The scruffy and earnest French designer Philippe Starck has launched a 29-piece collection of outdoor furniture he describes as “strangely classic and subversive.” Extraordinarily prolific and blessed with a singular mojo for ballyhoo, Starck works with his wife Jasmine in isolation on a Bordeaux oyster-farm property accessible only at low tide. Jasmine’s role is that of a one-woman mission control, orchestrating her eccentric husband’s movements with precision worthy of Houston.
With projects worldwide, the reclusive designer seems to work 24/7 with a loyal, three-person team in his Paris office. In addition to boutique hotels and furnishings, the Starck portfolio includes decades of work — sofas to sneakers and yachts to eyeglasses.
Made of teak and mirror-polished cast aluminum, the new RobinWood Deluxe collection for Sutherland is sophisticated and unmistakably Starck. For it, he chose teak, likening the wood to “a woman looking more beautiful with age” as it patinates and turns grey. High-tech, aerodynamic aluminum recalls the designer’s fascination for motorcycles, yachting and speed. It is Starck’s contrast classique: texture and shine, organic and manufactured.
The global agent provocateur of outdoor living, Starck doesn’t differentiate from indoor to outdoor design. With some self-deprecation, he says that “there is no invention, no design” in his work, concerning himself instead with “icons and common memory.” Meaning, rather than reinvent the wheel — or the chair — Starck loosely draws on historic forms, “Louis XIV, XV or XVI. Whatever.”
In his famous hotels such as Delano in Miami, Hudson in New York and Mondrian in Los Angeles, every experience is designed to point the senses outdoors. In Starck’s world, armchairs go in the swimming pool, dining tables go in the orchard, and outdoor lounges are furnished with alfresco sofas.
Starck sees himself as a modern Robin Hood of design and popular culture, not exactly robbing the rich, but profiting from luxury projects to support his more “democratic” efforts. These sometimes quixotic, design-for-the-masses adventures have included an extraordinary boxed kit to build a Starck-designed house, low-priced products for Target and his OAO brand of organic packaged food and wine.
And now in his outdoor collection for Sutherland, Starck has offered furniture of refinement and maturity, the product of a surreal imagination, a perfectionist’s focus on the possibilities of the material, and a subversive playfulness. — Timothy Jack Ward
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