com Read Shoba’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/shoba­narayan

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RADHA CHADHA LUXURY CULT ABHIJIT BHATLEKAR/MINT

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LESS IS LUXURY

Good design is as little design as possible—Dieter Rams

YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP

Purity in style: Apple’s products, like the iPad, have always been simplis­ tic in design; and (top) at the Sabyasachi store in Mumbai, where our tradi­ tional design sensibility searches for complexity.

am at the Sabyasachi store in Delhi. The salesgirl sizes me up and down—I have come in jeans and T-shirt—and picks out a “beautifully subtle”, cream-coloured sari for me. As she mock-drapes it, I suck in my breath. It is beautiful, stunningly so. But subtle? Not by a yard. The fabric is lush Kanjeevaram silk, with an intricately woven black and gold zari border—look closely, and you will see a line-up of peacock motifs—which is embellished with a second border of deep burgundy with rich zardosi embroidery.

The pallu amplifies the same patterns, ending in a wide swathe of frenetic zardosi work with gold wires, gota appliqué, and tiny white beads. The blouse is a totally different brocade, soft and luxurious, with woven flower motifs, a sensuously cut deep low back, held up with a tasselled string tie-up. The string itself is further adorned with playful dangling gold balls, and an appliqué mirror thrown in for good measure.

Phew. Just as I am wondering how so much opulence can qualify as subtle, the salesgirl pulls out a dazzling orange-and-green sari embellished with even more abandon, and then we try the bright yellow net concoction (Oprah wore an apple-green one during her recent India trip),and just for fun, I put on the neon pink khadi silk number too. Half an hour later, I have warmed up completely to her notion of understated razzle-dazzle because whatever you pick, there is always another piece that sets the bling-bar higher, and soon we come full circle, to the first sari which I am now referring to as subtle.

India’s aesthetic code is “more is more”. Somewhere deep in our cultural DNA, our design sensibility is programmed for glorious colour, rich materials, laborious karigari, embellishments, complexity, clutter, even chaos. While Sabyasachi does it with regal finesse, look around your everyday life, and the same design ethos is played out—the colourful crowds in the Metro, the back of a TATA-OK truck, the thali at Rajdhani, the new office towers of Gurgaon, all stay true to the “more is more” design code.

So when my editor asked me to write about design, especially the minimalist, functional sort that is gaining currency internationally, the first question that popped in my head was how this “less-is-more” design philosophy is going to work with a nation that values “more-is-more”. Will we evolve over time and embrace it? More importantly, from a brand’s point of view, what would it take to change our deep-seated collective preferences?

While international design philosophies range from Versace lush-and-plush to Apple clean-and-simple—and everything in between—it is fair to say that the less-is-more end of the spectrum has risen dramatically in recent times. In my view, Apple has single-handedly moved the needle on that, and ironically the death of Steve Jobs has put a sharp focus on the role of

design itself as a strategic weapon, and Steve’s obsessive beliefs about what constitutes good design, that elusive “purity” he sought. Apple’s design head Jonathan Ive—who has been called Steve’s “spiritual partner”, and has led the design of everything from the iMac in 1998 to the new iPad that went on sale last week—has caught the spotlight too. In turn, the man who has been Ive’s lifelong inspiration—the prolific German designer Dieter Rams, now 80, whose designs for Braun and Vitsoe are revered classics—is being feted through exhibitions and books, and one of them, Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible, even has a foreword by Ive. Indeed, the proximity in design is so uncanny, it is as if Rams is somehow working through Ive. Steve, Ive, Rams, their words may be different, but they are all talking of the same principles. Good design is as little design as possible. It gets out of the way. It is easy to use. Intuitive. Self-explanatory. It takes away anything that might distract. Pure. Simple. Less.

This is at complete variance with the complexity and clutter that define Indian design. We are not taking away anything that might distract, we are adding decorations for the express purpose of distracting. Fit, form, functionality are not our strengths, in fact they are glossed over by our focus on embellishment instead. Was the Sabyasachi sari easy to use? Hardly, it weighed a ton. But did I care? Not a shred. I was too busy feeling like a princess.

There are other cultural quirks that influence our evaluation of design. Will we pay big bucks for a plastic chair? No, we strongly associate plastic with cheap. What if the chair is designed by Charles and Ray Eames, a design classic, a 10 on comfort? Or the other design icon, the delightful Panton chair, now made in polypropylene? I am not sure. There is a hierarchy of materials and associations in our head that is difficult to dislodge. Furthermore, while we may pay for materials we consider precious—gold and diamonds, for example—we are averse to paying for the design and “making charges”, which we will haggle down to the bone. We don’t really value the design either, and will happily get a local jeweller to copy a brand’s design, justifying it as the sensible thing to do.

Is it possible to love Steve and Sabyasachi in the same breath? Here’s the thing—while we may not subscribe to the design principles central to the iPhone or iPad, we subscribe wholeheartedly to the products themselves, in fact they are objects we desire immensely. What gives? Perhaps it’s a tribute to Steve’s design, the appeal of which is so universal that you fall in love with it regardless of your cultural orientation. Perhaps the design is so unobtrusive we focus instead on the product’s capability, delighted by Siri or swept off our feet by Retina display. Perhaps it is the cult status of the Apple brand, and the fact that you have shelled out a hefty sum adds to your own status.

Or perhaps the iPhone is the final embellishment, the perfect accessory, to add to a Sabyasachi sari.

Radha Chadha is one of Asia’s leading marketing and consumer insight experts. She is the author of the best-selling book The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair With Luxury. Write to Radha at luxurycult@livemint.com

Good design is as little design as possible—Dieter Rams

about what constitutes good design, that elusive “purity” he

www.livemint.com Read Radha’s previous Lounge columns at www.livemint.com/radha­chadha

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Time out: Vacheron Constantin’s Patrimony Traditionnelle 14­day tourbillon.

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his year, more than any other, has been a year of restraint and sobriety at the BaselWorld fair (8-15 March), in Switzerland. The world’s premier watch fair annually showcases products from hundreds of large and small brands, and is a barometer of the timepieces much of the world will wear for at least the next 12 months. Going by what some of the top names have presented to buyers and enthusiasts, 2012 is going to be the year of “more of the same”.

While most brands have launched dozens of new models and references, none of them has taken risks. It has been a fair remarkably bereft of “wow” moments. Sure, there has been the odd timepiece drenched in gold and diamonds and other precious materials. But that is ostentation more than innovation. Even then, brands with these “high jewellery” pieces have preferred to embellish their stalls, booths and websites with pictures of more staid products.

The brands are reacting to the state of world economies and their uncertainties. While the US seems on the verge of bouncing back, Europe is sinking into the abyss. China is cooling down purposefully, while India is doing so inadvertently. A new bubble of some sort is always threatening to burst somewhere or everywhere. Who knows how things are going to be in a few months?

This economic uncertainty has translated into collections that are full of novelties that barely nudge the envelope.

Part of the problem is timing. You don’t want to experiment or rock the boat when economies are shaky. Watches are not inexpensive to develop and market. Brands seldom get more than one chance a year to make an impact on buyers. You don’t want to screw that up.

But the principal problem with the industry is its obsession with legitimacy and provenance. Legitimacy is what the Swiss industry calls a somewhat ephemeral blend of history, heritage, pedigree, success and watchmaking competence. A sufficient sum total of these things and you’re considered one of the top brands. Falter in any one or two and you’re either a has-been or a pretentious upstart pulling wool over naive buyers’ eyes. Without legitimacy nobody will take you seriously, you’ll have lower pricing power and your booth will remain mostly empty during watch fairs.

From brands that sit at the apex of the Swiss watch business, like Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Breguet, right down to the three-man, start-up operations that come and go every year, the industry is obsessed with history and heritage. Every brand likes to talk about how it was founded in the 1800s or how it first sold a watch to the Sultan of the Ottoman Turks on special request.

Brands go to great lengths to publicize this history, and many infuse this into their products in the form of signature structural elements, case designs and mechanisms.

Provenance is a good thing for most brands in most busi-

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nesses. It is a certificate of quality and reliability.

Which is why I have no hesitation in saying that I would gladly swap several distant relatives, and a few close ones, for a Rolex Explorer II, anything at all by Breguet, an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore, an IWC Portuguese, or Vacheron Constantin’s latest Patrimony Traditionnelle 14-day tourbillon launched in January. These are truly timeless classics.

But for many others this obsession with legitimacy—for that is what they seek with their history and heritage—may be killing innovation in design. So keen are they to associate with the past that they are perhaps losing sight of the future.

And, indeed, the present.

A constant refrain among frequent visitors to BaselWorld is that true innovation is not to be found in Hall 1, where the high and mighty brands congregate, but in Hall 5 or in the Palace Hall where the lesser ones jostle for space and attention (an entire booth in faraway Hall 5 can be smaller than the cloakrooms in Hall 1).

