CzechDesign.cz

Ing. arch. Ludvika Kanická, CSc – 24.07.2006

It is not very usual to use pseudonyms in the world of design. However, the name Matali Crasset is so prominent that it cannot be confused with any other, just as the design creations by the woman who bears this name.

Similarly, neither her appearance is mistakable: a fragile, short French with a typical boyish hairstyle and energetic look. Nothing can stop her commitment and dedication, neither the birth of her son. Accompanied by his mother, he visited Prague as early as a several months-old baby on the occasion of the installation of a Matali Crasset exhibition in the French Institute.

From her birth in 1965, Matali Crasset lived in the French countryside with her twin-sister and two brothers. Her original name Natalie was too conventional for her siblings, so Matali came into existence. The countryside affected her lifestyle. It taught her to watch and listen to what she could see and hear around her. Later on, it came handy to her in her practice. She obtained a diploma at École Nationale de Création Industrielle in 1991, and she already exhibited her school-leaving project at the Design Triennial in Milan held a short time after she had finished her studies. After that, she wrote – just to make an attempt - a letter to the firm of Thomson where Philippe Starck was art director at that time. Fortune smiled on her: she did so just at a time when he was looking for fellow workers….

A five-year experience in working with Philippe Starck, a star of the world design, strongly affected Matali. She took over his ability to change over from one project to the other without remaining focused on a single field. Their cooperation climaxed in a prize, the Grand Prix of Design of the City of Paris in 1997, which they were jointly awarded. After Philippe Starck had left Thomson, Matali Crasset established a studio of her own in 1998. She moves across the world of design from industrial and graphic design through to stage design and interior architecture. In so doing, she enjoys herself. She plays. She researches on living space turning it into a mobile environment for poetic experimenting.

A distinctive approach makes it possible for her to get oriented in fields so different from each other such as stage design, industrial design, furniture design, interior architecture or graphic design. She is able to speak about her projects with enthusiasm using an amazingly rich vocabulary. She adapts to the roots but she is not their slave. Speaking of herself, she says that she is a designer – do-it-yourselfer. She works on developing the ideas of modularity, flexibility, hospitality and goodness. We could appreciate it in Prague, too, where she presented, in the French Institute exposition displayed at the Designblok 2003 exhibition, various projects from the world of fauna and flora, for example a little house for children, but also a feeder for squirrels designed for the Luxembourg garden, a dovecot, an exhibition stage design as well as a fruit bar. Her achievement as a designer was acknowledged in 2003 by another prestigious prize awarded to her by the organizer of the Furniture Show in Paris.

The name of this prize is „Le nombre d´or“, and it is awarded for exemplary cooperation between designer and manufacturer. In this case, her partner was the young, dynamic firm of Domeau & Pérez. The company likes to include in its collections interesting projects by various designers, and its executives were literally fascinated by her bed for occasional sleeping, quite an uncommon design. Designing this bed, she solved her own problem: she needed to accommodate her cousin Jim in her small flat in Paris. She rejected all folding mechanisms to be the basis of this bed, and created a felt column, which can be turned into a bed by pulling down a zip. A small reading lamp and an alarm clock are also part of this unusual bed.

Matali Crasset likes Prague. She cooperates with the Prague-based Gandy gallery, for which she created the perfume atomizer Sunic. For her, this atomizer symbolizes a portion of sun and optimism. It was just a sunbeam that inspired her. In order to be able to create a perfume design, she had, at first, to get the hang of the technology of mixing perfumes, a very complicated subject. Perfume, as a matter of nature, has a special meaning to Matali Crasset. Another object belonging to the gallery project is a glass stoup with a plant stem motif inside and an interesting candle. For a long time, she has been interested in fashionable wellness. She often thinks about new functions of the bathroom. At present, the mirror is the attribute of the bathroom; we are interested first of all in what we look like, in our „exterior“. In one of her studies, however, Matali Crasset hung herbs on the walls of the bathroom instead of a mirror. She will use the herbs to mix various clean-up baths and to make dishes. It is said that it is the reflection of „our interior“ that is going to interest us rather than other things, with this reflection manifesting itself outwardly too.

