58 — Christophe de la Fontaine

Product Design

CHRISTOPHE DE LA FONTAINE

58

Front Cover CHARLOTTE with Aylin Langreuter Chaise longue, 2017 Powder-coated or anodized aluminum, leather seat, and mattress. © Katarina Cirkovic Back Cover LITTLE ODD Chest, 2015 Powder-coated aluminium, white © Katarina Cirkovic

THE JOURNEY THAT BROUGHT CHRISTOPHE DE LA FONTAINE TO CREATING HIS BRAND DANTE – GOODS AND BADS WITH HIS WIFE, ARTIST AYLIN LANGREUTER, IS A FASCINATING ONE. IT STARTS WITH THE ALMOST ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY OF AN ARTISTIC VOCATION IN LUXEMBOURG, FOLLOWED BY FORMATIVE YEARS IN STUTTGART UNDER SAPPER, A PROLIFIC DECADE AS THE DESIGN HEAD OF A PROMINENT STUDIO IN MILAN, AND FLOURISHES WITHIN THE CONFINES OF A 13TH CENTURY CASTLE IN THE BAVARIAN COUNTRYSIDE.

CHRISTOPHE DE LA FONTAINE

COME AS YOU ARE with Christophe de la Fontaine © Katarina Cirkovic

You have had quite an interesting design journey. Let’s start from the beginning.

You went to the Arts et Métiers in Luxembourg, a vocational school which nurtured practical skills in its student body.

Were the seeds of your love for design planted then, or does the root of your story begin further back in time?

The Arts et Métiers was a real a fortune for me. At home, we talked about how it would be better if I did something practical, but when I was that young, I did not look at it as something positive necessarily, it felt more like I was being reduced to something. By the time I was there, however, it was exactly the opposite. It opened a whole new horizon. It all of sudden became much bigger and it felt like there was a whole different world out there that was waiting to be experienced.

So, did your presence in that school bring that creative streak out in you and make it flourish or was that something you were already drawn to?

Definitely. Maybe there was this kind of leaning towards it already, maybe it started at home with the way I was educated. I grew up with my sister and my mom. My mother tried to make me mindful of certain things and point them out to me.

If we were walking down the street she would say, don’t just look at the street, if there is a nice building, open your eyes and look at it. There was maybe a certain sensitivity to art but not in any particular way. It was not like anyone in the family was an artist, beside maybe my great great grandfather who was a writer and who was actually more marginalized inside the family, even-though he is a national poet [Edmond de la Fontaine known as Dicks]. So, creativity wasn’t always necessarily confronted in the most positive way.

It didn’t feel very much like school in the classic sense. I was in sculpture class, there were 3 or 4 of us, if I remember correctly, and we were mixed in with other people who did fine art and also the graphic department who were really learning things from scratch not just on the computer, but really doing incisions and learning old techniques. It felt really natural being inside this system. It was really positive. We were there every day until 6 in the evening, but it didn’t feel long.

From there how did you end up in Stuttgart?

Why was that experience important in shaping your direction especially under Richard Sapper?

At that time, I wasn’t yet in the design world, I was still a teenager. By the end of my studies in Luxembourg, the art world and its uncertainty or rather the clichés thereof were still in my mind.

I didn’t feel like I could just let go and see where I would end up, so the world of design felt more applied and more conscious of something precise and maybe even more pragmatic in that you could find a job in the end. I initially applied to the Art Centre which at that time had a branch in Switzerland. They accepted me but then in April the school closed its branch in Europe.

So, I had four months to find another school where I could study. One of the teachers told me to check out Stuttgart. She said, if you are lucky Richard Sapper will be there for another 2 or 3 years. I ended up going there and it felt very cool. There was a similar spirit to the Arts et Métiers, it didn’t feel too school-ish. As you walked through the corridors you saw skateboards around everywhere. Guys walking around with prototypes in their hands, moving between workshops. It felt really exciting from the first moment on, with the added bonus of having someone like Sapper who was teaching there.

He was of course a real character. The moment

“CREATIVE PEOPLE THAT WERE WORKING WITH THEM JUST TOOK MILLIMETRE STEPS. IT WAS A REALLY...

