Three Layer Cake

What food/dessert best describes your design style (or your approach to design)?  How has it changed individually since you started working together?  What would you like it to be in five years?
E:  I think the one that describes our work best is probably a dessert for which you need to combine things, like bread & butter, or bread with butter and jam, which I especially like.  I think that our approach is like this kind of dessert in which you combine simple elements on your own, it’s not done for you.  Over time we are trying to add some more strange elements to this dessert.

R:  A good fish, well chosen, prepared without complication and well-cooked.
 

First thing you notice in a restaurant?
E: The way the waiter welcomes me.  To me it’s one of the biggest deals in our society—  social interaction and hospitality.  This is for me the most important thing inside a restaurant.

R:  I care about the authenticity of the place. 

Eating what food brings back the best memories and why?

E:  I have a passion for bread and all foods that are sandwiches in general.  I don’t know, maybe it’s more something which is behind my family background, or this way of having an incredible but improvised dinner.  Just in one moment people collide together for a picnic or big meal which is made up of something each person brought. I like this type of event without “rules”.

R:  Langoustines remind me of Brittany.
 

R:  First piece of furniture you placed in your home?

An old 60s marble table, a round one, a bit of a copy of Saarinen.  It was a dinner table made of marble.

E:  Last piece of furniture you fell in love with?

For my 30^th birthday I was given the Eames Lounge chair and I fell in love with it.  It’s the first furniture I ever had in my life that wasn’t used (hand me down) and is the first time a piece of furniture brings me so much service and comfort.  Everything I had in my life before was just…but this one just came in and is such an incredible device for an incredible function—relaxing.  For this reason I really fell in love with it.
 

No home is complete without?

E:  A ceramic bowl.  If you don’t have a ceramic bowl it can’t be a real home. 

But you like bread!  What do you put in it?  The coffee to put the bread inside!  To me a ceramic bowl is something I love for its function because it can become so many things.  For example, for a kid’s birthday party, it can become a harp or something like this, it has so many purposes.

R:  ...A window.

R:  Zizou, Henry, or Ronaldinho?  Henry!

E:  Red, white, or blue?  My answer will be a little linked with soccer too.  I will choose red, because right now I am wearing a red scarf of AC Milan.  I’m not a pure tifoso of Milan, but I love the drama inside football in general.  I pulled for Lyon, of course, but Milan won so I am wearing their scarf today.  But I like to wear this scarf because to me in football there is this incredibly important element of society which in a way there’s a playful fight, but still a fight and it’s a way in which people react with a lot of instinct and react with a lot of desire.  It is something that is not controlled.
 

Celebrity (or public figure) you’re inexplicably intrigued by?

E:  At the end maybe Philippe Starck.  I think he’s really strange and I am incredibly surprised by his way of … what I find interesting is what he achieved in design by using the media as a tool—  from a design point of view.  He achieved it with strange manners.  But he was strong in his approach.  For some ways, I don’t like the manner in which he achieved things.  But I am so impressed with the way he was able to communicate things of the design concept.  Starck used the media to advance the design concept.

R:  None…really, I have no idea!
 

Magazine (or website) you can’t live without?

R:  None. 

E:  None of them.  I read books.  First, my girlfriend works for a radio program.  She’s a newscaster.  So I know from her so much of the news, purely the journalistic point of view which I love.  And the other thing, I read books, I never read a magazine in fact.  I think a magazine is only one part of design, such a small part.  You get so much more from taking a scooter ride around Paris and observing people and seeing what they are doing.  It’s much more revealing to look at the world and what surrounds you in small detail.  I look at people in the street, like how they react to the cold or how they handle a baby.  I don’t look at fashion shows.  I would never buy a magazine before getting on the train, I’d buy a book.
 

So if you’re not looking at magazines, where do you look to verify that your designs are innovative, or at least not similar to what’s already out there? 

E:  I have my own ways of verifying this, but really Ronan has very strict rules on not doing what anyone else has done, and I leave that for him.  I really trust him on that and so I don’t get involved in that aspect.

 
You can never have too many/too much …

E:  I love to be in a situation in which everything is calm and quiet and you’re not surrounded by actual things, but things which become symbolic.  So my thing is that as much as I can widen the space around me and get it simple enough and poetic enough, that’s what I like the most.

R:  Sugar.

Photo credits:  Portrait, Morgane Le Gall; Kvadrat showroom Paul Tahon and Ronan Bouroullec; all others Studio Bouroullec