This is because the brands in Hall 5 don’t have the burden of legitimacy to shoulder. They don’t need to worry about sticking to codes, designs and values established two centuries ago. They don’t have an ancient painting or engraving of the founder frowning down at them from the walls.

Instead they are—funds and business cycles permitting—free to experiment, dabble, mash-up and make mistakes. A young brand like Cecil Purnell, for instance, can say that they will only specialize in funky tourbillon watches and nothing else, and be taken seriously. Other brands can work with form, function, material and design with stunning, sometimes bewildering results.

They are taken seriously because for them legitimacy comes from only one source: revenue. If they don’t make money, they don’t have an old maison in the mountains to go back to and weep in. They must get up and start all over again.

Many readers ask me why watches in 2012 look exactly like watches from 50 years ago. This is a valid question.

Almost nothing else that is part of the wardrobe, except perhaps writing instruments, has remained so static over so many years.

Legitimacy and heritage are good things. But so are innovation and experimentation in design.

The world luxury watch industry desperately needs a Steve Jobs who will drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st century. For now, it looks like the right place to look for the Steve Jobs of horology is not in the hushed tones and grave airs of Hall 1, but in the irreverent badlands of Hall 5.

Write to Sidin at watchman@livemint.com

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WHAT MAKES AN UNASSUMING PIECE OF FURNITURE HIGH­END? FIVE DESIGNERS TELL US ABOUT THE BACKSTAGE DRAMA THAT MAKES THEIR PERFORMANCE PIECES A HIT B Y K OMAL S HARMA komal.sharma@livemint.com

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Chandlo

BY DOSHI LEVIEN

2.

Spike

BY SHAHID DATAWALA

Charpoy 3. Deconstructed 4.

BY ALEX DAVIS

5. The Other

The London-based husband and wife team of Jonathan Levien and Nipa Doshi have designed Chandlo, a dressing table inspired by the bindi as well as the moon.

Chandlo was created to make it appear that the elements are holding one another in position without actually touching. To hide the methods of construction from view, Doshi Levien invented a complex bracket arrangement that could be located under the table surface. The dressing table takes its name from the ancient Indian word for bindi, an essentially Indian adornment.

“Chandlo celebrates the enjoyment of getting dressed and the importance of our daily well-being ritual,” says Levien. The geometric forms, materials and colours refer to the work of Bauhaus and De Stijl artists Hans Richter, Max Burchartz, Theo van Doesburg and El Lissitzky.

The Spike coffee table plays on the principle of creating an illusion. Six hundred stainless steel rods and a reflective sheet are put together to create a curved effect, which in turn requires a degree of precision cutting and assembly. “It was a challenge in terms of cutting.

The rods are screwed on the steel back and when they extend outwards, it creates a bending effect. This happens when a straight line is mounted on a reflective curved surface,” explains Datawala, head of design, Pallate Design Studio, Mumbai. His inspiration for the coffee table was a pin cushion and a sea urchin.

BY GUNJAN GUPTA

BY AJAY SHAH

Available at Pallate Design Studio, Mahalaxmi, Mumbai.

`98,900

Chandlo was part of Das Haus 2012, which is their model of a home in a 180 sq. m space at IMM Cologne (Internationale Möbelmesse, an international furnishing show in Cologne, Germany). Made by BD Barcelona, a Spanish design company, it can be ordered on www.bdbarcelona.com and shipped to India.

Gunjan Gupta’s vision as a designer is to put historical Indian craft in a contemporary mould. She believes in her signature sculptural style, but produces in batches to make her work more affordable.

“That’s my idea of luxury today,” says Gupta. So she took the misunderstood wood sheesham, which is strong but coloured and not typically used in luxury furniture. “Sheesham is unpredictable, unlike uniform Burma teak. It doesn’t take well to polishing,” says Gupta.

In her studio Wrap, Gupta arrived at a process of staining sheesham uniformly by matching the grain in one lot.

Seven months in the making, the Deconstructed Throne is an extrapolation of her full-backed Dining Throne. The seat is upholstered in a gold and silver crescent pattern, much like the waxing and waning of the moon. Customization allows the six chairs to be designed to represent different phases of the moon.

Available at Wrap Art & Design, Mehrauli, New Delhi. For details, visit www.wrap.co.in

`30,000 (PER CHAIR)

€5,000 3

Throne

Alex Davis’ steel charpoy was created as a tribute to the quintessential cot of India, seen in homes, courtyards and under banyan trees—the centre of all community interaction. Made in high-grade stainless steel, it is completely hand-cut and woven much like a real charpoy, demanding much skill from the team of artisans at Davis’ design studio, Indi Store.

Davis used sheet metal to create the interwoven surface and tube steel to create the legs, all fabricated separately and then put together. “This was created more as a statement piece. At some point, you do reach a threshold and cross over from functional design to art. By virtue of its complexity in production, it becomes the ultimate luxury,” reasons Davis.

The charpoy is part of Davis’ collection called My Lazy Garden. Available at Indi Store, 143, Shahpur Jat, New Delhi.

`85,000 (APPROXIMATELY)

Side

Ajay Shah’s work desk was designed using a mild steel frame that supports a laminated glass-table surface. The challenge in its construction was that the structure is prefabricated in parts and then assembled. Each part, therefore, is produced using component drawings. Shah and his team made a full-scale model using paper and card to get a sense of proportion and the joinery details.

“The normal perception of design is understood to be driven by form and colour because both are easily understood by a viewer.

Function is also considered an important criteria, however, that’s a given. As I understand it, a form should be the outcome of a process, rather than being driven from a pure aesthetics viewpoint,” says Shah, who runs a design consulting firm in Mumbai.

The Other Side is built on the principle of massmanufacturing techniques, even the flushed (the handle or groove with which a drawer is pulled) detail of the drawer becomes both an expression as well as a clean detail.

Available on order at Ajay Shah Design Studio, www.industrialplayground.net

`49,000

(APPROXIMATELY— AROUND `3.25 LAKH— EXCLUDING TAXES)

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TRENDING SOLVE SUNDSBO

FOR

LOUIS VUITTON

MARC JACOBS’ SPRING/SUMMER 2012 COLLECTION PERSONIFIES FEMININITY, CHILDHOOD AND ALL THINGS SPRING B Y S HREYA R AY shreya.r@livemint.com

···························· arlier this month, Marc Jacobs had talked about the importance of a surprise element in fashion (“People don’t know what they want. They only know when they see it,” he said in the March issue of Time magazine).

Jacobs had already put his thoughts into action much earlier with Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2012 women’s collection (that showed in October), which pulled off a surprise like no other, especially after his Fall/Winter collection 2011. Where the Fall/Winter one was all about fetishism, this one was all femininity; the navies and blacks have been replaced by wispy whites and subtle, almost missable, pastels. The strict silhouettes are out, feathery layers in. In an email interview, the creative director for Louis Vuitton talks about the

surprise he has thrown up this season. Edited excerpts: This collection has a childlike innocence and feminine appeal. How did you infuse a wisp of spring into the collection?

The collection is loving and beautiful, tender, feminine and soft. It’s fresh and clean like the spring, when love is a possibility. I thought of the spring and specifically, spring in Paris. Even the carousel (the collection was showcased with a carousel in the background) comes from the Parisian Tuileries gardens spring fair. Something that is naïve and simple. Something that can be seen as a metaphor for the continuity of fashion and the seasons as they go round and round.

Given that one’s environment influences the work of a designer, how did busy, buzzing New York City inspire you to create a

collection that was so in tune with nature?

Don’t forget that I spend half of my time in Paris and members of my team live in Paris. Both the SS12 Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton collections were born from an idea of romanticism and freshness that we translated in a different way for the two brands.

Comment on the romantic and everlasting appeal of lace that appears in this collection.

While the clothes are simple, there is a multilayered construction. We used cellophane over printed lace and broderie anglaise. The clothes move lightly through the air or allow air to flow through them. They have a cloud-like quality, almost dream-like. Even where there is definition, there is nothing too strict or hard.

Are separates back?

We love to play with clothes in

A TIMESHARE CONCEPT ALLOWS MEMBERS TO HIRE A PORSCHE OR A FERRARI FOR A FANCY WEDDING B Y S HALLY S ETH M OHILE shally.s@livemint.com

···························· arsh Gokal, business head of Patchi India, loves highend sports cars like Ferrari and Porsche. He does not own either, yet he can be spotted driving them alternately on holidays and weekends.

Gokal, 32, is one of 12 members of Club Torque, which is tapping high net worth individuals with a super luxury car rental model, akin to the timeshare concept typically associated with luxury holiday resorts.

After paying a one-time membership fee of `1.5 lakh, members can choose from three packages, with annual fees ranging between `5 lakh and `15 lakh— much lower than the actual price of the cars.

