<\/p>\n
It\u2019s Perron\u2019s furniture work \u2014 for Knoll, for USM Haller, for himself \u2014 that has connected most broadly. His pieces, many of which emerged as prototypes for clients or for his own spaces out of a trashcan-like need, have become coveted by a certain artistic class. They have a distilled, napkin-sketch quality, minimal and exact but also loose\u00a0\u2014 the work of an expert hand and an even more highly trained eye. Plus, the Knoll couches are easier to incorporate into your life than a Rihanna set.<\/p>\n
We spoke to Perron about the difference between furniture and other design disciplines, the European versus American markets, and why he\u2019s moving away from moodboards.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Has the furniture bug been there the whole time?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Design was innate in a weird way. I have an older brother who\u2019s also a designer. He would buy vintage books; there were these Letraset catalogs my aunt bought us as kids. I was really fascinated by the idea that there was a creative hand in everything: packaging, clothes, typography, the chair you sat on. You could make the version you wanted. It\u2019s always been there. I think I\u2019m too pragmatic or neurotic or nervous to be an artist.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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It sounds like you prefer working within a framework, as opposed to the more open-ended process of creating art.<\/p>\n
I like parameters, and I like problems. They have a negative connotation for most, but for me problem-solving is the core of everything I do. Coming up with solutions for things, I think that\u2019s the essence of design. Obviously there\u2019s an aesthetic layer, but that sits second for me.<\/p>\n
How do you approach solving problems at Knoll\u2019s scale, versus for your own furniture projects?<\/p>\n
Half of my furniture comes from interior projects we\u2019ve done, including the Pillo couch for Knoll, which started really giant in somebody\u2019s house. I couldn\u2019t find anything on the market at the scale I wanted. Then, we made it human-sized. The other half is things I can\u2019t find for my house that I want. But I also think it\u2019s nice to start at the essence, which is the opposite of what I just said. The Sausage Sofa was sense-memory. Growing up, we had neighbors with a giant bean bag thing in their living room; we\u2019d go there and lay for hours. I made it at the scale I remember, but it\u2019s bigger because I\u2019m bigger.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
We talked a bit about the design challenges in your new home \u2014 the issue of the trash can. What has it been like to outfit that space?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
I got a place in Paris. I\u2019m here a lot as a visitor, but I\u2019ve never had to buy basic things. It re-engages you: If you had to buy a toaster, where would you go? And Europeans are funny. They might have an actual toaster store. Even if you really care about how things look, you might not have had to engage with a toilet brush in America; you\u2019d scroll through some options online and pick out a not-bad one. But here they literally have bathroom accessory stores.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s in the air there. What\u2019s the difference between the North American design environment and the European one?\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a lot more \u201cdesign\u201d in Europe because there are no standards. As in, there\u2019s no standard white bulb. In America we have the one junction-box-size light switch. And so everything is considered. There are so many faucets and switches here that it becomes comedic. It\u2019s great, though. Designers aren\u2019t just doing a junction-box-size light switch. You\u2019re making the light switch you want.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How is your furniture work different from the rest of your design practice?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Client work is very much, \u201cHere\u2019s the project, budget, timeline.\u201d You\u2019re working against a clock. Whereas in furniture, I can let it simmer. I have a lot of half-started ideas: I see something or flip through a book and figure out the solution, and in the meantime, it sits there and gathers dust. My preferred way of working is starting a project myself and not really having a total end goal. The Bun chair we did for Knoll was something I noodled around in my office; it sat in a corner for a while. There\u2019s something good about not being attached to a brief or mandate.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A lot of the other stuff I do is not quite as intimate. Furniture is very close to the person so it becomes about very subtle, small details: materiality, how it feels and wears. And it doesn\u2019t have the same purpose anymore. The depth of couches is different now because we don\u2019t sit formally and upright anymore, and people are less and less ready to compromise comfort.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the research process like for you now? Is it more or less formal at this stage in your career?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The way you did research for the past 30 years was discovery: You\u2019d go to a used bookstore and find something incredible you didn\u2019t know about and build a visual library. There were recesses on the internet. But now, the portals where people do research, everybody\u2019s looking at the same shit. There are a bazillion creative agencies and designers, and they\u2019re all just looking at these few resources. If you\u2019re really clever, you can go past this, but everybody still winds up in the same pool. We\u2019re looking at a finite amount of things.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And so there\u2019s an experiment I\u2019m starting with the studio: How do we not moodboard or research with pinned images? We know the images, but what we do as a studio is come up with a point of view. If everything starts to bleed into each other, we fail. We\u2019re not off them yet, but they\u2019re really such a deficient way of communicating. You\u2019re saying, \u201cLook at these things that you\u2019re for sure going to like that already exist.\u201d It\u2019s an existent energy. Seeing successful things on a board \u2014 of course it works. People have seen them, and seen the reaction to these items, versus taking a chance on something that\u2019s completely abstracted to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Consider the garbage can. Not many people do \u2014 it\u2019s perhaps one of the least-considered items in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-541720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}