Philippe malouin biography of williams

‘I draw badly, and I used that as my initial starting point.’ London-based Philippe Malouin has turned his weakness into a rug pattern for cc-tapis – his first two-dimensional product design. ‘I actually had a very functional approach when it came to my requirements for a rug. I wanted it to be comfortable like a pile rug, yet, be architecturally sound like a flat weave.’

Malouin’s idiosyncrasies is was what drew cc-tapis’ art director Daniele Lora to his work, especially when she was planning for the Milan-based brand’s collection. ‘I immediately thought that his style could play a strong part of what we had in mind.’ For the Lines rug, Malouin took this wobbly sketching of straight lines further by using wax crayons to accentuate the flaws – ‘it also left an irregular deposition of pigment onto a clean page of paper’.

When taken off paper, the artwork is identifiable through the distorted pattern and colours that fluctuate in tone – an effect which Malouin says was hard to achieve when translated to wool. ‘This was ingeniously solved by Daniele Lora by coming up with the idea of dip-dying bunched wool yarn before knotting it,’ he says.

This nifty dying technique for the Himalayan wool was paired with Tibetan craftsmanship that takes place in the production facility in Nepal in a performance of trial and error – ‘rather than printing lines we wanted to have a more natural and imprecise effect that came after many trials of dyeing the raw material and that could only be achieved through hand-knotting.’

The Lines rug is part of cc-tapis’ digital launch of Gesture – a project that looks at ‘how the motion of hands and tools can quietly lead the creative process, creating entirely new aesthetic languages.’ In addition to Malouin, Lora and the team invited Sabine M

DESIGNNEWS

The simplicity of Philippe Malouin&#;s work is misleading. What really excites the London-based furniture designer is a tricky brief and the experimentation that eventually reveals a new way of doing things, whether he&#;s making lampshades from industrial shrinkwrap or bowls from rolls of cash register paper.

Designers are practical people. They are problem solvers. But sometimes this trait has an unexpected, paradoxical outcome: it causes some designers to gravitate towards the impractical, the difficult, the experimental and untried. They want more problems to solve, so they go out of their way to find them.

Philippe Malouin is one of those designers. When I first met him, during the Portes Ouvertes design festival in Montreal in , he was using industrial shrinkwrap – generally used to protect boats in winter – to make lampshades. This wasn&#;t easy. The material was wrapped over a metal framework, then shrunk with a heat torch. But it split, or scorched, or shrank unevenly. The other designers at the event were making tried-and-tested signature products, and hummed with productivity. Malouin, like a benign version of HG Wells&#; Dr Moreau, was surrounded by the disturbing results of his less successful experiments. &#;It&#;s better to show a process than a finished product on a plinth,&#; he said at the time.

One of these lampshades – one of the later, more successful models – sat in a high corner of Philippe Malouin&#;s former studio in Stoke Newington, north London. Just days after Icon&#;s visit, Malouin moved to larger premises 15 minutes&#; walk away. He attributes his emphasis on process to his education at Design Academy Eindhoven under Li Edelkoort. &#;Processes were the basis of our education – Li stressed it again and again and it just kept banging in our heads.&#;

So all around Malouin&#;s studio are new processes waiting to be adapted to new products. A couple of his assistants – he has four, who help him three days

When designer Philippe Malouin got the call to collaborate with Swiss furniture brand de Sede, his first reaction was surprise, followed by excitement. And then, he freely admits, he began to feel the pressure.

De Sede and Philippe Malouin

De Sede began life in as a small family-run saddler’s workshop, but rapidly grew into a world-class producer of handcrafted leather furniture with a track record for producing coveted modernist design classics, such as the iconic, accordion-like ‘DS’ sofa system, Ubald Klug’s terraced ‘DS’ sectional, and the imposing ‘S’ swivel chair, used as a prop in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Meanwhile, Malouin’s eponymous studio has racked up an impressive client roster since its founding 12 years ago. Named Wallpaper’s designer of the year in , he has created products for the likes of Iittala, SCP, Kvadrat, Established & Sons, Hem, Ace Hotel and Roll & Hill, to name a few. His interiors studio, Post-Office, has completed spaces for brands such as Aesop, Everlane and Valextra. ‘It takes a long time to be taken seriously,’ he reflects. ‘In the beginning, brands would tell us to jump and we’d ask, “How high?” Now we’re really lucky because we can choose who we work with. De Sede were very willing to let me take the lead, which was great because I had some strong feelings about what we were working on, and they listened.’

A modular sofa born from intuitive material experiments

The brief was straightforward: to create a modular sofa system with a traditional yet contemporary aesthetic. The process began with folded foam experiments, and the resulting form, the ‘DS’, was created by taking a square piece of foam and folding it in half and then in half again, which according to Malouin, was the simplest of all of the experiments the studio carried