Members can choose from a fleet of super luxury cars, which includes the Porsche 911 Turbo, Ferrari F430, BMW Z4, Mercedes-Benz E Cabriolet and Audi R8. They are not tied to any

specific vehicle, nor are they limited to a predefined usage period—unlike a timeshare model where the member has seven fixed days in a year, Club Torque members have the flexibility to choose as and when they would like to use the service. They are allocated points against each model. The annual fee they pay depends on the number of points they accumulate. The more valuable the model a member takes out, the more the points that are deducted from their quota—so, for example, more points will be deducted from the annual quota for taking out a Ferrari F430 on a weekend than a BMW Z4. The annual membership fee rises proportionately. The cars are owned, insured and maintained

by Club Torque.

“It makes a lot of economic sense as you can actually experience these cars at almost onefourth of the cost you would pay

Show stopper: Marc Jacobs designed the Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2012 collection inspired by the Parisian spring. an unexpected way… We like to play with feminine and masculine, with dresses and different pieces, with layering, with the contrast between rich and innovative materials… This is our interpretation of fashion…

COURTESY LOUIS VUITTON What are the colours, fabrics to look out for in spring-summer?

Dream­like: The colours are kind, generous Organza­ and pretty, like the spring. They wrapped are translucent; sometimes with broderie white layered over them to anglaise shirt create a frosted, almost sugary (€2,700, or feel—like spun sugar. It should around `1.77 have defined shapes, but with lakh) and skirt softness created by using layers (€1,800) with of synthetics, georgette, lace and three­strap broderie anglaise. vernis mules There is a lot of craftsmanship (€950). in this collection...

XAVIGIVAX/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

for a new car,” says Gokal, who has been a member of the club since its inception.

Amit Jain, chief executive of the five-month-old club, says he was inspired by the success of the model in the Australian, European and British markets.

“We sensed an opportunity gap in the high prices of super cars and the unwillingness of buyers to own one as they saw little merit in forking out `60 lakh-1 crore merely to satiate the leisure of driving on weekends,” says Jain, who worked with Ford India Pvt. Ltd and MercedesBenz in various sales functions before founding the club in November. Encouraged by the response, Jain plans to introduce the concept in other metros and even abroad.

“When you buy one of these super cars,” says auto expert Murad Ali Baig, “you have to use them. Any small dent or a scratch can cost a lot. A concept

like this, even if you have to spend a few lakhs per year, makes sense.

“It gives those who otherwise cannot afford such cars, which have high snob value, (the chance) to flaunt them on important occasions like a family wedding.”

Rishabh Sheth, director, Shaman Group—dealer for Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and Honda cars in Mumbai—and cofounder of Club Torque, says: “We often get customers in our showroom who check out the E-Class Cabriolet. When it comes to the purchase, they will choose an E-Class as it’s more practical.

We realized there is a latent desire for cars like E-Class Cabriolet.”

Jain points out that one of the challenges is getting the cars into their fold. Club Torque currently has a mix of new and preowned ones. With the market for second-hand super cars being limited, procuring them becomes difficult. “It doesn’t make sense to buy new ones as it will increase the cost for members,” says Jain.

It is amazing. I have an incredible team and atelier, as well as the design team at Louis Vuitton. We did things that we have never done before, like the beautiful eggshell lacquered bag. The meticulous creation of the bag involved a skill that was much more common in the 1920s, but today only one artisan remains. In one case, it took 6 hours to cut the back of one coat and to match all of the plates. We were involved in developing all of the materials, including laser-cut fake leather and special crocodile finishes.

It was all very subtle and required an enormous level of craftsmanship, of savoir faire.

ertu first became famous for selling diamond-encrusted handsets in 2002, maturing over the years into a true luxury product in the form of the services that go with it. The company will launch a new phone, the Constellation Candy, for women in April. The big change is in the line-up of associated services with handsets. Buyers of Vertu’s Constellation Candy handsets (with a price tag of `4.8 lakh) will get two additional services: VIP access to fashion weeks—in London, New York, Milan and Paris—as well as style consultation from wardrobe consultants with British designer Stella McCartney.

The Vertu Constellation Candy will be launched in three colours, and each will have a matching set of natural gemstones to highlight the colour—rubies, tsavorites and orange sapphires for the raspberry, mint and tangerine variants, respectively.

Gopal Sathe

efore Paul Smith became a British fashion icon, his sole ambition was to become a racing cyclist. The forthcoming London Olympics 2012 and Paralympic Games made Smith revisit his old love. The Isle of Man Post Office’s special design project commissioned him to design a set of seven stamps in commemoration of the games.

The set of stamps (Smith describes them as “optimistic”) are in vibrant reds, greens and blues. “I worked on the designs for one year because the job was quite complicated with the various things you have to include officially on a stamp; the logo, the Queen’s head, etc.” The designer has also worked on a set of five modal and cashmere summer scarves with the flags of five sporting countries competing for the games: Britain, France, the US, Italy and Jamaica.

The Paul Smith flag scarves will be available online at www.paulsmith.co.uk from April.

Shreya Ray

Ride in style: Among Club Torque’s fleet of cars are Ferrari F430 (top) and Mercedes­Benz models.

HEMANT MISHRA/MINT

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Do you believe design is more important than the label?

Design is everything, especially when it comes to luxury goods.

From clothes to cars, pens, phones, design heightens the product. When Ferrari designs hairdryers, Suneet Varma collaborates with Judith

LUXURY

VITTORIO ZUNINO CELOTTO/ GETTY IMAGES

INDIA’S FRONT­ROW DIVA ON WHY DESIGN MATTERS, AND THE SHOE LABELS SHE CANNOT DO WITHOUT B Y U DITA J HUNJHUNWALA ···························· n the five years since her Bollywood debut, Sonam Kapoor has rapidly become the international fashion face of India. This year, she occupied front-row seats at the London, Paris and Milan fashion week shows, including those of Burberry Prorsum, Dolce&Gabbana, Elie Saab and Salvatore Ferragamo.

Kapoor’s style is hard to define, swinging from grunge to androgynous, hippy to haute couture. No matter what the final effect, Kapoor tells us her fashion choices are not always based on the label alone, but the totality of the look she sets out to create. Edited excerpts:

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Leiber, Lanvin and H&M join hands and (Christian) Louboutin and Swarovski pool resources, it ups the ante of the brand. Good design, along with a strong artistic sense, makes a product stand out.

Packaging is also a big part of the luxury experience.

How would you describe your design aesthetic?

Traditional mixed with modern.

Indian fashion design is often considered to be ‘more on more’ compared with Western haute couture. Do you agree?

I disagree. Most international haute couture houses use Indian karigars (craftsmen) and embroidery, whether it is Gaultier, Armani, Cavalli or Valentino. The difference is in the silhouettes and in the fabric, prints and cut of the outfit.

When it comes to choosing designer wear, what parameters influence your decision?

Since I am allergic to synthetics, I have to make sure I wear only pure, natural fabrics like cotton, silk, velvet. My father jokes that

I was born to wear luxurious garments.

Besides fabric, the cut is important to me. I liked buying things off the rack, but once you try madeto-measure, you get spoilt.

I don’t like to wear what others are wearing. I have to have my own identity, which is always a little hatke (different). Fortunately, there are designers all over the world who will design for me. Quality is paramount. Even the lace and embroidery have to be top of the line. When it comes to Indian wear, I like to be traditional, which is why I love Anuradha Vakil; she is the epitome of luxury.

Do you focus only on the garment or the entire look?

The look in totality. I’m not

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practical at all when it comes to fashion. I am a bag hag but I don’t like to change my bag every day. That’s perhaps the only area of fashion where I am practical. I also have a shoe fetish but because I have long and narrow feet, only a few designers work for me—Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Giuseppe Zanotti. At Cannes last year, I was nervous about being in high heels, so I wore my Ferragamo

Row 1: (clockwise from left) Sonam Kapoor attends the Cavalli Autumn/Winter 2012/ 2013 fashion show in Milan; in the front row at the Burberry Prorsum Autumn/Winter 2012 show in London; and at the Dolce&Gabbana Autumn/Win­ ter 2012/2013 show in Milan.

heels. They are so comfortable that you can wear 6-inch heels and still climb a hill.

How was the experience of visiting the London, Paris and Milan fashion weeks?

When I had the opportunity to go to the London Fashion Week, I knew I had to attend the Burberry show. Burberry is the epitome of English fashion, and I am a huge fan of Christopher Bailey, who had brought so much energy to the brand. I was invited to Italy by the Ferragamo family for the Shoes for a Star project. Their designs are clean, classic and wearable. I thought the Dolce&Gabbana collection was quirky and dramatic, and I am surely going to wear something from that line at Cannes this year.

Which international designers do you favour?

There are three designers that I am in awe of: Alexander McQueen (I dreamt of wearing him and would love to wear one of his archival pieces), John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier (who I am lucky to have worn).

