Designers with verve

DON'T throw out those old Veuve Clicquot boxes.

Designers

JUST for the record, the distinctive colour of the label on Veuve Clicquot¿s champagne bottles, boxes and almost every other bit of collateral associated with the brand is not, as it might appear to be at first glance, orange. Look closer and you will see that it is, in fact, yellow. Or at least to those who work for the brand it is.

At a design fest in Milan earlier this year, sponsored in part by the French champagne house, I heard the label referred to as yellow on numerous occasions. Any opinions to the contrary were corrected: “Actually, it’s really yellow.” I was indoctrinated into the corporate speak: “At Veuve Clicquot we call the colour yellow.”

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And it was subtly worked into conversation. Says Cecile Bonnefond, the company’s president: “If you think of the yellow Veuve Clicquot label, and we say it’s yellow and not orange ...” It was enough to send a person straight to the optometrist.

It’s a point that speaks a lot about the driving force of the champagne house, which was established in 1772. Design - or, more precisely, innovation - has been a hallmark of Veuve Clicquot since 1816, when Madame Clicquot invented the riddling table, which tilted the bottles so the yeast sediment would settle in the neck of the bottle and the wine, after disgorging, would be completely clear. This practice subsequently became the industry standard in the production of methode champenoise.

Today the association Veuve Clicquot has with design is, arguably, more of a marketing position than anything else – although obviously designers can be very picky about colours, especially their names. Where other champagne houses have opted to align themselves with the fashion industry, or certain sports played by high net worth individuals, Veuve Clicquot chose design not just, one assumes, because of the historical association but because fashion and sport are so crowded in terms of sponsorship. Design is something a little bit out of the box, so to speak.

And speaking of boxes, that distinctive “yellow” packaging was the starting point for an unusual design exhibition held as part of this year’s Milan Design Week. Veuve Clicquot asked three European design firms, the London-based Tom Dixon, Front Design from Stockholm and 5.5 Designers from Paris to design a piece of furniture based on the company’s new eco-friendly cardboard presentation box.

Veuve Clicquot has a history of commissioning big name designers to create something that draws its inspiration from champagne. In 2005 Andree Putman reinterpreted the riddling table; in 2007 Karim Rashid came up with a modern take on the love seat; and in the same year Porsche Design Studio produced a striking stainless steel wine cooler – that wouldn’t look out of place in a Terminator film – to house 12 magnums of the champagne.

“We are not in design, we are in champagne, but design is always very linked with our history and our tradition,” says Bonnefond. “Design is just something we love and that we feel involved in, but we are not designers, we are not a furniture company.” In choosing the designers to work on this project, Veuve Clicquot cannily chose an established, well-known name, Tom Dixon; a cutting-edge, emerging practice, Front Design; and a relative newcomer, 5.5 Designers. The process of deciding who to work with is, according to Bonnefond, largely instinctive.

“The way we meet with designers is we say, we have a project, we have something that we care about, who do we feel could be a dreamer about that project. And then we start meeting people and at some stage we say, yes, we would like to dream together and that’s how it comes about. Then it’s about inspiration and about working together on that inspiration. It takes some time and there is no written plan. It’s about meeting someone and liking each other and saying, yes, it’s a good idea.”

When the results of the collaborations were unveiled at the press preview of the exhibition, called Out of the Box, the work of the Front Design team seemed to garner the most attention. It probably helped that the Swedish design group is made up of four fashionably dressed women who look like they consult each other on their outfits before they get dressed. When they arrived at the gallery they immediately set the flash bulbs going. The piece they designed was no less striking.

Front Design, which was established in 2003 after the four principals met while studying design at Konstfack University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm, likes to play with illusions and a subversion of conventional forms. One of its most well known works is a series called Animal Thing, which includes a lamp in the life-sized shape of a horse and a pig coffee table, also life-sized, with a platter on its head. Then there is the Royal Delft vase, called Blow Away Vase, which looks as though it was hit with a big gust of wind before it was sent to the kiln.

What was remarkable about the chaise lounge Front Design created for the Out of the Box project was that at first glance it looked like little more than boxes of champagne randomly stacked together. And on closer inspection, it still looked like a stack of boxes. But that was precisely the point, says one of the four members of Front Design, Charlotte von der Lancken. “We wanted to do something that was like an illusion, so what you see is a pile of randomly stacked boxes and it looks like a hard pile, but when you sit down it’s soft,” says von der Lancken. “It’s not really doing what you would expect it to do.”

The chaise is actually made from a series of wooden blocks, painted to look like Veuve Clicquot boxes, on a steel frame that has foam cushions underneath some of the boxes to enable them to move and shape to the contour of the body. The illusion is so effective that at the exhibition there were gasps when the four designers went to sit on it to be photographed– onlookers feared they might squash what appeared to be cardboard boxes.

