This article first appeared on the design website Designerati and can be seen here.
Since we last spoke – at ISH in 2019 – quite a lot has happened in the wider world! How has the pandemic directly affected you as a designer and impacted upon your approach to work?
This has been an important time to think. We couldn’t travel physically, so we had to travel with our minds and in fact, that process enabled us to discover many things. For example, many people discovered that their homes were not really responding to their needs. Before, they were just using it as a place to sleep, but now people have found new ways of living in their houses and a new way to be with others too outside of the home.
In this context, the role of the home became more important. In Italy during lockdown, for example, you could not buy flour for cooking anywhere because everyone was cooking and rediscovering a part of life that had for many people had been lost.
I’m not trying to say that the pandemic was a good thing because it certainly was not. But it was a moment to stop and think. This virus is a horrible monster, but our task is to look to the future and be positive. Even when things look dark, we have to light a candle and find the path ahead. That’s very important.
For me, in some ways, nothing much changed in that I still work pretty much 24 hours a day! But on another level, a lot is different now. I’ve been thinking more about the word ‘comfort’. Before comfort at home was just a moment in our day, whereas now we have become used to spending much more time there, so what it means to be comfortable is what makes a house a real home.
The way we express ourselves has also changed. There has been a shift from ‘performing’ in public through the clothes we wear, towards expressing this personality through our homes. Influencers share their home environments on Instagram, this becomes aspirational for others, and that changes everything because it means we have to design things that people feel expresses who they are.
It is a big responsibility because of course, you cannot change your sofa or your furniture every day as you can with your clothes, so we are really trying to understand the shades, colours, finishes and proportions as a way to create these performance spaces.
There is a huge opportunity to turn the impact of this awful pandemic into some real opportunities for the years ahead. If we fail to do this then we will have been really stupid.
At the time of that last interview (Designer, May 2019), we spoke about the beginning of your own journey with Ideal Standard and the potential to ‘create a legacy’. How have things progressed since then?
It has been fantastic. I don’t think there has been any other brand that has launched so many new products, and so many innovations. Really it has been quite a revolution in terms of positioning, aesthetic, design strategy and philosophy. It has all been supported with a magazine, the World Tour films, a new catalogue, new showrooms.
There have been a lot of people involved in all of this – I am just one part of the process – but everybody has been working very hard. We all love this brand and we all love the possibility of bringing this brand back to be one of the leaders. It was fully understood that design was one of the pillars to achieve this goal of leadership and I’m proud to be responsible for such a delicate and strategically important element.
Progress has been very strong and very fast, despite all the problems we have faced over the past year and a half. If we had not all experienced such a horrible moment as this pandemic, we could almost certainly have achieved even more. But I have to thank the whole team who have been supporting what we have been doing.
Harnessing the company’s heritage to create new visions is an idea that comes through very clearly with products such as Conca for example. How do you achieve this mix of classic and modern, and how has it manifested in other new products?
For me it is not important for the consumer to understand my job, I just hope that they like the results. I’m not arrogant to feel I can explain or teach anything to anybody. I just have the hope that someone likes what I do.
In terms of the heritage, the opportunity to tap into this was the most exciting part of joining Ideal Standard. Even before the word ‘design’ was being used to describe the community and function that we recognise today, the company was working with architects and designers to develop their products. It is in the company’s DNA.
My aim has not been to redesign, reproduce, or re-edit an old product, but to try to take those values to the next generation. Many of the people who will appreciate these new products were perhaps not even born when the original products were produced, so these new designs do not have to fit any expectations. The most important thing is that they carry the values from these old designs.
Are there more new products to come which are directly linked to this heritage principle?
There is one more product to come in this way, and it is a very classic line. Not only does it link back to one of the earlier products, but it is also inspired by the classic Victorian age. It is based on the proportions and curves but required a very delicate approach, which is important because if classical style is used in a very intelligent way then it can also be super-contemporary to some, and yet also appeal to those who much prefer a more classical environment.
Classic is no less interesting than contemporary. Today we are living in a wonderful moment because anyone can express their own ideas and preferences without being labelled as ‘old fashioned’ or ‘too contemporary’ – you can be whatever you want. The key word to use here is ‘fluid’; you can even change, and this is a really important difference today. You don’t have to be ‘cool’. Instead, you can just be ‘honest’, move away from the expected, and take a risk.
For example, this year, I designed the Home collection for Versace. In terms of the typical style of the brand, it is the furthest thing from ‘me’. It is almost the opposite of me. But they asked me to work with them because they want to change the rules of the brand, and wanted someone who would be curious enough to do it. It was fantastic that they were prepared to do this, and to ask me to come up with something. It was brave for them to do that and brave for me to take it on – sometimes being brave is an important part of our job as designers. If you’re not brave, you’re not so much a designer but more a stylist.