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BJORKLUND

LAPIN KULTA MALCOM KIRK

Trend­mapping: Edelkoort’s latest venture, Trendtablet.com, is a social media platform.

Shown here (from far left), a fish dish from the award­winning Danish restaurant Noma; the Lapin Kulta Solar Kitchen Restaurant in Finland; and a contribution under the section Earth Matters on the site.

Q&A/LIDEWIJ EDELKOORT

Living in the future SHE KNOWS WHAT YOU WANT BEFORE YOU DO. INSIDE THE HEAD OF THE RENOWNED DUTCH TREND FORECASTER B Y A NINDITA G HOSE anindita.g@livemint.com

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nowing what’s right and when has made Dutch designer and forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort a soughtafter prophet across the luxury industry—textiles primarily, but also automobiles, interiors, gardening and cosmetics. “It’s not a mystical experience,” she says. “The ideas I develop are in the air. It’s how they’re interpreted that’s the creative part.”

A fashion designer by training, Edelkoort, 62, started her career as a trend forecaster at the leading Dutch department store De Bijenkorf.

Her Paris-based agency, Studio Edelkoort, works as a creative and operational think tank for a broad base of clients in Asia and Europe.

Edelkoort relies on a continuous process of archiving human behaviour. “When you have a critical amount of data fragments, you find the missing fragment that makes the whole,” she says. “It’s like archaeology… but in the reverse.”

Her longest forecast so far has been 25 years into the future—for 2020. According to her, that society will attempt to bridge contrasts: the rational and the emotional, the male and the female, the vintage and the contemporary, the minimal and the decorative. “In the new world, we’ll want answers that address a combination of both.

It’s interesting to see how much of it is there already and how the rest will unfold.” The fashion industry is witnessing this already, for instance, in androgynous clothing, in fragrances, softer materials and brighter colours for men.

Named one of the world’s 25 most influential people in fashion by Time magazine, Edelkoort talks enthusiastically about her latest project—Trendtablet.com, a social media platform that relies on visual contributions from users to explain how trends

evolve and flow. “I’m hoping for many contributions from India,” she beams.

We met Edelkoort for an interview while she was in New Delhi earlier this month for the India Design Forum (9-10 March). Edited excerpts: This is your 10th visit to India.

What brought you here in the 1970s?

I was here designing clothes for European markets. It was exciting to work with certain restrictions. Unable to find good trimmings, we had to rely on detailing, embroidery and smocking to make things work.

In fact, I believe textile production in India modified the way fashion took off in Europe. Designers like Martine Sitbon, Jean Paul Gaultier…they did their collections in India, they used a lot of embellishments.

When you make a forecast for a specific date, like 2020, does it mean that’s the year the forecast is at its best?

It’s fictive, of course, this date. I said 2020 because that’s the date the client wanted a forecast for. But it isn’t meaningless. You use a date to talk to others, to interview people and to help yourself get into that time frame. Normally, we work with seven years for automobiles, four years for fragrance, three-five years for industrial projects and electronics. Trends in the phone industry are very short-term and very cosmetic.

Food is catching up with fashion—two years.

What about seasonal fashion trends?

Seasonal trends are bullshit. I do them because that’s the way the fashion industry functions.

Contrary to what the media reports, trends are very long-term. They’re like a layered sandwich. Every season you look at it your own way. So when I say trends, I’m not really talking about the latest outfit of Lady Gaga.

Tell us about a slow rising trend right now?

People are becoming more creative. They want to assert their uniqueness. The consumer

wants to be the curator of his or her own existence...bespoke is the only solution.

How will the refocus on bespoke redefine luxury?

Bespoke—the idea comes and goes—is here to stay. It’s the ultimate luxury. And I fear that India might lose it. Here you can go to your neighbourhood store and have your own designs made, you can tailor your dresses. People are paying so much in Europe for this idea.

Tom Ford and Brioni are doing it worldwide but you don’t need them here. India is essentially a bespoke country.

Where do Indian luxury brands stand at this juncture?

Everything is ready to burst, ready to be packaged. There’s a sense of innate taste in India—beautiful yarns, lovely colours. I believe these things are ingrained in some societies from the oldest days, maybe because of nature and climate or something else. But the culture builds from that.

Indian luxury brands also have the heirloom tradition working in their favour. In the future, I see “hand-medown” as a great concept for luxury globally.

What are your observations on Indian design?

India needs urgently to create its own design language— especially in industrial and craft design. Fashion is doing well, relatively. But you need hotels that reflect contemporary Indian style. India is coming into its own in so many other ways except in the design world.

The problem, the way I see it, is because contemporary Indian design has completely

distanced itself from the past.

What is the way forward?

Design schools should take on the task. In the Netherlands, producers requested young designers to revisit old traditions of metal making, weaving, embroidery and so on… A whole generation of young designers were thrust into 16th century technical processes. Now they produce contemporary objects with an echo of the past. This is what has made the Netherlands such a design force today: the rediscovery of old crafts by young people.

The other important thing is to remember that you can only be global if you’re local. Think of any success stories: Chanel is 100% French, Ralph Lauren is 100% American. In

fact, the only time Ralph Lauren did a show which was not about America—it was about India in fact—it failed. That’s because it was not what people expected of him.

Hermès is creating a Chinese brand made in China. You can see how they’d want to do an Indian brand also. It might happen if foreign capital comes in to help create a luxury brand from your own origins.

And what do you imagine the Indian luxury brand that comes out of such a partnership to be like?

The Indian luxury brand will have a different colour perspective, a different tactility.

It will cater to men and women of enormous grace…that brings me to the point that the men in this country need urgently to take a sartorial check and that will happen if they become more contemporary, less macho perhaps.

What is the future of luxury in India?

Several evolving global trends are good for India. The wind is blowing this way! The interest in bespoke, in cultural rootedness, the focus on the handmade... The future of luxury will be time, peace, amazing natural scents.

The idea of luxury itself is going to change.

RUY TEXEIRA

Crystal clear: The longest forecast Edelkoort made was 25 years into the future for 2020.

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Q&A/KARIM RASHID

FOR THE WORLD’S MOST PROLIFIC DESIGNER, THE ULTIMATE LUXURY IS A WORLD WITHOUT DOOR HANDLES B Y K OMAL S HARMA & A NINDITA G HOSE ········································ or a people addicted to plastic water bottles, Karim Rashid tapped into American behaviour and came up with a $10 (around `490 now) water bottle that comes with a carbon filter. Available in six popsicle-bright colours, the Water Bobble, one of his most recent creations, filters chlorine and contaminants from water.

That’s 3,500 designs and counting. At 52, Rashid is the world’s most prolific designer.

For the India Design Forum earlier this month, dressed in signature white and pink, he put up a spirited show on the power of design. He has the body language of a new-age guru. His talk—the most well-attended in the forum—began with the change in the design industry from designing for mass production to elitism to going back to a “designocracy”, as we are beginning to witness now.

While some might disagree with his singular vision of moving forward to a world of original design by shunning all that is nostalgic, Rashid is open in his criticism of sentimental design. He speaks of his recent visit to a restaurant in the hipster outbacks of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, US. “When their food was so inventive, I was wondering why I was sitting in a poor imitation of a 16th century European chair!”

At the other end of the spectrum is a San Francisco hotel where a simple pocket device with a microchip does all the work: from paying for your restaurant bill to opening your room’s door. This features high on his “like” list.

For Rashid, the ultimate luxury is a world

Kloud chair by Nienkamper, 2005 Rashid’s answer to a world that is evolving to more organic, softer and fluid forms. From the Kloud Collection, this chair is made with wood, steel and foam.

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Seamless world: Rashid says he dreams of a ‘casual age’ where beautiful objects will make life easier.

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KARIM RASHID

without door handles—a seamlessly designed world. “I dream of a ‘casual age’ where beautiful objects make our lives simpler,” he says, evoking the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who’d called all objects obstacles in our experience of the world.

“Let’s face it. We’re living in a poorly designed world.”

Rashid’s designs span interiors, fashion, furniture, lighting, installations and art. His work is displayed across museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His work profile is eclectic: from designing for the high-end Italian lighting brand Artemide and the Morimoto restaurant in Philadelphia to luxury goods for Veuve Clicquot, Swarovski and Kenzo. A few years ago, Rashid created the ultimate in bathing luxury: an all-in-one TV-tub unit for Korean company Saturn Bath. Made with liquid acrylic resin, the sleek bathtub comes fitted with a waterproof LCD screen which allows you to watch television and DVDs, listen to MP3 format music and surf the Internet.

Rashid’s products have striking names—from the Orgy Sofa to the Oh Chair.

“That’s part of the design,” he says.

Indeed, everything is “part of the design”—from the faucets in the hotel we’re sitting in to his own pink shoes.

“Why on earth are their fittings from Italian and German luxury brands when I’m sure there are people in India who can manufacture a ceramic basin?” he asks, before answering himself. “This place is concerned more with style than experience. Luxury is an experience.”