MINIMA MORALIA Room divider, 2015 Powder-coated steel, grey, pleated fabric © Dante

... DIFFICULT TIME TO BE ABLE TO DO YOUR JOB LIKE YOU THINK IT SHOULD BE DONE. ALSO, THERE WAS A BIT OF AN ENTREPRENEURIAL DRIVE WITHIN ME THAT MADE ME SAY, WELL IF THEY DON’T TAKE ANY RISKS, WE WILL.”

BAVARESK HIGH Dining Chair, 2015 Beech base, stained, upholstered in white leather and fabric © Dante

H.E.A. 310 Stool, 2015 Powder coated t-beam in anthracite, upholstered leather seat © Dante

he walked into a room his aura took over.

He was probably in his late 60s. He made a real big impression. Under Sapper and also another Professor, Klaus Lehmann (he was the director of the school at that time) you had two components. Sapper was maybe more hands on and practical while Lehmann was more theoretical and from a Bauhaus background. That was a nice mix. But in the end the thing with Sapper was that it was not enough to just do something.

The basis was always to have an idea. You first need to have an idea. And if you have an idea that you are able to formulate and to communicate, then you have an initial starting point and you take ownership of it.

What were the most essential lessons and skills that you took from that educational experience?

That it’s not just about doing something for the sake of it, but you have a precise idea that you are following, which guides your entire process.

Each of the steps you have to follow to bring something to an end, you always have something to reflect on. How is it possible to realise it?

How is it feasible? How is it functional? How does it represent itself and so on, but you always have the possibility to play back and forth with this initial idea. I think that was one of the most important lessons we learned there. We had fun but we worked a lot. The working experience with the other students was really good, so we actually ended up working there every day, together, until 9 or 10 in the evening. The biggest thing we got from being there was that we knew how to take our own direction. We learned to always dig a little deeper.

Is that why you also felt at home for a long time heading the studio at Urquiola? I read that one of the important lessons you took away from there is that there never is a shortage of ideas.

Yeah, definitely. Ideas are never ending. As a creative there are always a lot of things going on in your head. There’s never a problem of not having enough ideas, it’s more about the capacity to make them materialize, to make them be the right one for the right place and the right people.

There are so many things to follow there.

It’s not enough just to have a good idea. We are constantly surrounded by things that inspire us, but the most critical point is when you are able to transform the idea into something physical that has to exist and have its purpose. It has to function. It should answer the question: why should it come into our world? In that process

there are so many other things that we need to respect to make it happen that the initial thing of having a good idea almost seems easier in some way.

But going back to your journey, after Stuttgart you came to London. Therefore London, seems to have a highly functional approach to design. Can you talk about that experience?

Yes, while I was in Stuttgart it felt like I was inside a bubble. Over the span of 5 years you experience a lot. Then you get to the end and you think, ok so what happens now? I got my diploma and now I am out in the real world. So, with 3 others I decided to take a year off before we getting to the end of our degree. That’s how I ended up going to London for 6 months, followed by another 6 months in Milan with Piero Lissoni. The London experience was quite significant. It was a proper industrial design studio that was working on consumer products and also some more technical things. There were engineers, model makers. It was a more service-oriented approach to design. In the end it was a proper business. You do a service, and you assist clients in developing a new product and launch the first pieces. It was the opposite of what I later experienced in Milan which was more along the lines of authorship design – you have a person in the front of it that really represents a whole attitude of design, where the end consumer is aware who designed this or that thing. This was a completely different.

“ANYTHING CAN BE DONE IF YOU JUST HAVE TO DO IT ONCE. BUT WHEN YOU HAVE TO MAKE SOMETHING THAT HAS TO BE REPEATED THEN THERE ARE MANY MORE TRICKS THAT YOU HAVE TO COME UP WITH AND MANY MORE THINGS THAT YOU HAVE TO RESPECT. IN THE END, AS DESIGNERS OUR JOB IS TO SEE HOW WE CAN TURN OUR IDEAS INTO SOMETHING REPRODUCEABLE.”

NIGHTINGALE Lantern, 2014 Raw porcelain by Rosenthal, leather belt, gx53 LED © Katarina Cirkovic

When you look at Therefore it seems extremely functional and almost in its ethos an antithesis to how you explain the idea behind Dante that seems highly emotional.

