The Monocle Minute
On Design

We report from Paris this week, where emerging salon Matter and Shape coincided with Paris Fashion Week. Our design editor sees merit in the alignment, while our team picks out work by Lobmeyr and Gohar World (pictured) as being among the best on show. Elsewhere, we resurrect a portable radio, build up bricks and speak to the industry veteran who thinks we’ve reached peak chair. Sit tight!

The design industry has a relevance problem. It doesn’t have the pop-culture power of fashion; you won’t find the names of the best sofa, chair or glassware designers plastered across billboards or making headlines in weekend supplements after the Academy Awards. And that’s perhaps understandable; fashion is more accessible because it feels more personal. Our clothes are the way in which we present ourselves to the world, our first impression and expression of who we are. Priority, in terms of coverage and interest levels, then makes sense.

But there’s a certain irony in that design can, perhaps, have an even bigger effect on us. It permeates every aspect of our lives, from the light of the lamp by our bed to the posture supported by a chair, shaping our experiences and influencing our mood, comfort and wellbeing from morning to night. And yet it’s less discussed.

As such, we need to reframe the conversation around design. And events like Matter and Shape, a salon in Paris that wrapped earlier this week, are helping to do this. The second edition of this annual event took place in the Jardin des Tuileries, coinciding with Paris Fashion Week – an alignment that made this particular event feel more like a cultural occasion than an industry trade fair. The demographic was different: people were clearly flitting between runway shows and the fair. “The fashion crowd is here, with all the big names for fashion week,” said David Mahyari, founder of SolidNature (see below). At his stand, and across the fair, there were more casual design observers alongside architects and design journalists.

By placing Matter and Shape alongside Paris Fashion Week and including more fashion-aligned design brands – Laila Gohar was present, as was fragrance firm Byredo and a new collection by designer to the stars Willo Perron – the mood of this design event felt different. Its co-founder, curator and journalist Dan Thawley, spoke candidly about this theme at the fair over the weekend, explaining that it’s about bringing design closer to people and introducing new crowds to find “design inspiration in different ways”. And perhaps that’s what the industry needs: to find new ways of engaging and uplifting people. That way, design can more readily find its way into our pop-cultural context and, hopefully, our lives.

Nic Monisse is Monocle’s design editor. For more news and analysis, subscribe to Monocle today.

Manufacturing waste is a problem but there could be an upside. Dutch firm SolidNature is, for instance, harnessing its offcuts and reformatting them as a series of bespoke design objects and installations as part of a new initiative called Off-Cut Puzzle. Created in partnership with Dutch artist Marte Mei, the natural-stone brand presented first iterations of the concept at Matter and Shape, displaying a bench and coffee table crafted from individually shaped stone fragments and supported by solid oak frames.

“It doesn’t make sense to call [an offcut] waste because it didn’t fit the size of a table,” says SolidNature’s founder David Mahyari of the decision to actively work with discarded material. “The point is that natural stone is already extremely sustainable and durable, and it looks good. So why throw it away?” The new programme will see reclaimed natural stone turned into distinct architectural surfaces and furniture. “If you have a project, we look at what kind of material is available,” adds Mahyari. “And then we make a composition.”
solidnature.com

With spring approaching in the northern hemisphere, we can look to the south for sunny inspiration. Australian lifestyle brand Country Road has always made a statement: you’ll spot its logotype on T-shirts and tote bags across the country. Now it can be found on a lounger and tables produced in collaboration with Melbourne-based outdoor furniture brand Tait. “Having grown up with Country Road, we view it as a truly iconic Australian brand,” says Susan Tait, co-founder of Tait. “But we have spent more than 30 years developing our outdoor furniture collections and we too have a unique Australian style.”

The resulting partnership has produced an outdoor collection that, much like the Australian landscape, is both beautiful and incredibly robust. Manufactured in Melbourne, the powder-coated white-steel frames of the Saltbush collection, named after a tough Australian native plant, are complemented by travertine porcelain tabletops and a 100 per cent recycled bouclé outdoor fabric for the lounger, with a soft, textured finish. It’s a perch that, despite its hardiness, you might never want to get up from.
countryroad.com.au; madebytait.com.au

Sweden’s Kasthall has been crafting rugs of exceptional quality and design since 1889. The firm’s factory in Kinna, an hour’s drive southeast of Gothenburg, is a well-established hub of textile innovation. This year the company will celebrate its 136th anniversary by starting a new chapter. Mirkku Kullberg, an industry veteran who runs multidisciplinary design consultancy Glasshouse Helsinki, has stepped in as CEO, bringing a wealth of experience from previous leadership roles at Finland’s Artek, Switzerland’s Vitra and Italy’s Poltrona Frau. Here, Kullberg tells us about material innovation and an evolution of the brand’s identity.

