Konstantin Grcic, the 'Chair Man", on More Than Just Chairs

KONSTANTIN GRCIC: I was raised in Wuppertal, a German city shaped by its textile industry. My father was an immigrant from former Yugoslavia and my mother, German. She was much younger than he was, so in a way they represented two different generations. It was special, these completely different lives coming together. My father’s passion was collecting 18 th -century drawings, while my mother was a contemporary art dealer. Antique furniture from my father’s side lived next to 1970s plastic Italian furniture. Being exposed to a continuous juxtaposition of old and new heavily influenced my understanding of design. I see myself as a designer of today, looking towards the future, but I always draw on my profound experience of seeing old and new live perfectly alongside each other.

My sister and I had a happy childhood with lots of freedom to play outside and build things. I enjoyed making things and quickly realized that I was good at it. My mother worked with contemporary artists and would often take us with her on studio visits. That was how, at the age of 12, I found a role model in work and life being one, even though I was yet to understand its implications.

After high school I didn’t want to go to university. I wanted to keep making things, to do work that was practical. And I was seeking the life of those artists I’d visited, with no separation between life and work. Building boats was my dream, an idea that stemmed from childhood play. The problem was that, at the time, it was impossible for me to find an apprenticeship with a boat builder in Germany. I ended up working for an antique furniture restorer, which wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. But as fate would have it, it was there that I discovered my passion for furniture. Working with antiques gave me a deep understanding of construction and taught me the ability to judge quality. Not all antique furniture was good, but the pieces that were really stood out.

One year later, I moved to the southwest of England to start an apprenticeship at the John Makepeace School for Craftsmen in Wood. John Makepeace followed the tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement, which considered craftsmen to be creators – or as we called it, ‘designer makers’. Learning how to make things was fundamental to my understanding of design, and this attitude still informs a lot of the work I do today. The school had a small library where I found two design books, one on Marcel Breuer and the other on Gerrit Rietveld. These two books became my supplementary teachers. A third was an exhibition catalogue about Achille Castiglioni that my sister sent me for my 21st birthday.

I’ve always had good instincts about my own pace of development and my capacity for what I can – and cannot – do. After finishing my apprenticeship in 1987, I took a year off and headed for Spain. Having just emerged from Franco’s regime, the country had recently been awarded the 1992 Olympic Games and World Expo, which created a huge economic and creative boost. I arrived in Madrid with a small suitcase, knowing nobody. I learned Spanish, read Hemingway and followed bullfighting. And I travelled. When you’re young in a foreign country, your senses are open to absorb everything. It was an amazing time – free and light-hearted in an inspiring environment. And it was the perfect mental preparation before moving to London to study design at the Royal College of Art (1988-1990).

There’s a great myth about the RCA: some consider it the Holy Grail. When I arrived there, I was quite disillusioned and confused. I came with certain values in place from my training as a craftsman. Being thrown into a melting pot of interesting and talented creatives from different disciplines brought my self-confidence crashing down like a house of cards. My years there weren’t very productive; I was trying to find balance amid all the input. Jasper Morrison and Vico Magistretti were both visiting professors in those years, and they helped me reinstate a form of belief in my own way of doing things.

Just before graduating from the RCA, Jasper Morrison introduced me to Sheridan Coakley, the founder of a small furniture manufacturer called SCP Ltd. SCP produced Jasper’s early works and presented them at the Milan furniture fair. Memphis had passed its peak and people were looking for the next big thing. Jasper became one of the great protagonists of what followed: a return to industry and simplicity through production-oriented work. SCP launched my first two products in Milan in 1991.

That year I moved from London to Munich. I probably should’ve gone to Berlin: they were the wild years, just after the wall had come down, but I wasn’t looking for that kind of life. I wanted to work. Setting up in Munich was simple – the city was so much smaller than London and I could live on a very low budget. From the day I opened my first office, I called myself an industrial designer. That’s what I wanted to communicate to the outside world. I wanted to design for industry rather than for private commissions, even though I had no idea how to find producers that would put their trust in me. But I took it one step at a time and one thing led to another. Through SCP I met Cappellini and through them, Driade. The art director of the German company ClassiCon coincidentally lived around the corner from my home in Munich. He recognized me in a local grocery store and invited me for an interview. From there we established a beautiful collaboration that boosted my first ten to twelve years of practice and led to such designs as the Chaos chair, and the Diana and Palace tables.