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“I got a chance to work without any questions asked. I wouldn’t have learned what I learned. That is a key difference.” Georges Zigrand: seized his chance Designer Georges Zigrand, who heads up his own business, Integrated Place, and has a design blog, had already tried living in various places before he moved to London. After graduating from university in Strasbourg, Zigrand worked in Frankfurt and Brussels for a year or so, not really earning money but gaining the vital experience required to make him employable. But when he found a job organising and running workshops at the Vitra Design Museum in Charente, France he met his future wife, Sarah. “By default, I moved to London through a combination of not knowing where to go to find work, and following Sarah.” Zigrand found work pretty quickly in the British capital, but was jobbing on what was a minimum wage for a couple of years. “Those were key years, because I learned how to get by with very little means, how to be smart about money. It involved a lot of walking and not many Tube journeys.” Zigrand’s English was what he calls “average for a Luxembourger” when he first landed in London, “I understood most things, but couldn’t speak it very well. And what I struggled with for a very long time is the speed of reaction, especially humour wise. It was a few years of not being able to completely keep up with discussions and jokes. My wife says I still don’t get it, but then she’s from Hartlepool…” One difference Zigrand noticed during his attempts to find work in London was that in the UK experience and ability counted more for employers than formal qualifications and diplomas. “Nobody ever asked if I had a diploma. They test you and if you are good you get the job. I’m not saying it’s bad to have a diploma, in many jobs it is important and necessary, but for creative jobs?” So he thinks that if he hadn’t gone to the UK, he would not have been in the position he is in today. “I got a chance to work without any questions asked.
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I wouldn’t have learned what I learned. That is a key difference.” Indeed, when he did return to Luxembourg, people showed an interest in what he had been doing in London and gave him opportunities to try out small projects. “It took me three years to adjust to Luxembourg again,” he says. Zigrand had kept in close touch with his friends in Luxembourg during his London sojourn. But he also admits that he was very self-absorbed in the city and that his friends back home had moved on in other ways--starting families, buying houses. “All those things that were delayed for me because I was too busy. I almost missed the boat in that sense, which is a London, or big city, specific problem. It was one of the reasons we came back in the end. Whatever was right in going to London at the age of 25 was no longer right at the age of 38.” Indeed, he says that social life in London was much less involved, more superficial perhaps, than in Luxembourg. Here he can go for a drink after work in a local bar like the Bouneweger Stuff and know he will meet someone he knows, or he can spend a whole day walking with friends. That just didn’t happen in London. It is clear that Zigrand did enjoy the specifically British way of working, however. He explains that the British have a very different approach to design than the Germans or French. “In Britain the lack of a well-established design tradition makes them more open to take on things from everywhere. You can pick and mix what’s right. It is the right mix between the cultural and functional aspects. In France aesthetics are much more important; in Germany it is slightly more pragmatic.” Now that the couple has an infant child, Georges is not sure whether an imminent move is on the cards, though he would one day like to return to the UK, although not to London. “A big house by the sea with a dog; that would be ideal.” Georges Zigrand
Lived in London from 1999-2006
march 2013
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06/03/13 12:39