Rashid spoke to us about his idea of luxury in design, his personal design symbols and the originality of the Tata Nano. Edited excerpts:

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You have lectured and written extensively about the power of design. What sort of power does design wield?

Contemporary design has the power to shape the future. I believe that good design is extremely consequential to our daily lives and can positively change human behaviour and popular imagination.

One must remember that design has evolved over the years based on a plethora of complex criteria—human experience; social, global, economic and political issues; physical and mental interaction, form, vision and a rigorous understanding of contemporary culture.

You’ve written a book called ‘I Want to Change the World’.

What is your vision of this changed world?

My inspiration, drive and agenda are still the same as when I wrote I Want to Change the World in 2001. I want to contribute objects to our physical landscape that inspire, engage and encourage positive experiences. The role of a designer today is to make the world a better place by influencing our everyday behaviour, functionally and emotionally. By replacing the clutter of poorly designed and poorly made objects with beautiful, luxurious high-performing objects—hopefully sustainable, ergonomic, well-made, sensible yet seductive objects—we reduce the stress in our environments and in everyday life.

Tell us about the design symbols that have become so recognizable—on your website, your work, your skin.

Are they your design building blocks or design atoms?

The icons came about in the 1980s as frustration for not getting credit on products that I designed. In retaliation, I started marking the products with a small cross, then eventually an asterisk, and then a figure 8. Now I have 54 symbols that make for a language. I think that somehow these symbols just grew out of me, it was a visceral process. But now I see the connection so strongly. In fact, many people look at my arms and ask me if my tattoos are Egyptian.

Strange how we have all this in our DNA. You are one of the most prolific designers of recent times. What keeps you going?

The world cannot keep up with my speed. I conceive more ideas than my clients can produce. This year, I have developed about 230 projects

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so far. Of those, maybe 100 will get to the market. My clients cannot work fast enough, produce enough concepts, turn around manufacturing fast enough. Typically clients come to me with a brief and I design for them but I frequently already have designs in mind for that product or typology.

My discipline is to absorb everything I can about a particular subject, and then I sketch for hours developing ideas. I study the criteria, the brief, and in turn, I follow my axiom, “form follows subject”.

What is your opinion on the Indian design style (from local textiles, handicrafts to architecture). Is there something you identify as Indian design?

This is my second visit, I came for the first time several years ago. I love India for being the most colourful place in the world. Poetry, beauty, love and respect for human existence are essential elements of Indian design.

Name a few contemporary Indian products that are iconic.

I can name one: the Tata Nano!

All my life I wanted to make an inexpensive, democratic car but I didn’t have the capital or the means to do it. The Nano is smart, it’s original.

You’ve worked across the spectrum from industrial products to home interiors to fashion. What is closest to your heart?

I love designing it all. But my best designs function both as sculptural and functional objects. They are sculptures to be used. Dirt Devil’s Kone, for instance, is the first cordless, hand-held vacuum cleaner to put out in your living room on display as an object, like a vase. In a product typology such as a salt and pepper mill where it holds the place on a table where a centrepiece or flower arrangement might be, it should also be a sculpture in its own right, which is why we also used strictly black, white and metal finishes. Everything should be designed to be displayed. That’s luxury to me.

Are you suggesting that functional design is superior to design wholly geared to aesthetics?

Well, this is the business of beauty. One’s definition of beauty is important to answer that question: To me, if a product is holistic, if it fulfils its purpose, it is also beautiful. So the two concerns cannot be separated.

You were born in Cairo, raised in England and Canada, and educated in Italy. You set up your studio

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Veuve Clicquot Love Seat, 2006 A bright pink love seat with joined chairs facing each other and an ice bucket in the signature Clicquot yellow in the middle.

q t Nearco suspension lamp by Artemide, 2011 A mirror­finish pendant lamp made with moulded polyethylene for Italian designer lighting manufacturer Artemide.

in New York. How have these cities and their ethos inspired you?

I love New York because it is so free and yet so expensive, Milano because it is so hyper emotional and bourgeois, London because it is so eclectic and eccentric, Toronto because it is my little crab apple, Cairo because it is my pyramidal birthplace, Belgrade because the culture, the

people, the food, the intellect is very vibrant and Amsterdam because it’s my European office away from home.

In your spare time, you engage with art and music...how do these engagements weave into your fabric as a cutting-edge designer?

Music affords me to concentrate, be inspired, dream and imagine. I always

wanted to be a musician but had no talent. It is probably why I ended up playing other people’s music as a deejay.

My strength is in finding interesting and unconventional music. I also cannot sing, and I wish I could, so I am drawn towards beautiful voices like Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, Antony Hegarty and others. komal.sharma@livemint.com

Candy­coloured future: (below) Rashid’s designs for an apartment in MyBrickell, a new urban condo residency in Brick­ ell, Miami, Florida; and MyBrickell’s gym area.

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THE NEW INDIAN LUXURY PRODUCT IS EXCLUSIVELY FINISHED AND CUSTOMIZED TO MAXIMIZE YOUR COMFORT, SAY THE COUNTRY’S YOUNG DESIGNERS COURTESY URBANIST

B Y R AJNI G EORGE rajni.g@livemint.com

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COURTESY URBANIST

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Gentle luxe: Urbanist’s oak­frame chair, `45,000 (without leather), comple­ mented by a lamp imported from Portugal, `1.57 lakh.

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Stretching the envelope: Bent by design’s rocking crib without seat, under `50,000.

here’s a delicious green Italian leather oak-frame chair I’m coveting these days, with little wooden armrests and space enough to turn and face the friend you’re sitting with. It costs`50,000 even without the leather—`1 lakh, leather included—and is designed by the design firm Urbanist. The difference between this and traditional luxe popular in India till now?

Material, functionality, form.

A certain kind of Indian customer is moving away from ostentatious luxury to high design, gilded thalis be damned.

No patience for lazy kitsch or the boring albeit lovely richness of traditional Mughal or Rajasthani design; the luxury is in the detail of how the object feels, functions, charms.

How are today’s young Indian designers handling the new appetite for luxury?

“India is getting a different luxury sector altogether,” says Amresh Panigrahi, coordinator of the lifestyle accessory design department at the National Institute of Design (NID), Gandhinagar, Gujarat. “People want products that reflect on what either traditional or modern Indian means, and they don’t want to get it from outside.” His department began in 2002, outside of the traditional NID preserve of work with bamboo and tribals, and trains those who want to go high-end as well as mass-market. Like the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay’s master of design programme and Bangalore’s Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology’s design

Good finish: Urbanist’s Brian DeMuro (left) and Puru Das. programmes, it is dealing with increased variety. “Of our 105 graduates thus far, 10% have set up their own studios and work in the luxury sector,” says Panigrahi.

“Ten per cent work in social innovation, and the remaining work with space accessories. It’s a tough market, but luxury product designers do prevail.”

One young indie firm is Bangalore-based bent by design, founded five years ago by NID alumni and furniture designers Kuldeep T. and Yusuf Mannan as well as Srishti School graduate and furniture designer Salam Hidish Singh—all in their 30s.

Their curvy, almost mouldable looking Swadeshi line stretches varieties of wood this way and that to create benches, kitchen stools, couches and seats. All of these handcrafted, signature pieces cradle you; there’s

something traditionally Indian about the postures you can assume on these comfortable objects, the classic cross-legged ruminatory pose being one of them. A Swadeshi living-room set, including two upholstered single-seater sofas, one two-seater and one three-seater, costs`2.5 lakh, which is not terribly expensive in the handcrafted high-end furniture market, but is certainly above the average.

A team of craftsmen and contractors handles larger projects and the central three craft more personal projects in their workshop, situated by a mango orchard outside central Bangalore.

“The only way to achieve high design is to make it lovingly with my own hands,” says Kuldeep, whose rocking crib with attached seating space for the mother (`50,000) is particularly unusual.

Bent by design has recently been commissioned by a client to create a high-end table—5x6ft, and made of high-quality teak wood planks—for `5 lakh. “To me, luxury means owning a one-off piece of furniture,” adds Kuldeep.

For Brian DeMuro and Puru Das, whose design firm Urbanist is much sought after in the National Capital Region for personalized furniture and interior spaces, the perception of what is beautiful is just expanding in today’s urban India. “Taste is not calcified here,” says Das, displaying the parchment they imported from Turkey and played with to finish a subtly mottled shelving unit in their Jor Bagh home—the final visual effect is like that of an understated painting. “People are confident Traditional: Designers Kuldeep T. (left) and Salam Hidish Singh co­founded bent by design five years ago, along with Yusuf Mannan.

about what their taste is, and will spend on good finish.”