Her approaches to designing bathroom interiors are strongly documented by what she created in cooperation with the Belgium-based firm of Aquamass established in 1978 at a time when the time spent in the bathroom was basically reduced to a minimum, with the only „innovation“ being the bubble bath. However, the bathroom came to turn, step by step, from an almost taboo room into the centre of body culture. The technology of all types of bubble baths applicable in the interior of the flat contributed to it, and the time people spent in the bathroom started to become longer. However, consumers long for a bathroom object, which has „a soul“, and manufacturers have to look into the future. Over the last two years, Aquamass has launched 25 exclusive objects belonging to the Labels d´Aquamass collection, with excellent objects designed by Matali Crasset among them.

Her model HI.BATH won the Belgian Building Awards prize in 2003 while another of her models, Ultrawhite, won the Design Plus prize at the 2003 ISH Fair in Frankfurt. The owner of Aquamass claims that Matali Crasset „has breathed her womanliness into the baths“. We could see Matali Crasset´s baths also in the HI.Hotel in Nice. Originally, the HI.BATH was created of lava stone, but it also exists in the multicoloured „compolight“ variant supplemented by various small elements, such as a magazine carrier, a tray, carpet or a side table.

Also Ultrawhite, the other bath, was created for the HI Hotel. It is a bath with a brush steel baldachin and a fuchsia- -coloured Plexiglas ceiling. The HI Hotel is an experiment. Here, Matali Crasset reified her ideas of a new principle of staying at a hotel. She furnished 38 rooms in 9 different ways. Each room is different, and the guests can move, to their hearts´content, from one room to the other if they stay for a longer period of time. They can share their experiences, for example with people they are sitting next to while having breakfast. In the end, they will know, which environment suits them best, and they can bring their experience into their own homes. This uncommon project could have been implemented only just thanks to the investor’s extraordinary supportiveness.

Matali Crasset was terrified to find out at Thomson (France’s biggest TV-set and electronic equipment manufacturer) that everybody buys a TV-set of his own. Thus, he looses the opportunity of sharing experiences with other people. Family members do not get together to discuss what they are going to jointly watch on TV. One day, each member of the household may have a kitchen of his/her own too. Massive use of home computers replaced the feeling of [family] togetherness. People should communicate more, and the flat should be designed to fit this purpose as best as possible. Setting up home is a demanding process, and not everybody knows their needs and preferences well.

Before it is set up „ready-to-use“, everybody should be given the possibility to try it first. And there is hardly a place better than a hotel to do so! Matali Crasset would not be a French woman if she did not work for the firm of Habitat too. She created a wallpaper prototype. It can be stuck onto the wall in a „beamlike“ manner, just like a plant or tree grow in nature. Everybody can choose the rhythm of sticking strips, which create a figure, or its part. Nature is based on harmony, indeed, and this harmony rests with its repeatability. The blossom is the negative of branches.

Matali Crasset has a close relationship to nature, but she predominantly uses plastics in her creation. She took over from Philippe Starck the theory that recycling has been invented to increase consumption, and therefore destroying plastics would be a step back. What Matali Crasset primarily thinks about is function, not material and technology; the function determines the shape, and only then comes the material. She searches for new applications for plastics. Her search can be exemplified by a lovely waste paper basket made of the brooms used by street sweepers in Paris (polymetacrylate, polypropylene and aluminium). Matali Crasset is one of the few women who conquered the world of design dominated mostly by men. It is a pity that we do not know much about her creation in the Czech Republic. In consideration of the fact that she has a soft spot for Prague, we can but hope that she will soon come back to let us admire her works of design.

She works for the following companies: Abac, Aquamass, Authentics, Artemide, Camif, Centre Georges Pompidou, Comité Colbert, Cristal Saint louis, Deknudt decora, DeVechi, Dim, Domeau & Péres, Domodinamica, Dornbracht, Edra, Gandy gallery, Gilles Peyroulet & cie, Hermes, Hi, Issey Myaké, LaCie, Lexon, Manufacture de Monaco, Orangina, Plaxer, Premiere Classe, Premiere Vision le Salon, Pitti Immagine, Red Cell, San Lorenzo, Seb/Tefal, Tendence, Thomson Multimedia, Top – Mouton, Who´s Next.

Taken from Design Trend 25