So how did that experience shape your journey going forward – did you retrieve some useful lessons, or did you also realise ok, this is not what I want to be doing.

The design world is big and offers many possibilities. But I think the most important - besides having your own philosophy or your own point of view or your own work, you need to have the tools, and you need to have the education in being able to create something. Because it takes a lot of skills to bring something to life that is usable. It’s like a doctor, you need to know exactly how everything functions before you start doing your thing. So, in that respect the experience was interesting because I saw how even the most complex things can be managed quite well with a good team where each person is a master of their task. It’s more like a chain where everything has to work to accomplish something.

From there you went on to Lissoni and then to Patricia Urquiola where you headed the design department.

Later in Milan, it is true that it was a whole different world. I can still remember the first meetings with Piero Lissoni and his design team.

The arguments were completely different.

It was more about whether you liked it or not, but before liking was not an option for me. It was something that could maybe happen in the end that you may like this thing, but there were so many aspects that came into play before that.

So, whether I liked something or not was never a consideration until that moment.

Arriving in Milan must have felt like you were integrating a part of design history.

Did it feel like a historical milestone to you at the time?

No, I don’t think so at all. Maybe you become conscious of it afterwards. When I started working at Patricia Urquiola’s studio it was really small and the approach was really one to one.

I felt quite confident with the work I was doing, and in the end, it was more like I entered the studio and almost did my own thing. You felt really responsible for everything you did. You just brought things out the whole time. We went from being a small studio to having a certain scope and increasingly big clients coming in every day. Things were being produced and being presented at the fair in Milan. You immediately saw the fruit of your labour.

At Patricia’s things were working in such an efficient way, that it was almost like today you have the idea, tomorrow you produce it and the day after you can find it in the shops. I started part-time and then it became full-time, and then I ended up being there for ten years. Of course, the experience that you can have in that situation is incredible. You are living in a city and outside of the city there is this whole industrial area where everything is produced. You go in and out to the suppliers and actually your daily job is to go on and develop things. The attitude of the industry is such that they are really dedicated to the progettista (the designer) or the architect that is working for them. You are the one that is coming with the idea of something new and for them everything revolves around accomplishing this.

Christophe de la Fontaine & Aylin Langreuter © Katarina Cirkovic

At what point did you find yourself at the crossroad that made you want to leap into writing your own design story.

After several years it almost became like a golden cage, on the one hand you have the drive to move on with your personal projects but on the other hand your situation is comfortable and there is a kind of routine and ease.

I think there always has to be a moment when you are more critical, and you understand that things are getting too comfortable. That’s the time to break out of the bubble, and to push ahead with the things you feel inside of you.

That’s when I understood that it was time to move unto a new chapter. By that time, I was with my wife and we had kids.

“THE IDEA WAS TO NOT JUST DO SOMETHING THAT REMAINS WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THE DESIGN WORLD: YOU INVITE A FAMOUS DESIGNER, YOU MAKE A PIECE DESIGNED BY HIM, AND THE THING JUST RUNS BY ITSELF… NO, WHY SHOULD WE? WE WANT TO GET MORE OUT THERE.”

BAVARESK HIGH Dining Chair, 2014 Stained wood © Katarina Cirkovic

BAVARESK ROUND Dining table, 2016 Top laminate, legs lacquered wood © Camille Vivier

Design is said to fulfil a functional purpose first, while art primarily stirs emotions.

You have created a company that creates a balancing act between the two.

An artist (your wife Aylin Langreuter) and an industrial designer’s vision. Was this a sort of natural outcome of your vocations being juxtaposed or did you feel the need to fill a specific void when you created the company?

With Aylin we were asking ourselves how we could join forces and create our own company.

As a designer your fingers are in many more pots than just the development of single products.

There is a strategic component as well among other things. I had also developed a relationship after all these years with the supplying companies. That gave us the idea to say, ok what happens if we are the ones that design, develop, produce and then maybe even distribute our own products. Coordinating the whole process from A to Z. Did you feel like it was a natural evolution, because you were life partners and you each wanted to bring something creative to fruition together? Or did you feel like these are the skills we have and we feel like there is something missing out there in the world and we want to give these products a raison d’être and this is the way we collaborate together and make that happen.