For the French collective 5.5 Designers the solution was a slightly more functional one. The designers thought of the cardboard box as a building brick and came up with framework made from MDF that could house the box and be assembled in myriad ways, making their solution more like architecture than a piece of furniture. “We decided it could either be something very
artistic or very functional,” says Jean-Sebastien Blanc from 5.5 Designers. “But because we are industrial designers we decided to take the functional path and for us the first function of packaging is to protect the bottle and to store it. We didn’t want to change this function, we just wanted to enhance the stature of this sort of packaging nowadays. We didn’t want it to be something you would just put in the garbage bin.”

The idea is that you would use the system to create an entire wall of champagne boxes like a cellar or wine rack. “This is just one wall but we could imagine making an entire house with this system, because in our world we don’t like to design fixed, static things,” says Blanc.
Their wall of champagne also includes integrated silver components that can hold ice and be used as a wine bucket as well as a flat surface to make a table or seating. It’s like Lego for adults.
According to Bonnefond, the designers were given a fairly open brief and were free to create whatever they wanted, as long as they drew their inspiration from the box. The design solutions from Front Design and 5.5 Designers are expensive to produce, bespoke items.

British designer Tom Dixon, on the other hand, went for something much more egalitarian. His Comet Lamp is made from the cardboard box itself (although he sheepishly admits that it takes more than one champagne box to make one of his lamps). “We were confronted with a very plain box and asked to be inspired by what, on initial inspection, was quite dull,” says Dixon. “But I guess design thrives on boundaries; I had to work quite hard on this one.”

His design process was to look at the history of the champagne house and, in particular, the origins of the company’s star-shaped logo and what it represented. The logo derives from a comet that appeared in French skies in 1811. Winemakers have long held the belief that comets have positive effects on wine vintages and the 1811 comet is thought to have produced a remarkable vintage for the champagne house. “French companies like a bit of romance in their stories and I thought this was a good departure point because I’m interested in geometry and mathematics and the comet became this thing for me which had the right mix of the rational and the romantic,” says Dixon.

The result is a light fitting that resembles a comet and is made from several identical pieces of cardboard that are fixed together through simple notches cut into each piece, much like a child’s puzzle. At the opening of the Out of the Box exhibition visitors were presented with one of Dixon’s lamps as a parting gift. It was the designer’s idea.

“The other point about my design was that it was part of my experiment in giving things away in a bid to become popular by just being very generous,” says Dixon. (In 2006, in what became known as the “Great Chair Grab”, he exhibited 500 moulded polystrene chairs in Trafalgar Square and then invited Londoners to take them away.)

“I was also challenging the existing model that the furniture industry has, which is all about getting things made a long way away and then shipping them in large volumes to a warehouse where they sit until somebody eventually decides to buy them. My interest has been to subvert that and go directly from the factory to the consumer. (At the event) 800 went in 10 minutes, so in terms of speed to market it’s very efficient.”

Dixon dropped out of London’s Chelsea School of Art in the early 1980s and started making furniture from salvage metal. A decade later he was receiving international acclaim for his S-Chair and Pylon Chair, both designed in 1991 for Italian furniture company Cappellini. He has been the head of design for Habitat UK and established his own firm in 2002 with business partner David Begg. In 2007, as part of the London Design Festival, Dixon again took over Trafalgar Square, this time with a light installation, and then handed out 1000 low-energy lights to members of the public.

Today he is at the head of one of Britain’s most successful design firms and is well placed to comment on the effect the global financial crisis is having on the design industry. “It’s having an impact in all sorts of ways,” says Dixon. “From suppliers going out of business to people holding on to their money so that you get paid slower. For a lot of designers the work will dry up because people are not investing in design. You see it happening in architecture where studios are cutting their workforce by 25–50 per cent overnight. It’s not a great situation but I have to say there is a surfeit of designers out there and there has been an explosion of design education.

“Those graduates are going to have to find other things to do but the beauty of design is you can apply it to almost anything and there are some very serious and critical problems out there that could do with the bright, young minds of some fresh designers. I think there will be a lot of activity at the lower end of the market, simply because people will be forced to buy cheaper. I’ve also noticed that people are going for substance; they might buy less but they will make sure it’s longer lasting.”

It’s for that reason that Dixon was drawn to the idea of designing a product made out of cardboard. “I’ve always been interested in materials and cardboard is a genius material. It allows you to make things affordably, with low technology, and quickly. For one person it’s just a cardboard box and for another it’s a lamp. I think my adventures in cardboard will continue.”