4 Perspectives from Christophe Pillet

ON DESIGN

I’m a designer, but I’m also an interior architect, and my goal when I’m doing interiors is not just matching the color of wallpaper and the carpet. It’s like making a movie. I need a scenario, and I need to consider the people as an actor. At the end, the environment, the décor, tells a story. The world of offices is where we spend the most of our lives, and this lifestyle dimension is never taken in consideration as an argument. For me this is a central argument. If I want to spend my life in an office, it has to have a scenario. I need to be an actor of something, an inclination of a story.

ON PRIDE

I have tried to make a sofa that feeds the technical and physical necessities of working today in terms of function, but in this expression it’s friendly, it’s warm, it’s sexy, it’s elegant. It’s everything that makes me proud to be able to sit in it. We never express design in terms of pride, but I think this is the most important value in design. Am I proud to be sitting in such a chair? Or am I proud to be working on a table? Being proud of one’s own image is for me the leading value of a human being in any environment.

ON PERFORMANCE

Performance for a long time was related to technology, so technology performance in the office was sort of a systematic standout. In recent years, analysis on work is saying to be performant, a worker needs to have a friendly environment. You can have performant tools, but the people can’t work more than five hours on performant tools. They get bored. They lose their concentration. If you provide a friendly, more human, more emotionally and individually connected environment, people are able to spend 10 hours with no problems. The performance here is connected to the quality of life, not the technological aspect or technological dimension of the tools. If we consider this for the furniture, we don’t need technical tools that represent the technical force of performance. We need cool pieces of furniture.

ON PEOPLE

The office environment used to be the world of controlling, the world of mastering the complexity. Now we accept the complexity is too complex. We accept a certain mess, let’s say, because mess is part of being happy. This is not only in the furniture, but if you see the way people are working today, it was impossible 15 years ago to not go into an office without a tie; you had to conform to the stereotypes. These days, we don’t care. We don’t care because we want the inside of people.