You come from a multidisciplinary design background. Why take a role at a company that specialises in one product?
I really like brands that have an archive and design legacy. But I thought that Kasthall’s legacy was becoming a burden: it didn’t know how to interpret its heritage for new generations. I’m not great at creating organic business growth. I’m better at shaking things up and bringing people along – and that’s what I want to do at Kasthall.

What does ‘shaking things up’ look like at Kasthall?
Kasthall didn’t know how to position itself. It is a luxury product but we need to redefine what luxury means for Kasthall. We talk about this in a way that invokes a sense of beauty and natural, high-quality materials, which I think are the biggest luxuries in the world. In the context of our rugs, this means that we have to be more innovative in terms of bringing in new materials. Though we’re already doing amazing work with wool, we need to be exploring the potential of different types of textiles. Our factory has the capacity to work on everything from the spinning to the dyeing of yarns.

What does innovation mean for rug-making today?
Innovation is always related to material technology. But the way that we work with rugs in an interior-design setting is changing too. The industry has been focused on chairs for so long, which is boring. But I believe that this hyperfixation is finally coming to an end and people are starting to look at the floor space again. Rooms need several framing elements. We need to think about bringing textiles back into our environments. Rugs do both of these things.

For more from industry leaders like Mirkku Kullberg, tune in to ‘Monocle On Design’ on Monocle Radio.

In less than 50 years, portable technological devices have gone from being music players for cool kids to the ubiquitous smartphones of today. Before the reign of the iPod in the 2000s and the Walkman in the 1980s, there was the pocket transistor. These portable radios, such as the BP-156 by Sharp Corporation, were some of the earliest devices that allowed listening to music on the go. This Japanese model was mass-produced in Malaysia and came equipped with an earpiece and small speakers.

The BP-156 was marketed as a “junior favorite” that sported “medium wave-band reception; neat fist-size but surprisingly big on quality and range”. The technical specs of the six-transistor radio pales in comparison to today’s smartphones, where even the simplest model has access to almost all of the world’s radio stations. Still, it is valid to question whether that progress has been positive. After all, the BP-156 never interrupted the music with a notification or kept children glued to a screen for hours on end. And no smartphone looked this charming swinging from a wrist strap.

With the advent of concrete-dominated modernism and standardised home building in the late 20th century, bricks – once the staple of house construction – gave way to cheaper and speedier prefabricated elements. But Helsinki-based studio Avarrus Architects is helping bricks to make a comeback.

“Buildings made using bricks are more durable and easier to repair,” says Atte Aaltonen, one of the designers behind Helsingin Muurarimestari (Helsinki Bricklayer), the studio’s new showcase of brick-based construction. “Solid brick works as a passive heat-storage and cooling structure, making it energy-efficient.” The building’s distinct bricks were manufactured by 60-year-old Finnish family-run atelier Tiileri. Every one of the 300,000 bricks was laid by hand.

“Many of the houses made since the 1960s using precast insulated elements have been torn down due to moisture damage and extensive repair costs, whereas brick houses built more than a century ago still stand,” says Aaltonen. Using bricks is also a stylistic statement and lends buildings a more bespoke look that, in this case, has become an architectural landmark.
avarrus.fi

For more projects like Helsingin Muurarimestari, pick up a copy ofMonocle’s March issue, which is on newsstands now.

It wasn’t just contemporary brands and emerging designers showcasing their wares at Matter and Shape. Lobmeyr, a 202-year-old Viennese heritage house, displayed an edit of pieces originally made for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, which took place in Paris in 1925. On display (and available for purchase in Matter and Shape’s shop) were coupes, glasses and candy dishes cut from Lobmeyr’s signature super-fine and lightweight glass.

There was also a collaboration between Lobmeyr and New York-based tableware specialists Gohar World that consisted of hand-painted drinking glasses and carafes. The US brand run by sisters Laila and Nadia Gohar also created the set, which featured supersized sugar cubes acting as playful plinths for the glassware. At Lobmeyr, it seems that heritage can be continuously refreshed – and so can your glass collection.
lobmeyr.at; gohar.world