Trendspotting at Maison et Objet: Minimalist luxury & serene timelessness

Calm down!” pleaded the trend forecasters at the recent Maison & Objet show in Paris. We have to come back to what’s crystal clear and ask ourselves, “What really is the essence of life?”

The world has become too noisy, too crowded and characterized by mindless consumption. The opulence of our societies and the overabundance of signs that it propagates are blurring values and saturating perceptions. It’s time to unburden ourselves of the artifices of superficiality and uselessness.

Maison’s trend observatory members suggest that instead of excess, let’s choose the best. Let’s go for the “Essentiel.” For them, minimalist luxury is reestablishing a bare, serene timelessness. The contemporary spirit contemplates beauty in its most elementary sobriety. It seeks to reconcile the traditional, current and future. It is a most exciting time when discoveries in the techno-sciences are reinvigorating an optimistic vision of the future.

Minimum by Elizabeth Leriche

Yenwen Tseng’s “Ladder” coatrack and “Melt” chair by K%

Just like the change in administration — from Sarkozy’s glitz to Hollande’s austerity — Elizabeth Leriche’s interpretation of the trend theme is an anti-bling luxury of privileging “less” by turning its back on overload.

Whereas in math, the term “minimum” refers to the smallest degree one can reduce a value, here it has become something unique, an added value, a character that shapes the perception and process of producing an object. Her proposed design aesthetic is characterized by lighter forms, bare geometry, simple lines, transparent materials and a gradation of colors. Minimal as they may seem, there is high emotional wattage. Far from the illusion of emptiness, some order is brought back to our desires and perceptions that have been saturated by the mass of objects from the global market. Leriche observes that “design is creating minimalist art that plays the card of discretion and invites contemplation.” This stylistic asceticism frees the space from the weight of things and in the process reveals the essence of the beautiful.

Ron Gilad’s “Grado” collection of furnishings, for example, reflects the designer’s predilection for geometric shapes. In designing tables, wardrobes, book cases, mirrors and shelves, he plays conceptually and materially with revolutionary elements thereby producing objects that fascinate and capture our imagination. Leriche calls them “objects of pure light that appear to suggest hidden treasures.”

Joanna Grawunder’s “Platform” series includes a table made of dyed steel shot through with fluorescent light. She wanted to create a completely abstract form with no superfluous details, “fundamentally a block of steel from which small slices of green light emanate.” She called the piece “The Tron Table” because the slices of light define its compact form just like the silhouettes in the movie. Above all, she says, “It’s a way of underscoring the table’s geometry, just enough to tease out a bit of magic from the contours of a block of steel.”

Specimen Ediions’ “Object Dependency” series explores new forms created by reversing nature and the logic of the relationship between furniture and objects. Nendo’s collection presents “dependent furniture pieces” that can only exist because of the objects for which they were created. Objects stabilize the furniture piece and allow it to attain its function. Adding these objects to the furniture also has other unexpected effects like helping adjust the inclination of a lamp or splitting a shelf in two. “Used in this way, these books, teacups and bottles help furniture fully fill its role,” according to Leriche. “Above all, they reveal the furniture’s soul, aestheticism and poetry.”

Kazuhiro Yamanika’s “Sound Cloud” monolith of free standing or wall-hung glass acts as a source of light and sound. Transparent in its off state and emitting a soft light when switched on, it uses a wireless connection to a smartphone or computer so that the light-emitting glass also becomes a speaker capable of replaying the user’s choice of music. The designer has obviously transcended the technological identity of the material to reveal an intrinsic lyricism. “The alliance of transparency, sound and light creates an unexpected cloud of sound that introduces a completely new way of enjoying music,” observes the curator.

Elements by François Bernard

François Bernard’s vision combines geometrical, archetypal, molecular and abstract forms to achieve a simple, poetic timelessness. He qualifies, however, that “if this kind of elementary expression is simple, it is not simplistic. The objects are rich with emotion and sensation!” The geometrical dimension fuses with the physical states of nature whose elements — water, earth, fire and air — bring fluidity, mass, cohesion and power or conversely, lightness and evanescence. “These objects invite us to ‘dream’ of their forms, their surface appearance, or the physical properties of their materials.”

Water in its serene and calm state invites reflection. It also influences design through fluidity, transparencies, blurred surfaces, softness, lacquered and reflective surfaces. There are nuances of deep blue and turquoise, hazy graphics of bleeding inks. The strong impact of this element has actually made cobalt blue one of the major colors of the season.

Air conjures dreams: Fragile, light, inflated, disembodied, ethereal, phantom-like, invisible, objects with their shapes softened in the clouds. Meteorological and climactic states like rain, steam, mist, clouds and storms are sources of inspiration.

Earth promotes rest and stability. Materials assert their solidity through simply built forms with the force of magnetism enabling the creation of new shapes. Earth assures an extremely physical presence in objects that have been solidified and crystallized; in stone, salt and clay. Its influence has made the sphere an omnipresent geometric form.

Fire creates energy. Its massive power inspires a new generation of objects in copper. Both alchemical and contemporary, it embodies energy, beauty and softness.

Yes future! by Vincent Gregoire for Nelly Rodi agency

For Vincent Gregoire, what is essential is to look to the future. So much time has been wasted from our obsession with a magnified past that we feel was so much better. Gregoire laments that we have frozen our memory into a commemorative nostalgia and clenched our minds on a present that’s going nowhere — “a deficit of a future that is driving us straight into a brick wall.”

 “We are not museum curators!” he admonishes. We have to adopt new schemes and an attitude of optimism so that changes can be made to bring on the future. Although we should not be naïve, we must still break the vain cycle of reproducing the outdated and the passé.

If we look close enough, tomorrow is already taking shape before our eyes. Innovative technology, new machines and materials, novel services and actions are creating unheard-of ways of being. Knowledge has never been sought out, assembled and shared to the same extent as it has now. This has fueled a new wave of discovery and experimentation that enables designers to rethink and revamp vocabularies of forms and invent types of objects that will change our everyday life.

Techno-sciences are regenerating the laboratory of the contemporary in a way that de-dramatizes and playfully appropriates innovation: Les Cahiers Europeens de l’Imaginaire talks about “techno-magic” while sociologist Michel Maffesoli considers post-modern technology a part of “the re-enchantment of the world.” Designers can actually be likened to explorers in outer space. Fashion designer Iris Van Herpen, who uses innovative materials and 3-D printers to radically refresh our silhouette, puts it succinctly: “What interests me in science is precisely the ability to help us discover our universe.”

Granted that ushering in the future cannot be done with “the simple wave of a magic wand,” we still have to lay the foundation by evoking other worlds. Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut, for example, has conjured the “Lilypad,” an ocean-borne floating ecopolis for climate refugees with aquaculture fields and biological farms. Virgin Galactic is already scheduling sub-orbital travels for the tourists of tomorrow.