EL SANTO JIFFY Armchair, 2015 Base powder coated metal, upholstered leather © Dante

In the end these things they just grow. It’s not like they just happen from one day to the next.

On the one hand it was maybe due to a little bit of frustration that you know you have certain skills and you have the capacity of bringing things to life and making something happen.

On the other hand, post crisis after 2008, the creative industry was really affected. Factories were no longer willing to take any risks, they

needed to make sure that a year later they would still exist. Creative people that were working with them just took millimetre steps. It was a really difficult time to be able to do your job like you think it should be done. Also, there was a bit of an entrepreneurial drive within me that made me say, well if they don’t take any risks, we will.

2008 was the first time I worked with Aylin on a couple of projects. We are two distinct people with strong characters. It took a little bit of time until we got together but then when we started working it felt really natural. Aylin’s creative process is quite similar to how I was used to working. From the inception of an idea, to how you develop it and how you bring it into shape and the type of craftsmen you work with.

From her perspective, having studied philosophy, I think there is more of this intellectual component that comes with it, this idea of reflecting over something. I think she would never refer to herself as a designer and I would never define myself as an artist: both of us are eager to leave this knowledge and this baggage that we have in our respective fields behind us. It is always about digging deeper and definitely bringing these two worlds together without mixing them.

So, it’s a conscious blurring of the lines between art and design?

Yes, or rather a design company with an art approach. Definitely not pieces that have to be sold in a gallery with a zero added at the end to justify that this is something valuable. In the end what we are doing are products that someone can buy on a daily basis and hopefully in 20 years as well. There is definitely the desire to do something that is reproduceable because literally anything can be done if you just have to do it once. But when you have to make something that has to be repeated then there are many more tricks that you have to come up with and many

PLUS OU MOINS Shelving System, 2017 Powder-coated aluminum, in black © Katarina Cirkovic

more things that you have to respect. In the end, as designers our job is to see how we can turn our ideas into something reproduceable.

What are your thoughts on this trend of design collecting on the back of art collecting?

I think all of this is actually really positive because in the end what it does is just raise more awareness on what people in this part of the creative industries are doing. I have no prejudice against this, and I think it’s fantastic to be able to see how many people are able to interpret a certain typology of product in so many different ways that it just opens our eyes much more every day. But it is just not what I aim for as a designer.

For us the division is actually quite clear, Aylin is more like an art director for the company and I am more the designer. You need a certain structure, not just for the company itself, but you need structure in your design process. So, we have some kind of manifesto, even though it is nothing that we think will change the world but more something we need for our inner structure.

In your particular approach of inviting an outsider to the design world to create with you and for you. What is it that you are looking for? How do you make your choice of who to invite and how do you ensure that it doesn’t turn into a sort of trap but still continues to satisfy your initial quest?

We have this idea of having a collection every year where we have a so-called guest that hopefully is from outside of the design world.

This gives us a theme to work with, something where we can reflect our ideas on. From the typology of the product to the material, to the way the entire concept is communicated,

“THE PIECES NEED TO HAVE AN EDGE. YOU STOP, YOU LOOK AT IT AND YOU MOVE ON. IN THE END THAT’S WHAT WE ALWAYS TRY TO DO IN DESIGN. IF WE ARE DEFINING SOMETHING NEW, WE NEED TO HAVE A NEW LANGUAGE FOR SOMETHING.”

COME AS YOU ARE Serving trolley, 2013 Powder-coated steel in white, tempered glass panels © Katarina Cirkovic

the images, the catalogue – it actually influences everything. With Admit one Gentleman collection we had Charles Schumann – a real character who is a bartender from Munich – bringing his world to ours. We came up with the idea of doing a bar cart for example, and the thing with the champagne buckets. It gave us something to play with.

But you’ve also worked with Stefan Diez who comes from the design world.

We don’t consider the designers that collaborate with us as part of this inspirational story.

They are more like contributors. The idea was to not just do something that remains within the confines of the design world: you invite a famous designer, you make a piece designed by him, and the thing just runs by itself… no, why should we? We want to get more out there.

So, we have more of a general theme, with Charles Schumann it was the bartender, nightlife, vice, and maybe also the bad parts of our overstimulated lives.