All their materials are of a high quality or particular finish: gentle luxe. An oak-frame chair is complemented by a lamp imported from Portugal; a shelving unit is made of palisander shelves and matte black supports—the screen in the shelving unit is made of hand-carved teak. These considered, even fussy pieces are part of the two lines Urbanist plans yearly.

Das, 37, and DeMuro, 46, left New York City for New Delhi a decade ago to found Basix, their earlier, more plebeian avatar.

They ran their business for six years. Basix was rebranded as Urbanist four years ago. They began to customize more high-end furniture one-and-a-half years ago, and were soon doing entire spaces.

“Design for me is an organic sensory experience,” says Mukul Sood, 36, an ex-lawyer who formed a design firm called Parapluie in New Delhi two years ago, without any formal training.

“Parapluie works to bring harmony between life and design,” he says. The firm has designed spas, houses, book fair spaces and home accessories which Sood customizes for clients. “I have an idea for a mirror frame, fully upholstered— even in the back.”

His wooden hanging lamps, carved flower-patterned mirror frames, bamboo poster beds and fabric-upholstered cupboards have a rustic aesthetic, with slightly rough finishes and generous padding which are more country house than Delhi power home. But young professionals looking to spend on their own homes are ready to splurge on a space. So it looks like Sood’s Green Park barsati home, full of cherished one-off items. A teak table at `30,000 is hardly high end, but as the young designer begins his first full line, he says he will price higher if he sells in a store.

Luxury is something desirable, not a necessity. But luxury is, of course, also that which is expensive or hard to obtain, something sumptuous the neighbours will envy, as the ubiquitous Onida TV jingle went in the 1980s. It is within these multiple definitions that the Indian concept of luxury exists.

While Indian designers want to take more products out to a sector with increased spending power, they don’t want everyone to have them. “Luxury is not democratic,” says DeMuro. “How would it be luxury then?”

It is in a redefinition of luxury that young Indian designers find their vision—and their market.

“A luxury product doesn’t have to be something which hasn’t been done before; it’s about how it makes me feel now,” says Sood. “The ability to choose what I want.”

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FRAGRANCE

YVES FORESTIER/SYGMA/CORBIS

AS MARKETS, INGREDIENTS AND TASTES CHANGE, THE IDENTITY OF A PERFUME HAS COME TO DEPEND ON ITS DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION B Y S UPRIYA N AIR supriya.n@livemint.com

···························· n his talk at the India Design Forum earlier this month, Paul Austin handed out three small blotters to the audience. “Let’s smell,” he told them.

Austin had just described to his listeners how his journey in olfaction design had brought him to this country in 2008, and revived his love for perfume.

Among other things, coming to the source of many of the world’s most exotic—and essential —perfume ingredients allowed him to experience a culture of scent at its most elemental.

He was showing his audience what he meant. One blotter deployed a familiar Indian scent—jasmine sambac, the species of jasmine native to South Asia. The other, tuberose absolute, was also easily recognizable as a local fragrance.

The third blotter featured both these scents as part of its signature, but by a process of chemistry and pure storytelling, had become something quite different in finished form: the superstar Dior fragrance J’Adore.

Austin, whose company, the Austin Advisory Group, does global brand consulting for fragrances, was telling a story to demonstrate what he says is essential to understanding perfume, and how its design is experienced by its users. “There are 1,200 perfumes put out in the

market every year, according to some studies,” he says. “But authenticity is the key.”

What can authenticity mean in a world where chemicals outperform the natural scents they are meant to recreate, tastes change with every generation, and where the market is said to be moving away from the West, towards China, India and West Asia?

In the perfume labs of Chanel and Dior, Hermès and Guerlain—creators of some of the world’s most iconic and best-selling fragrances—the answer is increasingly a function of construction and design.

Their perfumers, or noses, are faced with the same artistic challenges as their couturier counterparts, but with an added volatility of purpose: how to create a piece of art which is worn for private reasons even more than public ones. In the 2011 BBC documentary series Perfume, Jean-Paul Guerlain, former perfumer and head of the house of iconic fragrance makers Guerlain, explains the old-fashioned way in which his grandfather taught him to think about the problem: “When the most beautiful girl in the world goes to see her lover, she gets off her dress, takes off her make-up. What is left? The charm of her voice

and her perfume.”

Perfumers, who study scents for years in design school, memorize hundreds of smells, natural and chemical, and vast numbers of recipes that allow them to manufacture the kind of smells they need. “The structure of perfume design remains fairly constant whether you’re creating a luxury perfume or a more everyday fragrance,” explains perfumer Ahalya Matthan.

Matthan studied perfume design at the Institut Supérieur International du Parfum (Isipca) at Versailles, France, before returning home to set up her own fragrance design company in Bangalore. “The base note is the ingredient

which lingers—the memory of the perfume.”

“The inventiveness poured into these creations reverberates not against our retinas or eardrums,” the perfume critic Chandler Burr once wrote in The New York Times, “but against our nasal epithelia.” This innovation has a language of its own, which translates into the story of the perfume, or what Austin calls “the sensory narrative” of the fragrance.

Burr wrote the 2008 classic, The Perfect Scent, which was partly about a year spent with Hermès perfumer Jean-Claude Ellena, watching him create the signature fragrance Un Jardin sur le Nil. A moment in Burr’s accompanying New Yorker article illustrates how Ellena thinks of the perfume’s “sensory narrative”. He inhales jasmine sambac, which is full of indoles, scent molecules which are also present in decaying bodies and faeces. “It’s feminine, the smell of death,” Ellena says to explain its power (Un Jardin sur le Nil does not contain jasmine sambac).

From Ellena to François Demachy (creator of Dior Homme, 2011-12), the most sought after fragrances in the world are identified by design.

Designers like Parisian Serge Lutens (Arabie, Louve) and New

Yorker Christopher Brosius (of the CB I Hate Perfume project) inspire fanatic interest in their niche perfume brands because of their respective visions—Lutens’ is a questioning, literary imagination, and Brosius’ a stripped-down, cool, almost scientific one.

This makes even more sense in an era where the nature of perfume ingredients has changed so drastically. The International Fragrance Association’s (Ifra’s) regulations have modified the scent palette of perfumes significantly since 2003, for reasons ranging from health (for example, allergy-inducing or carcinogenic components are strictly regulated or banned) to environmental conservation, and perfumers find themselves chemically attempting to substitute for several vital ingredients, including clove and star anise. Miss Dior and Chanel No. 5 are no longer made of the same ingredients with which they started out. The challenge for perfume design becomes to recreate the vibrancy of traditional perfumes using the palette that they can play with.

“All perfumers are becoming expert in creating workarounds for materials that are banned, and many of them do these brilliantly,” Burr says in an email interview. “Whether they’re better or not? It’s possible, given that the workaround is going to have more up to date and perhaps more high-performance raw materials.”

For example, using a silicone

Scent sense: (from top) Noses like Bernard Chant’s have defined great perfumes; training people at Isipca; and classic scents. base for a perfume—as perfumers have increasingly done since the 1990s, substituting it for the traditional alcohol bases—endows it with qualities unthinkable in a more “natural” perfume from 50 years ago. But as Austin explains, the dichotomy is not quite as simple as the distinction we draw between, say, fabrics. “Synthetic ingredients give you qualities that would simply be unavailable otherwise,” he says. Burr wrote about Ellena creating a molecule of chocolate scent out of two molecules of isobutyl phenyl acetate and vanillin, making what would otherwise have taken him 800 molecules to create from scratch.

Austin marks the shift subtly when he talks about how India rekindled his love for perfume.

He would like people to think of India not just as a source of ingredients, but as a key to iconic fragrances. “It wasn’t until I came to Tamil Nadu that I discovered that vetiver, or khus khus, which is a key ingredient of so many perfumes, actually derives its name from the Tamil for ‘cut roots’,” he says. “I’d always supposed it was a French word.”

For an industry whose own roots are undergoing a kind of transplantation, the search for stories to bottle in those labs in the south of France is always surprising, and far from over.

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Art town: Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao gets an average of one million visitors each year.

T R AV E L

STAR ARCHITECTS HAVE TRANSFORMED ONE OF THE ‘UGLIEST CITIES IN SPAIN’ INTO ONE THAT HAS BEEN SHORTLISTED FOR THE TITLE OF WORLD DESIGN DESTINATION FOR 2014

Design on a platter: A set of four Eclipse Nesting Tables by Spanish design manufacturer Stua.

MARTIN Y ZENTOL

TRIP PLANNER

SPAIN

BILBAO GRAPHIC

BY

AHMED RAZA KHAN/MINT

WHERE TO STAY

EAT & DRINK

Decorated by Antonio Miró, the fashion designer from Barcelona, Hotel Miró (www.mirohotelbilbao.com) is located on Bilbao’s Golden Mile.

