TM | <strong>Jul</strong>y/AUGUST <strong>2017</strong> 36
THE HOME Audacious Auteurs Forget minimalism, eschew understatement, meet the four flamboyant designers whose fearless work make you wonder why you ever thought less is more. WORDS by Jennifer Choo Starck Contrast The original enfant terrible of design, Philippe Starck rose to rock star status in the 1980s on a tsunami of glossy magazine articles about how he flunked college, roared around Paris on his motorcycle, locked himself away for weeks to work, and tormented manufacturers by tweaking designs at the very last minute. Since then, the French designer has gone from industry bad boy to its best-known rainmaker, turning his hand at designing everything from luxury yachts and a mineral water bottle to François Mitterrand’s presidential apartments at the Elysée Palace and squiggly pasta shapes. Starck was the first “brand” designer, where the fact that he WAS the brand was enough to sell the product even though some of his more infamous designs like the Juicy Salif lemon squeezer for Alessi (1990), an object that became an indispensable totem in the late 20th-century interior, was utterly useless for its intended function. Nonetheless, while public opinion about him and his work may have waxed and waned through the three decades, today Starck is design’s elder statesman and his Midas touch still highly sought after by high and low brow clients alike. His designs, while still prolific and thought to provoke, have also mellowed with the environment being at the forefront of his obsessions. Starck’s countless hotels and restaurants around the world ranging from Le Meurice in Paris, Mama Shelter in Lyon, AMO in Venice and recently M Social in Singapore continue to look like complete showcases of his all-encompassing portfolio as Starck designs the total environment from layout to furniture to linens. Ironically for a man who’s designed everything including the late Steve Job’s boat, Starck does not own a computer and has no e-mail address, but then as the most celebrated and commercially successful designer in the world, he probably doesn’t need it. Novembre Reign “The important thing, in the end, is to make people smile - it’s what objects should do,” Fabio Novembre declared in an interview with CNN. This conviction has served him well in a boundary-pushing yet successful career built on Novembre’s confident, creative style and persona. During his ‘90s debut, Novembre was hailed as a design prodigy as this trained architect bucked the prevailing minimalist trend by proposing flamboyant furniture in an explosion of colour. This flashiness can be ascribed to Novembre’s roots, the city of Lecce, Puglia, South Italy, renowned for its stunning baroque architecture. His eccentric, charismatic personality also helped, and he was one of the first designers to be featured on the cover of design magazines (unheard of at that time), although Novembre was also notorious for his willingness to be shot naked. The Italian designer’s frankly sexual work frequently celebrates the nude form like the notorious Him & Her chairs for Casamania which were modelled after the iconic Panton chairs except with a suggestive twist. His tenure as an art director at Biasazza in the early noughties catapulted the luxury glass mosaic company into the design big leagues with voluptuous showrooms in New York, Milan, Barcelona and Berlin where the spaces were selling tools in themselves. To date, his work continues to teeter between provocation and poetry, contemporary art and design. His masterful command of space, evident in everything from his ambitious solo exhibitions to his contemporary stylings for restaurants, nightclubs and shops like UNA Hotel Vittoria, HIT Gallery, Stuart Weitzman and the W Brera, Milan, make it abundantly clear that Novembre is as irrepressible as his exuberant designs. 37 <strong>Jul</strong>y/AUGUST <strong>2017</strong> | TM