Inside a Furniture Designer's Remote Farmhouse in France

I'm Erwan Brolec, and I've been designing for a long time. La Grange is my place, and it's a piece of land, a piece of building. And I've been living in Paris for 35 years now, but I kind of needed another place in the countryside. For many reasons, I need to have some space to work, to experiment, to try things out. As soon as we stepped in here, me and my wife, what we saw was some abandoned farm building. So you could see all those layers, and one thing that was wonderful for us, it was very natural to bring our own layer on top of this one. But this layer would never be the idea of erasing anything. It's just like making what needs to be done, but then keeping as much as possible of everything that is original. The best interior you could ever have is try to do as less as possible. Keep every tiny sign of the past, add what you need to add, but don't remove anything else. You know, design is incredibly mandatory for everyday life, and I believe a room filled with many things is very nice. An empty room, a totally closed style is very harmful to your body. We need some food for thought, we need some food for action, we need some food for building a life. And for this, yes, design objects are maybe like some tiny animals, they're just part of all, let's say, our networks around us, and they just help us move around and act. This is a tiny treasure I found in Korea. It's made out of cardboard and different cutted paper that I carefully layered on top of it. It's not an antique one, it's kind of a reproduction of what they made in the past. Minimal, colorful, bold, and geometrical used to exist quite a lot. Here we go. The name of the lamp, this one is called Ma. And one thing that I like a lot is, within this crumpling, your brain is always looking at it, because your brain is wondering what this is. But on the other hand, your mind doesn't have any difficulty to somehow find a kind of natural association to it. I'm slightly afraid with good taste, because I'm afraid that people would be dictated by style. And I think life is more magic than following a certain recipe, I could say. And on the other hand, I have an issue because I've been cursed with elegance. Nearly everything I do is elegant, polite. I've been always a good pupil. I'm a very good pupil. Here we go. And something I like more than anything else is contrast. I love to have something, you could say minimal, with something dirty. You'll see everywhere such kind of construction. It can be stools, it can be benches, it can be shelvings, it can be whatever. I love geometry. But then there is this kind of geometry that can be found in nature that is, you know, the very, very, very next level. One thing that I've been doing for a couple of years, I've been doing some computer coding. And basically inside the computer coding, what I'm doing is, I'm just building some rules that are kind of easily repeating. But just repeat it more than a million times, and then the magic happens. Here we have a chair I've been carefully working on for nearly five years. It's been done by Vitra. I like to say it this way, I try to design it like a bike. I really believe, like, if your body is in a bad position, there's no way that your brain is going to feel at ease. I really like the way, like, objects get totally shaped by the user. To me, that is a time when they become incredibly beautiful. Me, I'm looking for objects in which somehow the bound will be created just by touching them, interacting with them. And so that you would kind of, let's say, grow them by everything you do with them. Here we have one of the marvels I've found around here. I was just in a flea market. That's a fisherman's tool. This is an object that is probably a result of a thousand years of a fishing person. In one way or another, sending the information to the other one. And this is one of the most luxurious things you could ever have. It's full of history. This one is a very brand new design from me. It's made for Samsung, it's called Music Studio 5, and that's a speaker. It's a very universal sign, the circle. But it's also one way of designing an object that is good for everyone, any space, any room. Music Studio 5 Nobody is one inventor of something. Everything is transforming. And one of the best ways of transforming them is still through practicing. When I'm coming to the countryside, to this place, I'm doing things very quickly, in a very rough manner. I'm looking also inside this roughness, a certain truth that is sometimes difficult to do. A shape that appears by necessity. A shape that is also driven by limited resources. A shape that is, in a certain way, very grounded. But honestly, I could say I've been building this as a kind of a playground. And for me, most of the things you see around are toys. The tractor is a toy. All the wood equipment is a toy. The grass is a toy. Everything is a toy. And I just like to play with those toys.