‘Wallpaper*’ magazine wrote, “Thankfully the Hotel Miró opened its doors just a stone’s throw from El Gug.” The five­star Silken Gran Hotel Domine Bilbao (www.hoteles­silken.com/ gran­hotel­domine­bilbao) had the well­known Spanish designer Javier Mariscal partici­ pating in its conception, and has a selection of furniture that rep­ resents the most emblematic design from the 20th century.

u Etxanobe (etxanobe.com). Aver­ age price of sample menu at the restaurant: €60 (around `4,000) u For those interested in the meeting point between design and gastronomy, a visit to Azurmendi (Azurmendi.biz) is a must. Average price of sample menu: €60 u For ‘pintxos’ (bite­sized rounds of toast topped with everything you can imagine), the old town has many options. Café Bar Bilbao, Zuga and Víctor Montes (Plaza Nueva Square); Santa Maria, one of the best cellars in Bilbao; Berton and Sasibil, situated on Jardines Street; Askao Berri and Gure Toki (Plaza Nueva Square); and Gatz (Santa María).

B Y L OLA M ACD OUGALL ···························· f you think Bilbao is yet another example of the clichéd sunny coastal Spanish town, you’ll be surprised to find a city where the skies are usually overcast, drizzles are frequent, and which has a bleak cityscape that serves as a stark reminder of its industrial past.

This was a city for workers, never intended for leisure. The affluent, privileged classes would always opt for San Sebastián or Donostia, a lovely (sometimes too lovely) town situated on the north Cantabrian coast, only an hour away from Bilbao.

In fact, Bilbao appears frequently in the rankings of the ugliest cities in Spain. Or it used to, that is, until the Guggenheim Museum kicked off its transformation into a cultural mecca—one that took place in an astonishingly short period. Being from a provincial Spanish city (Valencia) myself, a city which suddenly emerged as a tourist destination, I can imagine how its inhabitants must have embraced the fresh air of cosmopolitanism brought in by foreign visitors.

Since the Guggenheim Museum’s inception in 1997, the sculptural building designed by Frank O. Gehry has received an average of one million visitors per year, creating enormous economic impact.

Other architects have also left their landmarks in Bilbo, as it is called in Euskara (the Basque language): the metro, designed by architects Norman Foster Associates, the Sondika Airport by Santiago Calatrava, and Philippe Starck’s stunning renovation of the Alhóndiga, a former wine cellar. The implementation of Zaha Hadid’s master plan to convert 60 deteriorated hectares of industrial port land into a new residential, amusement and business space is expected to begin in 2013. The Bilbaínos (as the denizens of Bilbao are called) witness this downpour of star architects light-heartedly and some refer fondly to the metro stations as “fosteritos”, or little Fosters.

Fans of Bilbao’s remarkable reinvention, after the industrial crisis of the 1980s, use the term “urban revitalization” to refer to the changes that have swept the city, but its detractors have argued that this is largely a case of “city branding” where decisions are taken in the interest of business generation and marketing. Last September, when I was working in San Sebastián and decided I had had enough of its prettiness, I headed for Bilbao

to see how the city had changed since I last visited it, more than 10 years ago, when the Guggenheim had just been constructed.

I wanted to get a sense of the transformation that had made the city synonymous with contemporary design. How did a city with only 350,000 inhabitants come to be shortlisted for the title of World Design Capital in 2014?

On the bus to Bilbao, I browsed through the trendy magazine The Balde, published in Euskara and English (www.thebalde.net), which features everything from a fringe theatre performance in the city to an exhibition in Tokyo, Japan.

The magazine is only the tip of Bilbao’s design iceberg. In the field of product design, independent consultancy ADN (adndesign.es) has been at the forefront of Bilbao’s transformation. Some of ADN’s founders are also behind the creation of the Bilbao Design Academy (www.bilbaodesign academy.com), a non-profit association aimed at promoting design as a catalyst for innovation and a source of value creation.

Stua is one of Spain’s most prestigious design furniture manufacturers. Founded in neighbouring San Sebastián, it has a shop in Bilbao, which is well worth visiting (stua.com).

In the area of fashion, an example of Basque sophistication may be found in Loreak Mendian (www.loreakmendian.com), a “street fashion” brand with a network across Europe, Japan and Russia. When visiting their shop in the city, visitors should pay attention to the window displays, which are works of art in themselves.

The two founders of El Plan B (www.elplanb.com), a graphic design studio that combines elegance and playfulness, are among the finest artists in town.

But they are not alone. The talented Gorka Eizagirre applies his conceptual style not only to the graphic arts but also to exhibition and interior design.

If you happen to be in Bilbao around September, do not miss the unique Getxo Photo Festival (www.getxophoto.com), which takes place at the city’s seaside suburb by the same name. Unlike most festivals, this one displays its photos mostly on plastic banners to be found everywhere in the little locality. From the city centre, a direct metro line took me only half an hour to reach, and to my surprise, I found an exhibition by Michael Ackerman (who received a Nadar prize for his portrayal of Varanasi in the book End Time City) in the local market, right across from the butcher’s stall. Once the festival is

over, the banners are recycled into wonderfully designed objects like handbags, portable hammocks or notebooks.

But a visit to Bilbao would not be complete without a meal. The Basque country boasts of one of the highest concentrations of Michelin-star restaurants on the planet, and I was determined to find one that would combine the region’s renowned cuisine with its cutting-edge design. I settled on the Etxanobe restaurant. Located in Euskalduna Palace, and with panoramic views of the river, this is a one-star Michelin establishment that has the motto: Choosing will not be easy! Instead of the traditional menu, the Etxanobe has an iPad application, allowing the customer to see not only photographs of the dishes they hope to order, but also videos of the chef preparing them.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once described the molecular quality of each grain of rice in a paella. He said, “Of the Spanish cuisine I like the paella, in particular when it has been properly cooked; that is to say, when each grain of rice keeps its individuality.” The gastronomic avant-garde sometimes uses the term molecular gastronomy to refer to this continuous experimentation with foods and innovation in flavours and textures. But the term is controversial, and disapproved of by many chefs themselves.

Molecular or not, path-breaking innovations are expected from Basque cuisine in the years to come.

It had taken me 10 years of travelling to fully grasp Bilbao.

What would my impressions be on my next visit, I wondered on the bus back to Donostia. Do all cities have this potential to reinvent themselves or is it an ability just a few have?

Write to lounge@livemint.com CHILD­FRIENDLY RATING

The accessibility for prams in museums and public transport is good. Some museums organize special activities for children.

SENIOR­FRIENDLY RATING

Some museums offer discounts for those aged 65 or more. The metro and museums generally have wheelchair access.

LGBT­FRIENDLY RATING

Spain is one of the few countries where gay marriages are recognized.

There are several LGBT bars in town.

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GLOBE WATCH

MUJI’S GLOBAL SUCCESS CAN BE SEEN AS A TRIUMPH OF MODERN DESIGN VALUES, RISING ABOVE JAPAN’S OWN FEUDAL PAST

BY MAYANK MANSINGH KAUL ························ n the euphoria of international lifestyle chains vying to enter India, there has been complete silence as far as Asian business interests in India go. The Indian market has been quick to recognize European and North American brands; and it was interesting, therefore, to see the long lines—and endless phone conversations to swing last-minute invitations—to a talk at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in Delhi last month by Kenya Hara, iconic designer and chief design adviser at the Japanese lifestyle chain Muji.

Those from the Indian design community present were asking one crucial question: How has a retail company with no marketing effort or advertising become one of the most visible, followed and perhaps fashionable Asian labels in the world today?

Hara appeared, a man with a quiet disposition, in a simple natural indigo-dyed kurta sourced from an Indian designer duo. He read out from a carefully written script, illustrated with stunningly minimal black and white drawings.

He drew a trajectory through historical symbolism in Japanese culture, linking this to Muji’s design ethos.

Steeped in the ancient philosophy of “emptiness”— the awareness of infinite creative potential present in nature, a celebrating of subtleties—it guides the use of basic materials, recycling, ordinary shapes and forms that facilitate efficient storage, ingenious detailing that borders on the invisible, and a no-logo policy.

In present modes of consumption, which necessitate the manufacture of newness and change, the application of such aesthetics in Muji products defies even the concept that the “classic” occupies in today’s markets. They also transcend the most clichéd suggestion of luxury today, time. In a visual and material language that resonates universally, where cultural specificities dissolve into addressing “basic” needs, do we see such motivations as a premise for a global cosmopolitanism, an attempt to be relevant in markets everywhere, as the ultimate concert of spirituality and artistic endeavours, or as plain sharp business vision?

The name Muji is short for the company’s name Mujirushi Ryohin, the first word meaning “no brand”,

and the latter meaning “quality product”. It was started in the early 1980s as part of the supermarket chain Seiyu. By the mid-1980s, it had started its international operations.

And by the early 1990s, it had its first independent store abroad, in London.

Cutting across every product category from stationery, kitchen appliances, garments, cosmetics, electronics and furniture to even modular architecture now, the company presents a repertoire of around 7,000 products in more than 390 stores worldwide, with at least 285 stores in Japan itself.

