If the ground floor of the house in northern Deyan Sudjic in northern London looks a bit naked: all white walls, stripped floors, high ceilings and an elegant steel kitchen with accounting, serves everything best to show the furniture. This is, on its way, exactly the house that could expect the former director of the London Design Museum to have: a perfect backdrop for a collection, in this case, of notable chairs, in a neighborhood with kindness and shrew at easy reach.
However, these exhibitions are not in pedestals but in daily use: a set of Hans Wegner dining chairs, a Gerrit Rietveld Red and blue armchair that is still ridiculously modern despite the fact that its design has more than a century old, and a pair of plywood stools Alvar Aalto Vintage placed next to each other under the high window of the kitchen.
If something boasts in the elegant house of the first Victorians, they are not the modernist furniture, but rather an elaborate stone fireplace, clearly an import of France and wearing a bit arrogant inside this interior very British. “Before buying it,” says Sudjic, 72, sitting on a huge dining table that is as large as a bedroom, “this house belonged to Jasper Conran and John Galliano. They had their study on the upper floor. He was remodeled by [British architect] Nigel Coates, but unfortunately the people to whom they sold it completely remodeled it. The fireplace is one of the few things that survives from that previous period. ”
His last incarnation was designed “with a little advice from John Pawson“Sudjic says. It shows. Particularly on the floor, whose tables seem unusually wide.” Some of them go to the end, “he says.” We had to get a crane to put them. “We headed to the stairs. Harry Bertoia Purple velvet covering chair, a Jasper Morrison Sofa, a Le Corbusier chair, a coffee table Marcel Breuer and inevitable and possibly inexplicable shelves of Dieter Rams for Vitsoecarefully filled with books.
It is a relief almost finding an old wooden -looking wood bed and a pair of dining chairs that come from the suengro house of Sudjic, the architect John Miller. Sudjic’s wife, Sarah Miller, the founding editor of the United Kingdom Travel nast The magazine that now directs a brand consultancy (he is out in an exotic photo shoot when I visit), is from an architectural dynasty: his stepmother was his Rogers, a wife of only once from Richard Rogers who once had a practice with him. “Sarah is trying to implement a book in a book in a book,” says Sudjic. “It doesn’t work so well.”
Sudjic himself (his parents emigrated to the United Kingdom of the former Yugoslavia) began training as an architect, although he quickly gravitated to the media. He was co -founder of Blueprint Magazine in 1983, a large, lush and consciously great magazine that brought together the disparate tentacles of the design scene than Buzzing in London to suggest more coherence than has probably existed. When I ask where he believes that the design goes, four decades after the foundation BlueprintHe says, not necessarily useful, “I am always a bit cautious of the word ‘design’, as if it were one thing. It is not a method.”
Maybe. But the home of the co -founder of the former leading design magazine of the United Kingdom and former director of the Design Museum It certainly seems to have a lot of design. I ask if you think there could be too many chairs in the world? Adopt a slightly sore expression. “As Jasper Morrison said, we don’t need to design a new chair just to refine an existing.”
Sudjic is finishing a book about the furniture manufacturer Vitra. The company has the licenses to make some of the best known and most beloved modernist designs, from Charles and Ray Eames to Jean Prouvé and Hella Jongerius, and an impressive museum in Germany. Now, under the leadership of CEO Nora Fehlbaum, he is making a radical change towards sustainability. “Your former CEO [Nora’s uncle] Rolf Fehlbaum, is a very unusual businessman. He has a doctorate in utopian industrial settlements and what he has built in Weil Am Rhein, with buildings by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Álvaro Siza and others is like a contemporary version of something of Tomáš Baťa or Robert Owen. He made a kind of architectural collage that perhaps no one else could have done. ”
Vitra is a notable company. But it joins in the design ecosystem for hundreds of other outfits that produce fast fashion furniture, infinite chairs, unpleasant sofas and coffee tables. Isn’t there too much production in design now? Even Vitra admits that his Eames sun loungers are intensive in CO2. “What he does [Vitra] Different, “Sudjic insists,” is that it is designed to last 50 years. If I had to have, today, a refrigerator from the 50s, or a car, both would look quite eccentric. Compared to all other objects designed in 1956, I think this chair [he nods towards the lounger] It has lasted quite well. “
While we look around, more and more chairs begin to activate anecdotes, from a fantastically lightweight weight Cassina Gio Ponti Superleggera (who gave him a former Italian editor Domus magazine) to a thick design of Ron Arad made of an old car rover that seems strange. Is it a collector? “Oh no, I’m too disorganized to be a true collector,” he says. “Maybe more an accumulator.”
All these chairs could have adjusted more easily in one of their old houses. “When we start BlueprintHe lived in a loft loft large enough to ride a bicycle. It was a bit like living in the set of The long good Friday. The river had so much presence then, but it was very calm. “He continues:” In those days he believed that an architecture editor should put his money where his mouth is, so I commission Cricket Ground of London of London will know exactly what it means.
Towards the top of the house, stalking in a hall there is another remarkable appearance, a miniature throne with its upholstery replaced by shiny brass slats. “That was designed by Rei Kawakubo,” he says. “She gave it to me when I wrote a book about her.” Paul Smith introduced him to the Comme des Garçons designer on a trip to Japan. “I went to visit textile mills with her, and I went to the demonstration of Paris of their collections, where John Malkovich and Julian Sands were models. At the same time I was watching an Issey Miyake store designed by Shiro Kuramata, and the division line between design, fashion and architecture began to dissolve.” He still receives his costumes from the operation of Paul Smith (“It’s very good, a custom suit”).
He no longer led the design museum, for which he commissioned John Pawson to reinvent the wonderful Commonwealth Institute of the middle of the century as his new Kensington house, one might think that Sudjic was slowing down. But he is writing books, he has his volume vitra soon, he edits an annual design magazine, AnimaAnd he is a professor of architecture and design at the University of Lancaster. And regularly immerses the fingers of the feet in the journalism of the newspapers, which he still loves. “Actually, it’s a license for curiosity, right?” I agree, while I tell my shelves for the last time.