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How do a well-seasoned designer integrate decades of experience with a young designer's innovative, contemporary practice? The outcome: a progressive platform that celebrates functional poetics and imaginative designs while providing a space for co-creation. Marc Berthier, a renowned French designer dedicated to transforming the French design scene teamed up with young Danish-American urban planner and multidisciplinary designer Mikaela Kvan to launch Kvan x Berthier Design Studio (KxB) with Ofisu, a value-driven consulting firm.
With a career spanning over sixty years during which he actively contributed to the world of architecture and industrial design, Marc Berthier has previously worked with Hermes, Knoll USA, Thonet, Rowenta Germany, TOTO Japan, Ligne Roset Cinna and many more established brands. The prolific designer, ever since his first product in 1997- a rubber radio Tykho that shook the innovation in electronics, has attained name and fame through unique and highly functional designs. Berthier refined his commitment to design while translating a certain ‘lightness’ in all of his products for which he states, “I see lightness as the key to the third millennium.”
The studio KxB works to bring together a group of young, curious-minded design professionals who are open to co-creation under the umbrella of Berthier's years of knowledge and expertise and Kvan's hold of the design subject. It aspires to work alongside businesses at the vanguard of significant change in electronics, lifestyle, architecture, urban systems, service design, and technology with the hope to bring a positive change in society.
Both the designers, though belonging to different timelines, found common ground on the belief system that, “designers need to change paradigms to relate to the world as it grapples with the environmental, health, social, demographic and economic crises.”
With a degree in urban planning from Parsons and a master's degree in industrial design, Mikaela Kvan successfully trained with Marc Berthier in France, following an internship with Diana Balmori. She happens to be the founder of the collaborative research project ‘Primary Voice’, with an ambition of voicing the opinions of workers in mass production.
As of studio KxB's practice, the projects of different scales are either underway or in preparation to relaunch. One of the architectural projects undertaken by the firm is the rehabilitation of a small hotel in the hillside village of Saint-Saturnin-Lès-Apt, which is a part of France's Luberon National forest. The place is under the ownership of two French chefs and is being redeveloped as a high-end six-bedroom boutique hotel. The firm has also moved its attention to finishing Marc's cherished Belvedere house, which incorporates the idea of lightweight, modular metal structures created to handle many terrains, climates, and programmes.
Experience is certain to be the guiding light for a beneficial shift at the start of the 2020s decade as the design layers evolve at an unfathomable rate, while innocence doubts the gained. Both the designers pursue a progressive vision that is a subtle amalgamation of Berthier's belief in developing designs from an essential use, mastered techniques and systems, and Kvan's practice of moulding the design knowledge according to modern demands.
What do you think?