When you say you invite a guest, it is a conceptual guest, not always a physical guest.

Exactly, it can be a person, but it doesn’t have to be. After Charles Schumann we were with Camille Vivier a French photographer. There was Gustave Doré the deceased illustrator, then we had the design classics that inspire us in our daily life - so it’s a conceptual guest.

One of my absolute favourite creations of yours is Minima Moralia. Can you talk to me about how it came to be?

It came from what we called Metropolitan Improvement. The guest was the citizen himselfso you, me and everyone. We considered how

we live, and a lot of us are living in cities.

We didn’t need to reinvent the whole living room. It was the idea of separating rooms into other rooms, it was about intimacy and privacy.

And that’s when we came up with the idea of doing a paravent – a room divider.

To be honest though if someone goes into a shop and likes the paravent, they don’t need to know the whole back story. Then again, we live in a time where there are so many products and we have so much of everything all around us, that we believe it is not enough to just add one more thing to the mix. It has to be one thing that should become a favourite…or maybe not, but we don’t want to be in the “safe” in-between space. Which explains our name Dante-goods and bads.

Why was creating a “bad” part of the necessary narrative of your brand?

We want to state from the start that we are not willing to just be the nice guys. We have to be polarising. We don’t have to be liked by everyone. Of course, we didn’t create this company just for the sake of it, it’s also a business, but on the other hand just following trends – now only going for the minimal Nordic, then again for the eclectic-i-don’t-know-what that’s not our thing.

We try to forge our own way and doing things that we define as being in between times.

If someone likes what we do, that’s fantastic, but if you don’t, well then you don’t. We want to go against the grain.

We wanted products that come with an edge but without forcing it, without having too much reference to something that is maybe already in the air. A reference is always good but we don’t want to be doing retro stuff and on the other end we don’t want to be so conceptual that you think, that’s fine for a gallery but how should this fit

into someone’s home. But we understood that if there is some kind of reminiscence inside of the product, the analogy is always there or at least you can feel some kind of analogy to something.

We see that at the fairs when people are passing by, the moment they point at something and go wow, that’s the moment you know you succeeded. It’s not a wow because you did a crazy feather bird. Maybe It’s because you pull out a typology that some people forgot existed, or maybe because inside your design language you designed something that referenced something. It reminds you of something that might have been there. It can be the typology, the graphic language, the material, so you have so many points where you are able to evoke an emotion in the one that is seeing the object.

The pieces need to have an edge. You stop, you look at it and you move on. In the end that’s what we always try to do in design. If we are defining something new, we need to have a new language for something.

WONDERLAND Mirror, 2016 Powder-coated steel, black and champagne © Katarina Cirkovic

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31 LA FILLE D'O Fashion Design 2016 32 RUEDI BAUR Graphic Design 2016 33 ROMAIN URHAUSEN Product Design 2016 34 MR BINGO Illustration Design 2016 35 KIKI VAN EIJK Product Design 2016 36 JEAN-PAUL LESPAGNARD Fashion Design 2017 37 PE’L SCHLECHTER Graphic Design 2017 38 TIM JOHN & MARTIN SCHMITZ Scenography Design 2017 39 BROSMIND Illustration Design 2017 40 ARMANDO MILANI Graphic Design 2017 41 LAURA STRAßER Product Design 2017 42 PHOENIX DESIGN Industrial Design 2018 43 UWE R. BRÜCKNER Scenography Design 2018 44 BROUSSE & RUDDIGKEIT Design Code 2018 45 ISABELLE CHAPUIS Photography Design 2018 46 PATRICIA URQUIOLA Product Design 2018 47 SARAH-GRACE MANKARIOUS Art Direction 2018 48 STUDIO FEIXEN Visual Concepts 2019 49 FRANK RAUSCH Interface Design 2019 50 DENNIS LÜCK Designing Creativity 2019 51 IAN ANDERSON Graphic Design 2019 52 FOLCH STUDIO Strategic Narrative Design 2019 53 MARC TAMSCHICK Spatial Media Design 2020 54 TYPEJOCKEYS Type Design 2020 55 MOTH STUDIO Motion Design 2021 56 JONAS LINDSTROEM Photography Design 2021 57 VERÒNICA FUERTE Graphic Design 2021

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