Its fans are a tribe of their own! They include perhaps the widest range of consumers, being provided with the most functional array of everyday objects not providing any other satisfaction: By buying Muji, they do not acquire any identities of time, space, history, price or status, which is integral to the sale of brands today. Instead, they choose to be free of these shackled narratives, revealing the heart of Muji’s vision: aspirational, without ever bringing up associations of “low cost”, “mass” or “affordable”. This could be further seen as a triumph of modern design values, rising above Japan’s own feudal past.

For a more intimate gathering in New Delhi the next day, Hara and Muji president Masaaki Kanai trekked the city’s by-lanes with other board members, to a meeting with a few young Indian designers.

They arrived 10 minutes earlier than scheduled, and the often-told stories that bring handcrafts alive to foreign enthusiasts were futile; they responded spontaneously, almost in a childlike manner, by establishing immediate tactile connects. They held light cottons in their palms, consumed by their softness.

They bypassed the motifs of finely woven grass mats to explore their gossamer qualities of passing light by holding them against the sun. They playfully picked up the most mundane of plastic table coasters to enquire about their material composition.

In a surprisingly warm gesture, Hara reciprocated by showing the group a project he had been working on with vacuum cleaners, as he referenced the shared Indian and Japanese obsession with cleanliness inside homes, and the ritual of removing footwear outside. Kanai shared more on Found Muji, new stores set up by Muji in 10 cities

around the world to retail handcrafted techniques that are increasingly rare today, and their plans to explore sourcing from India.

At first, such interests can be seen as part of an innate Japanese aesthetic thread—to push the limits of the latest scientific technology in mechanization, while preserving the finest handcraftsmanship. Some might say it is even expected of Japanese design thinking.

A response to a joke inviting a franchise in India—which I jumped to volunteer for—also revealed a sound analysis of Indian retail infrastructure at present, and how it would have to be slightly different for Muji (senior curators from The Museum of Modern Art, New York, shared later that evening that it took Muji three years to decide whether to open a store at the museum or not).

And how, by focusing on the North American market recently, they were hoping to influence markets in South America and India eventually. Yet, such sharing seems to come more from a deeper need to sense what makes India work at a day-to-day level, and less from the usual precincts that create business validity.

In a sense, this comes full circle. The concept of Shunyata—the Buddhist concept of emptiness— travelled to Japan from India, getting embedded in Japanese rituals and codes through an introspective process in the country’s isolation from the rest of the world. The austerity that emerged was from a further process of severing through the uncertainties of geographical realities— extremes of climate and susceptibility to earthquakes.

On the other hand, India’s openness to absorption and amalgamation of different influences through millennia has made it a largely jugaadu (resourceful) culture that improvises constantly.

Japan has developed a way of containing its resolutions while India has found a way of adapting these through external interactions. I sense that it is from an understanding of such instincts that the presence of Muji in India will be envisaged.

Mayank Mansingh Kaul is a fashion and textile designer.

He is the founder-director of The Design Project India, a non-profit organization seeking to enable curatorial activities and writing on Indian design.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

The concept of Shunyata—the Buddhist concept of emptiness— travelled to Japan from India

By buying Muji, consumers do not acquire any identities of time, space, history, price or status...

Instead, they choose to be freed of these shackled narratives

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2. Flexi spaces

HOMES

Our cities host floating populations of students and professional migrants. The need now is not for large family apartments but for small apartments that can co-host two unrelated people. “People share a space but may not be a couple, so they still want privacy.

Putting a utility unit (such as a kitchen and bathroom) in the middle of the room makes it edgy, and splits the functions,” says Schwarz.

MIKE TAUBER/STRIBLING

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NEW TRENDS IN SMALL­SPACE DESIGN PROVE A SMALL FOOTPRINT MEANS EDGY AESTHETICS

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3. Senior­friendly Senior housing is a huge trend in Europe, the US and Japan.

Single-unit senior homes are preferable to retirement homes in unfamiliar areas or to managing a family home alone. “It’s like being a member of an exclusive lounge for the rest of your life.

Such units come with community areas, restaurants, medical facilities, skid-proof flooring, handrails and security. It’s the next step,” says Smita Rawoot, associate principal at Perkins Eastman.

B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

····································· he swankiest addresses are still the costliest, and the new buildings emerging within them are just too large.

“While a young professional may buy a luxury studio in a swanky downtown space, he will not put his money into one if his only option is a three- to five-bedroom apartment at that cost,” points out Aaron B. Schwarz, managing director of Perkins Eastman, the American redevelopment firm which set up base in India in December. The need of the hour, then, is small luxury spaces. “And the smaller the footprint, the easier it is to be edgy,” Schwarz says. Here are four trends in small-space design.

ARCHITECT ARJUN MALIK USED A SMALL, NEGLECTED SPACE IN MUMBAI TO CREATE A LOFT THAT’S CHIC AND FUNCTIONAL

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1. Pod living Small apartments need to be compact, but the regular hall-kitchen-bedroom format is not the best utilization of a 400-650 sq. ft space. It is merely the most traditional one. The solution is the pod. Pods make small spaces functional, they are utility-driven and high-tech. “Which means the trendiest appliances, the most compact use of space, and the functionality of a generation that’s not necessarily cooking every day,” says Schwarz.

B Y G AYATRI J AYARAMAN gayatri.j@livemint.com

···························· f the last decade belonged to the multi-bedroom home, with its “half rooms”, much like Fiddler on the Roof’s “staircase going nowhere just for fun”, the young world traveller ushers in the boutique residence—that 400-900 sq. ft chic yet functional footprint—the new edge of small space Indian design.

When Mumbai-based architect Arjun Malik, 32, son of architect K. Malik, was getting married, he decided to convert a 650 sq. ft space in Colaba’s art deco district into a residence for two. He purchased a neglected loft at a throw-

away price (“a price reflective of the lack of worth we attribute to old buildings,” Malik says) and began to transform it into an architectural labour of love.

Normally, a long space tends to be broken up into compartments, but Malik decided to celebrate its depth, accentuating it by fragmenting it. “The point is the space remains one visually, while functionally it can be split.” He worked with the old wooden walls, rafters, the height of the room and the original stone structure. The added advantage of an older building is the floor space index (FSI): 30ft of ceiling height that Malik confesses would be impossible in a contemporary apartment.

“To begin with, we scraped off all the wood and structurally analysed the space. A lot of the members which were not integral to hold the building up were removed and replaced with glass to get more light in,” Malik says.

Being 55ft deep, three-fourths of the home had no access to natural light or ventilation.

The space has two levels. At the lower level, the entrance opens into the living room, and to the

“In Mumbai, old buildings and chawl buildings are interesting.

They have single-room units and since they are thin, they don’t SARAH MECHLING/PERKINS EASTMAN face the problem of lack of natural light which lofts in New York face,” says Rawoot. With structural viability and plumbing, old buildings make chic stays with great addresses, and perfect starter homes.

right is an open kitchen. From the living space, two sets of stairs, held by tension cables, lead to two mezzanine levels: one a study, from which a cantilevered study desk extends beyond the floor footprint, translating its visual connect to the rooms beneath; and at a parallel but disconnected level, a bedroom. A passageway houses the washer and dryer beneath one set of stairs on the right, and on the left, a wall closet runs for 10ft and its end wall also provides storage for the bathroom unit.

“As you can see,” Malik points out, “the handrail (of the stairs)

itself is a physical expression of the light that filters in from the skylight above.” The house is built around such plays of light.

Both mezzanines connect visually to each other and the rest of the house. The bedroom overlooks a balcony space on the lower level which is fronted with a large glass window—the only window in the house. Because of the glass, the trees around have the appearance of forming a personal courtyard. The bathroom becomes a glass box within a glass box, and while latticed off with venetian blinds, Malik says it is PHOTOGRAPH

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ARJUN MALIK

Play lines: The house built itself around lines of light and wooden walls.

typically left open, providing the two of them with the sense of bathing outdoors.

The inner sections, like the kitchen and living space, are serviced by recessed mechanical vents, and skylights via a raised roof—one in the east and one in the west. “Throughout the day, I get different patterns of sunlight.

The house is not about what is fashionable. It is about geometry, space, air and spirit. It has very clean lines, the patterns of the stairs are reflected in the rafters, and move with the lines of the original walls,” says Malik. The home has more by way of hidden storage recessed into the wooden panelling of the walls than his father’s 3,000 sq. ft flat. “And it’s something my wife thanks me for at least once a week,” says Malik.

In terms of cost, he says, “on average you would need to invest from `2,000-4,000 per sq. ft.”

In terms of luxury, Malik says: “Luxury is a very subjective term.

For me, it is the manipulation, expansion and experience of space. For me, design is not materialistic. It is not about the objects placed in a space, but the play of the space itself.”