‘WHEREVER – YOU – ARE – RIGHT – NOW,’ flashes
the promotional animation, ‘TAKE A MOMENT – AND LOOK AROUND YOU. ICONS ARE
EVERYWHERE – SYMBOLIZING WHO WE ARE – WHAT WE DO – WHAT WE ASPIRE TO.’ It
sounds like the cover blurb for a Bret Easton Ellis novel, one of those
where no one is ever sure of anyone’s name, but everyone can name who
everyone else is wearing and what celebrity they look like. But this
advertisement is for ICON, Miami’s newest designer dwelling space, due to
begin construction in the spring of next year (with units on sale now). And
if you paid attention to that animation, you would have noticed that popping
up between the instruction ‘look around you’ and the statement ‘icons are
everywhere’ are black-and-white portraits of the building’s creators,
property developer Jorge Pérez and designer Philippe Starck. They look alike
(Pérez sports a neater, more tanned, more Miami version of Starck’s
black-suited shabby Gallic chic), they are icons by implication (well, you
probably recognised Starck), and they want to sell you a little bit of what
they have got.
Pérez is the chairman and majority owner of The Related Group, which prides
itself as being Florida’s largest developer of high-end apartments and
condominiums. He is best known for successful Miami developments such as the
Murano at Portofino and the Portofino Towers. Revenues for The Related Group
reached $547 million in 2001 and as the words ‘WHAT WE ASPIRE TO’ fade away,
the first thing to flash up in the ICON animation is a heart with a dollar
sign at its centre. Starck is the superdesigner who has achieved more
obviously iconic status by shaping everything from toilets and fly-swats to
kayaks and Ian Schrager hotels. In case you are in any doubt as to his
iconic status, you can find Jean Baptiste Mondino’s portraits of Starck as
Ganesh or Starck as Shiva in the designer’s fat Taschen monograph. Oh, and
the work of this part-time deity also provides the occasional backdrop for
characters in Bret Easton Ellis novels. Now, the man who shot to fame when
he designed the private quarters of President Mitterrand at the Elysée
Palace in the early 1980s wants to help the residents of Miami with their
living arrangements for 2005. ‘You are smart; you just need a little help,’
suggests Starck to the prospective ICON-dweller. ‘I am your friend,’ he
purrs reassuringly, ‘I shall develop a concept that can help you.’
Starck has already helped the people of London and Melbourne via his YOO design concept, created in conjunction with John Hitchcox, the property developer credited with bringing loft living to the British capital. The YOO concept, which also forms the basis of the ICON development, is relatively simple: create modern living spaces and then offer purchasers the opportunity either to receive an empty shell, or to select from one of four design palettes and nine different floor plans created by Starck. The choice is yours: Minimal (‘simplicity and purity, function and form-white spaces, clear water and neutral tones with a Zen-like aura’), Culture (‘explosions of colour and emotion, baroque and exotic touches, eccentric choices and fantasy’), Nature (‘natural wood and stone used to provide a light airy feeling, a feeling of being out with nature’) or Classic (‘a clubby, tailored and familiar look with timeless appeal and with echoes of French chateaux and Scottish castles’). ‘I’m Classic – timeless,’ says Starck. And the fact that it remains somewhat unclear as to whether he is talking about his designs, his ideal apartment or himself seems to summarise precisely what ICON is about. In case you are not taking enough time to look at what is around you, ICON comes with a slogan: ‘Where you live is who you are.’
It is a theme that Victor Hugo developed in his homage to Gothic architecture, Notre-Dame of Paris. For Quasimodo, the novel’s deformed hero, Notre-Dame is ‘egg, nest, house, homeland and universe’. ‘Developing always in harmony with the cathedral, living in it, sleeping in it, hardly ever leaving it, subject day in and day out to its mysterious pressure, he came to resemble it, to be incrusted on it, as it were, to form an integral part of it.’ Starck too describes his designs for YOO and ICON as eggs, imagining their inhabitants, or ‘my tribe’ as he likes to refer to them, as also growing with the space in which they live. He sees them incrusting the shells with their personalities and perhaps a few of his products. As well as with the European custom cabinetry, Miele appliances, Sub-Zero refrigerators, whirlpool bathtubs, spacious walk-in closets and the high-speed cable modem Internet service promised by the ICON prospectus. With all that, presumably the only deformity ICON will breed is a hoard of Attilas and Napoléons, the grinning plastic gnomes transformed by Starck into stools and side-tables and originally produced for Schrager’s Saint Martins Lane Hotel in London – that and the unintentionally warped spelling of Starck’s first name at the end of the ICON promotional animation.
