The Monocle Minute
On Design

We begin this week with a celebration of industrial designer Miguel Milá (pictured, with his TMM lamp), who passed away this week. Our design editor, Nic Monisse, explains how the effects of his work were felt well beyond the designs he brought to market – and still will be. Such influence is also heralded in a book compiling influential Japanese design from the 1920s, while we highlight contemporary transformations in London and California.

Malcolm Davis Architects and landscape-design firm Lucas & Lucas have teamed up on a residential project that seamlessly blends indoor and outdoor living. The California-based designers were tasked with renovating and expanding a house in Healdsburg, a mill town in the state. They were also asked by the homeowners to increase the communal outdoor living space to make the most of the balmy wine-country climate. The interior additions include a new guest suite and, outside, there is now a spacious kitchen and inviting sitting area.

The designers used locally harvested redwood for the new cladding, referencing the historic valley houses of the mill town. The project is also a benchmark for shirking hi-tech innovations in favour of simple techniques: ceiling fans on the concrete porches and skylights are used to keep the building cool and well lit without consuming large amounts of energy. The outcome is a low-impact home that subtly blends into the landscape – making it a weekend retreat that allows its owners to leave behind the hustle and bustle of the Bay Area.
mdarch.net; lucas-lucas.com

London-based Hût Architecture have transformed a former military drill hall into a new mixed-use development in London’s East End. The property, which has been largely undisturbed since the 1930s, when it served the Royal Army Service Corps 1st Anti-Aircraft division, was doomed to a dark future of use as a storage space and the dilapidated backdrop for grungey fashion shoots. Its restoration, however, takes the form of offices, nine apartments and a coffee shop.

Hût have not shied from celebrating the original patina of the building. Roof lights and translucent block walls ensure that natural light glows across the exposed structure and brickwork, while also illuminating the forest-green accent colour that defines the renovation. From sheets of corrugated iron and steel beams that cross the lofty ceilings, to plants and vines that tumble down the exterior walls, the redesign’s juxtaposition with the original industrial feel brings a new sense of purpose and longevity to what easily could have remained a neglected urban relic.
hutarchitecture.com

Self-taught designer and furniture maker Christophe Delcourt began his career in the 1990s manufacturing his own pieces in Parisian ateliers. Some 30 years later, he is an industry leader, working with natural materials and collaborating with French artisans to produce pieces for his namesake brand, the Delcourt Collection. Here, he tells us about the symbiotic relationship between designer and manufacturer.

How did you develop good working relationships with artisans?
My beginnings were atypical. I didn’t have a degree or support from a big name so I wasn’t able to get manufacturers to make my designs. I worked in an atelier, creating my own pieces and developing shapes that I found interesting: mostly smaller objects in metal, then wood. As soon as I started attracting some attention, I began reaching out to artisans across France because I didn’t have pretensions to know how to make everything and I realised how important it was to have partners with skills that I didn’t have.

How have those relationships influenced your practice?
For me, making furniture is a long-term creative process. Over the 30 years that I have been a designer, my work has become more liberated, thanks to the relationships that I have been lucky enough to establish along the way. I’m a loyal business partner and gain a lot from that. I have also known some of the artisans who I work with since they were young apprentices and we have seen each other grow. We have learned how to push our limits in terms of assembly and fabrication. This is essential for me as I love to work with rounded shapes in wood and they make it possible to really sculpt this material.

What makes wood such an interesting material to work with?
The raw material is simple but it has a unique story, especially because we use centenarian trees. I never get tired of it. The lines and patterns in the wood mean that no two pieces are the same. My favourite is oak. It has such an interesting texture and colour, and can be reworked in many ways. It’s also easily found in France. It’s essential to have that proximity, both with the people and the material.

For more on Delcourt, pick up a copy of Monocle’sJuly/August issue, which is on all good newsstands now.

Anyone who has tried to squeeze guests into place at a well-attended dinner party will have found that table legs often get in the way. Architects have too. When Albert Frey was designing his Palm Springs home in 1954, he addressed the issue with a flourish: he suspended a tabletop from the ceiling on nine carefully balanced wires. One of the last intact replicas of the design can be seen at the Albert Frey: Inventive Modernist exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum, which runs until 18 August.

The ingeniously minimal Suspended Table is a characteristic design from the Swiss-born Frey, who left a job in the Paris studio of Le Corbusier to move to remote Palm Springs in the 1930s. In the booming desert town, he found the space – both literally and figuratively – to pursue his architectural vision. Buildings preserved in Palm Springs include his Aluminaire, the first prefab home built using aluminium, and Frey House II, a hillside property built around a rock. Fans of Frey’s desert modernism would surely covet the Suspended Table too, were it put into production. Though it is worth wondering whether the added comfort of ample leg space is offset by the sudden difficulty of passing the salt.

Danish design brand Frama has long produced body-care and fragrance products to complement its furniture range. It has often launched these products with bespoke installations at its Copenhagen flagship shop, which, appropriately, is a former apothecary. Its latest scented hand creams, body lotions and soaps, launched during Copenhagen Fashion Week earlier this month, are Columnae and Escalier. Created as fragrant counterparts, both take their cues from the world of sculpture, in particular the work of US designer and artist Isamu Noguchi.

Columnae offers a musky combination of notes such as vetiver, black pepper and bitter orange, while Escalier has a brighter scent profile with notes of carrot seed, cardamom and blood orange. To mark their release, Frama installed a Noguchi-inspired sculpture garden in its Copenhagen flagship on Fredericiagade. Here, small sculptures made from clay, chalk and stone by Denmark’s Sys Svinding were positioned to suggest the artistic inspiration behind the scents.
framacph.com

The Complete Commercial Artist: Making Modern Design in Japan, 1928-1930 is both a compendium of Japanese visual branding and an artefact of historical preservation. In that short interwar period, Tokyo-based publisher Ars developed a 24-volume illustrated series that celebrated the radical work of designers who embraced avant garde and modernist trends from abroad while updating Japanese calligraphic forms. This book compiles selected pages from every edition along with biographies of those who contributed to them.

The original volumes were packed with illustrations and this update, published by San Francisco-based Letterform Archive, follows suit: there are plenty of full-colour reproductions of the original designs. Gennifer Weisenfeld, a professor of art history at Duke University, provides context with an extended introduction and essays on every original volume. If you would like to learn how to dress a shop window, advertise with neon and electricity, or with practical signboards, design a pamphlet, or any other possible way to design something, start here. The Complete Commercial Artist is bound to inspire.
letterformarchive.org