STARCK CONTRAST
Starck Contrast - Luxury Travel Magazine
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Starck Contrast | |||||
| By: Christine Hogan, Issue 17 – Summer 2004 | |||||
| (Philippe Starck, design, enfant terrible) | |||||
| THE ENFANT TERRIBLE OF INTERNATIONAL DESIGN SAYS HE ISN’T INTERESTED IN MONEY, YET PHILIPPE STARCK IS BUSILY MAKING A FORTUNE FROM HIS HIGH-PROFILE COMMISSIONS. | |||||
| How many times have you woken up in a strange hotel room and wondered the following: Where on earth are you? What the hell time is it? And more importantly – what about the weather? Philippe Starck, the enfant terrible of international design, has brought his fierce intellect and exacting design sensibilities to bear on these recurring problems for Oregon Scientific to help travellers (and those who stick closer to home) understand the world they live in precisely. His apparently simple cubes in the Time and Weather Collection – four different models from small basic clocks with barometers to the super-sophisticated Multi model – are designed to minimise, at a glance, the many complexities of our immediate environment. And they all reflect his basic credo – that good design can and should be a part of everyday life. For Starck, it’s essential, and creating it pushes him to new heights. “I am always looking for the magic in everyday life,” he says. The Visual and Multi models in the collections can project the time onto a wall or ceiling, so that even in the darkest light, you can read it clearly. The striking collection, in all its elegant simplicity – very functional, very spare, very Starck – also gives the weather for the next 12 to 24 hours. The more advanced models are radios, and display the current indoor and outdoor temperatures. More specifically, these entrancing cubes are primarily radio-controlled clocks, tied into an official atomic clock, accurate to one millionth of a second per year. They have an LCD display, giving the hour, minute and second, plus a calendar in five languages for the day and month, and are also alarm clocks. Because the designer is Philippe Starck – famous for designing public spaces such as the nightclub Les Bains Douches and Café Costes in Paris, Felix Restaurant perched on top of The Peninsula in Hong Kong, and the Hotel Mondrian in Los Angeles, you have not just one but a choice of melodies to bring you gently to consciousness. Not for Starck the horror of being jangled awake with a tune out of harmony with the individual using it. These have a total of seven wake-up sounds to choose from, so one of them should strike a chord with the person using it. Starck was in Sydney recently to help launch the collection and add his considerable reputation to the promotion of what is essentially a clock with a number of interesting bells and whistles. Dressed, as usual, in black from his boots to his cap, Starck is the very model of the modern design guru, the man who redesigned the private apartments of the Elysée Palace for President Mitterand, who worked with Ian Schrager on the interiors of Studio 54 and some of the hippest hotels in the world, has done yachts with French boat-builder Benéteau, and whose work is shown in museums from Paris to New York, London to Barcelona, Kyoto to Munich. He’s as likely to be designing a toothbrush as an ashtray, a lemon squeezer as a motorcycle, a baby monitor as a plastic stool. There is nothing too big or too small for his attention – he also owns an organic food company and restaurant, and part of yoo Australia, a design and development company he formed with the Australian developer Andrew Retting, and John Hitchcox, a leading London property developer. During his trip to Australia, Starck was having a look at Meta, an inner-city Surry Hills redevelopment of 77 apartments that is similar to yoo’s project, Tribeca, in East Melbourne. It’s a busy portfolio – there are on-going yoo projects from Buenos Aires to Tel Aviv, via London and Miami. It’s a full life for a man who describes himself as ‘nothing’ – not an architect, not a designer but a citizen of the world. He’s a little ingenuous in this claim because he is also a terrific subversive in his own unique way, a man who likes to take perceived wisdom, give it a little twist and then set it firmly on its ear. During the week he was in Australia, he was inescapable in the media – Who Weekly reported he and his American wife Nori (when he first saw her, he says he was metaphorically ‘pinned against a wall’ by her eyes) have 20 houses around the world, each set up with the same books, the same sheets, the same shirts. The couple were shot in Paris – he in Davy Crocket hat, she in feathers and pearls, in front of the Eiffel Tower. In The Australian Women’s Weekly, Starck, who now lives in London’s Notting Hill with Nori and their daughter K (now there’s a minimalist name), appears to have 15 houses around the world, is a sexual obsessive, a designer who hasn’t finished his own house, the son of a woman who was an actress/artist and an aircraft designer father who gave the world the twist-up lipstick case. He is shot in black suit, she’s in feathers again, this time with a G-string under a skirt which is open from hip-bone to hip-bone. For all the publicity blather surrounding Starck, there’s no doubt he’s his own best creation – a designer trying to reduce the design levels of everything to its simplest and pared-down best. He’s looking forward, for instance, to when the Time and Weather Collection can be reduced to a microchip and inserted under the skin. No need to turn anything on, or look at anything – all the information will be right there, within us. In some ways, it’s just as well he’s doing himself out of a job. It’s hard to see how many of Starck’s clients don’t get what he’s up to. In Felix, the handsome dining room atop Hong Kong’s legendary Peninsula Hotel on Kowloon, the restaurant is both exciting and a little challenging as Starck has some fun. For the first-time diner, the bathrooms are a compulsory pit-stop. Both have wonderful views but in the men’s, the urinals seem perched right on top of the city. And then there’s the bar – upstairs. The vertiginous stairs make some women in even a moderate heel cling to the handrail on the way up as well as down. “It makes you feel a little as though you are drunk before you go to the bar,” says Starck. Maybe, but it also feels as though the person who designed the Felix space is being a tad playful about the people who might be climbing up there and spending money on cocktails overlooking the dazzling harbour. If Honkers is all about money, it’s not something Starck wants to buy into. “I hate that,” he insists. Ironically, he’s most content talking about the baby bottles he’s designing for Target, and about getting good design into the hands of his fellow citizens. He’s happiest, though, in trying to out-think the opposition. “No-one can follow me, not even me,” he says, without a trace of irony, as he leaves his press conference, sweeping up his team of PR flunkeys in his flashing comet’s trail. | |||||
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