‘One of the most positive things a designer can do is refuse to do anything,’ Starck once said. At ICON he puts this theory into practice. ‘If you are rich and famous and you buy an apartment and you don’t know what to do, you will rent an interior designer. But in the end you will not make your own home. You will take the prefab life made by your interior designer and that is stupid. With ICON you will do it yourself.’ If anyone else revealed that the best way of doing their job was not to do it at all they would probably be fired shortly after the confession had left their lips. But for Starck it is part of a broader mission to popularise design. He is helping people to help themselves. Buried beneath a mountain of designer brand names ‘people disguise themselves so that they don’t have to exist,’ he says. ‘And it’s essential that people exist again otherwise they will disappear.’ Rather than expressing themselves through their possessions, Starck’s tribe should possess things that allow them to express themselves. A Dr Scud fly-swat, a set of Poaa dumbbells, a Joe Cactus ashtray, a set of four Dr Spoon ear cleaning spatulas; the bewildering array of products is proof of Starck’s relentless creative energy and his attempt to design absolutely everything that he thinks can be improved.
When he is not designing the apartments of presidents he is working on everyday things such as the humble toothbrush or your television remote control. In an interview with Elisabeth Laville he is proud to say that ‘one of the few victories I’ve won in my career is to have succeeded in conferring a certain nobility on the idea of multiplication, that is on the word "popular". I raised the status of contempt.’ He’s the Andy Warhol of the design world.
Of course, as Starck recognises, a designer lifestyle has traditionally been the property of the rich and famous. Indeed, it is the aura of exclusivity and the sparkle of celebrity that remain the primary attractions of the Starck environment, whether you are staying in an exclusive Starck-designed hotel, or sitting on gnomes in a Starck-inspired apartment. Although it has reportedly run into difficulties during the construction phase, when spaces in London’s YOONW8 were on sale at the beginning of 2001, the British press were touting Liam Gallagher and Nicole Appleton’s apparent interest in buying a chunk (actually an entire floor) as proof of its probable success. ‘Home to international celebrities,’ shrieks one Miami estate agent’s advertisement for condos in Pérez’s Portofino Towers. It is perhaps a more direct version of ICON’s promotional message – if you live in the right surroundings you can be an icon too. Watch Popstars or Big Brother. Watch the Stars in their Eyes European Championships. Everyone can be a celebrity. So Starck is designing exclusively for everyone. And central to this aspect of his strategy to democratise design is the subject of cost. While everyone can be famous, not everyone can be rich. ‘My first chair cost $5,000, now my Target chair is $9. Good design should be available to everyone, not just the rich. Design must make life easier so people can love.’ Walk into any shop selling designer goods and you will be surrounded by placards and posters that advertise Starck designs like so many graffitied declarations of love for popular consumer brands: Starck for Fossil, Starck for Thompson, Starck for Alessi, Starck 4 YOO.
You are the objects you surround yourself
with. Icons are everywhere. And Starck is a man who practises what he
preaches. Open that fat monograph, start flipping past Starck as Ganesh and
Shiva, past yet another Mondino portrait of Starck hanging on a kitchen wall
along with a selection of his kitchen utensils, past the photograph of
Starck dressed up as his Nani Nani office building in Tokyo, past a shot of
the Restaurant Felix in the Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong, in which each
chair-back houses a photographic portrait (the familiar face of Starck on
that one to the left), and watch, once you have almost reached the end, as
the letters STARCK morph down the page into a kettle, a lamp, a radio-alarm
clock, a lemon squeezer, a telephone and a chair. Forget those old paintings
of saints, venerate the new icons: Peltoo, a kitchen spatula with a face cut
out of it; Mister Meumeu, a parmesan cheese cellar (with grater) that looks
like a bull’s head; Rock’n’Rock, a micro hi-fi system that looks like a pile
of rocks; Dr Kiss, a toothbrush that looks like a blade of grass; Sumo
Table, a stand for an outsized Helmut Newton book; Saint Esprit, a tree
stump table…
www.philippe-starck.com
Mark Rappolt is the Architecture Editor for contemporary