Contemporary furniture design has become the new fashion. From classics like Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair to the avant-garde aesthetic of Dutch wunderkind Marcel Wanders, not including one of these pieces (or at least a book on the subject) in your home is akin to admitting a certain lack of cool. A selection of this season’s designs was recently showcased under the heading Milan In A Van at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (21 April – 9 June 2002). A well curated show in the new exhibition hall, the pieces were presented on bright red packing crates, fresh from Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile (10 – 15 April 2002), the world’s largest furniture fair.
Beyond all this hype and hyperbole,
however, an important question has yet to be fully addressed: where is the
market for a crop of new designs every season? Among the young and affluent
there is a growing interest in collecting cutting-edge design, yet the work
has such strong personality that most people find it difficult to live with
more than one or two pieces. There is also much to be said for collecting
proven ‘classics’ that still appear modern and interesting.
With designers increasingly being urged to create diluted versions of their
ideas for mass production, design-oriented boutique hotels are an obvious
place towards which edgier pieces can be marketed. Developing potential new
markets for their products is instrumental to designers looking to make a
name for themselves on a credible design level, and marketing specifically
to the hospitality industry is beneficial for several reasons. Firstly, by
definition the boutique hotel experience offers an ultra-cool atmosphere;
people expect to be surrounded by the latest in contemporary design.
Secondly, this is an area where the designer can hope to have his or her
full vision realised: not only able to create an entire environment, but
also to conveniently fill the rooms with already designed objects which the
hotel can then offer for sale.
The catalyst for this recipe was the collaboration between Philippe Starck and the Ian Schrager hotel chain, which began in 1988 with the otherworldly Royalton in New York and continues today with Starck’s Surrealisme in London’s St. Martin’s Lane Hotel. This partnership has been especially successful because many of Starck’s products for Alessi and others are relatively inexpensive, yet his profile as a designer has been raised significantly.
The idea of marketing specifically to the hospitality industry reached its peak with the Grand Hotel Salone at this year’s Milan furniture fair, an installation offering differing visions of the ‘hotel room of the future’ by ten design luminaries: Ron Arad, Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki, Toyo Ito, Legorreta + Legorreta, Vico Magistretti, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, Gaetano Pesce and Matteo Thun. The exhibition consisted of a main area containing a lobby, reception, several lounge areas and a bar/restaurant – all decorated in a contemporary style and staffed by students from a hotel school – and a darkened area at the back of the lobby with ten ‘rooms’, each representing a particular city.
Some rooms were more successful than others. Gaetano Pesce, for instance, created a wonderfully inventive and typically colourful room in which much of the furniture had moving parts, a lyrical reflection of the changes that are in effect in Moscow today. For this designer, the room ‘ought to represent the place in which it is located, and that speaks directly to the senses’.
Ron Arad’s was a business traveller’s hotel room, less a refuge from the city and more an extension of the workingman’s agenda. The beautiful clean lines and easy access to information through projection screens addressed the practical issues of travelling: the computer-generated images projected across the curved walls and even the bathroom mirror allowed for myriad possibilities from video-conferencing to city maps. Though originally designed for Mexico City, the room nonetheless represented an easily adaptable model.
Likewise, Zaha Hadid glorified the all-purpose fit-out. The bright white strobes illuminated the sleekest of modular units, recalling the interior of a car or aeroplane. Unwaveringly true to her style, the clinical environment was not a place for relaxation. More a concept than a designed study relating to a specific city, the room, according to the architect, acts as ‘a continuation of the thought of occupying the intermediate’.
Matteo Thun’s oasis of calm for his Hong Kong room used smell, lighting and sound to create a distinct ‘Asian’ environment that would provide a backdrop against which to relish the city’s intense, fast-moving pace. Appropriately, this was the most conceptual of the rooms, virtually empty yet filled with electronic images. Indeed, Thun always tailors his concept to the project in question, believing that ‘architecture should derive its formal essence from the places which must ultimately accommodate it and should cease to be a parasitic organism devouring the site upon which it arises’.
Sharing this idea, across town, avant-garde Dutch collective Droog offered their own hotel. Perhaps as a response to the saturated designers’ environment that one usually associates with boutique hotels, the reaction of the younger generation has been suitably low-fi, and presented a welcome antithesis to the Grand Hotel Salone. Droog, in particular, has never been about ego; they are an organic operation that recruits ideas first, designers second.
In a one-star pensione in the centre of
Milan, they replaced a single object in each room with one of their
products, without changing anything else in the hotel. A simple, yet potent
move, it highlighted the context in which the product would be useful. There
were beautiful glossy Gary Hume-like plastic house plants, a polyurethane
portable bath and bowls of pebbles for resting tired feet. The joy was in
the discovery of each object juxtaposed against a rather mundane background.
The first installation consisted of a series of self-adhesive pictograms
applied to every second step on the way up to the first floor bedrooms, a
reassuring reminder of how many calories have been burned. In one of the
bedrooms, a series of Sticky Lamps by Chris Kabel crawled above a bed like
oversized illuminated beetles. These lamps are simply light bulbs encased in
plastic packaging, with peel-off double-sided tape to stick directly onto
the wall. Just find a socket, and there’s your lamp. Cleverly, the packaging
has become the main element of the design, with only the back of the tape to
peel away.
Upstairs, the open bathroom door revealed a woman on her knees scrubbing the floor directly in front of the toilet. She worked relentlessly, unable to remove herself from the space for she was a video projection. Entitled Sit down, gentlemen. Respect the cleaning woman!, this work by Floris Schiferli conveyed a sense of witty humour that is typical of Droog. Suddenly, the ‘nice but dim’ monochromatic interior environment championed by the likes of Wallpaper* magazine seemed terribly contrived. The message being presented here seemed to be that subtle changes can be very successful in affecting a visitor’s way of seeing.
If furniture is the new fashion, then Droog
is the Martin Margiela of the design world – intellectual and conceptual –
and the Hotel Salone would seem to reflect the slick drama of Tom Ford at
Gucci. In the same way as Ford himself is very much a part of his brand, so
is each designer in the Salone. Margiela, however, refuses to be
photographed; he prefers to stand back from his designs, allowing them to
take the spotlight. In Milan, Hotel droog* and the Grand Hotel Salone
provided a complementary view of where furniture designers and interior
architects now stand.
The new hotel is, in a sense, a perfect design ‘boutique’. The guest is able
to experience the work as it was intended, the designer to create a desired
atmosphere, and the hotel to benefit by the creation of a space that will be
thoroughly appreciated by a unique and forward-thinking clientele.
www.isaloni.it
www.droogdesign.nl
Andrea Carson is a freelance writer
Grand Hotel SalonE rooms, Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan, 2002.
Mexico City (Ron Arad), Photos: Luciano Pascali