Interviews with Hugo Charlet-berguerand

The aim was to design a chair that would be appealing both in the eyes of the consumer, meeting best design quality and market trends but also to be interesting in the eyes of the industrialist. Considerable efforts were dedicated to make an industrializable product with a reasonable production cost yet unique look.

My Goal is to promote my award-winning design Tomeo as well as my other realizations and start collaborations with furniture manufacturers. I am currently less focused on designing new products, I spend more time on promoting my work and trying to get visibility in order to find clients and start new collaborations.

More or less one month and a half.

This chair is the work I presented for my master’s degree graduation project.

I would like to find an agreement with a manufacturer to lease the production rights, I aim to work as a furniture designer, so I don’t want to produce my designs myself forever.

The observation that wherever one looks, restaurant terraces remain filled with plastic chairs. I realised that the market’s offer in terms of metal chairs was really limited. Moreover, metallic furniture manufacturers sometimes do little more than re-publishing furniture designed during the early 20th century. Furthermore, the theme of outdoor furniture has always been of strong interest to me, that’s why I especially wanted to design this type of chair.

My worked is always tinted from the influence of the designers and artists I admire.

This is supposed to be an affordable chair addressed to everybody.

Tomeo’s uniqueness comes from its original structure. Tomeo’s structure has a surprising and innovative geometry which clearly differentiates it from other products on the market. It is as if the skeleton of the chair has come out of its body: the seat is narrower than the backrest at the rear and the chair legs jut out towards the sides. The armrests protrude from the backrest at a forty-five-degree angle to meet the front chair legs. The feet are directly below the front edge of the seat giving the impression that the seat and the backrest are suspended inside the structure.

When I started this project, I was working at Michele de Lucchi’s office in Milan. Anybody interested in furniture design surely knows the iconic lamp architect Michele de Lucchi designed for Artemide: Toloméo. This best seller contributed to make him the worldwide known designer we know nowadays. I gave a similar name to my design to bring me luck and because I liked this short and friendly name.

I worked on Rhino3D and Keyshot for the drawing part. For the prototyping, I worked with 3D printers and many different machines available at Politecnico di Milano’s workshops.

It is really a product that would easily find its place in the market. It’s contemporary and elegant look. It’s reasonable price would allow it to be a very competitive product. Moreover, the branch of metallic furniture is extremely trendy nowadays with the very bad image plastic drags. But the market remains sparsely populated with metal furniture, and few pieces are well designed, most of it are reproduction of early 20century’s designs (bistrot chair, Luxembourg, …). There is space, even a need on the market for such a chair.

I did everything alone but tried to seek out feedback from as various inputs as possible along the way.

This design is thought to be easily manufacturable with classic technologies used in the furniture industry.

I lived two years in Milan, and I had the opportunity to visit Italian leading furniture brands, I also participated to many different furniture fairs. I am always on the lookout for new products and market trends. Additionally, in my everyday life I tend to keep an eye on the furniture in restaurants bars, hotels, eetc. Wherever I go.

The prototyping phase was sometimes tricky and required a very delicate and attentive work to achieve the desired quality.

I was satisfied with my work and I wanted to promote it.

A very tricky part when designing a chair is to adjust the dimensions. Indeed, you’re not going to be able to sit on it before a long time, so it is a big challenge not to make mistakes on the proportions when you work on a computer. Another difficulty was to make this chair stackable. Designing a stackable chair is far from being trivial, I struggled quite a lot to achieve such without affecting the initial look too much. Then I had to prepare the prototype’s fabrication which required to go much more into details in your drawings. I had to separate my chair in straight and curved sections and to design the joins. And I also had to figure out how to 3D print objects…

My studio is a young company, I only launched my activity this year. The aim is to have an international design practice in the field of product and furniture design, meeting the highest standards in term of design quality. My ambition is to become an international designer and to work with leading contemporary furniture manufacturers.

I think “design” is creating something new, a nice detail an original shape or a different way to build something. It has to be smart, unexpected and beautiful. This is what differentiates design from craftmanship, the designer’s aim is to break the rules to find something unique in respect to all the other constrains. Design is a discipline like poetry, stand-up or music for instance, there are codes and rules and the main goal is to create something new and amazing. Design in an artistic practice that requires a lot of training. I think the designers’ main qualities should be: an obsessive attention to details, the ability to understand and respect the tacit rules of design, the ability to draw and model his ideas, the ability to bring innovation. Design is what turns a purely functional product in a beautiful and desirable product. It can be a certain shape that gives the overall look a greater appeal or even a new conception that allows new functions and enhances the users experience.

I love designing furniture. I love the materials involved in furniture: wood, steel, aluminum, leather, upholstery… These are the kind of materials I love to play with. Furthermore, furniture are timeless products, their primary function never changes only the look evolves with time and society transformations. Designing a piece of furniture means designing something that will last for decades even centuries sometimes. That is why expectations about furniture are so high, furniture is a purchase you may keep for your entire life. Moreover, furniture design has a common history with art, which I personally find intriguing.

I feel the most creative when I design something for myself that I don’t expect to sell. I can really do what I like and since I have no expectations, I am often more creative. Moreover, I really like to build things with objects normally dedicated to another use. For instance, I like to go on construction sites to forage unused materials and build things with it, in these circumstances I feel the most creative. I don’t expect to build something I could sell, and I must use what I found. I really like to invent new uses from constructions materials.

For me, the most important is to have an idea, something new that will be easily understood and will make a strong statement. I spend a lot of time designing the real product from this initial idea or detail that I want to keep. I make plenty of designs and I try to choose the most elegant one. Often the first tries are the ones I prefer at the end maybe because the concept was still fresh in my mind.

I am very concentrated because it requires the use of a multitude of skills and knowledge simultaneously.

If I worked well, I am proud of my realization. It’s an amazing feeling to sit on a chair you designed yourself or to see people using your chair. I don’t expect people to like what I do, I generally do it because I like it and I try do it well, so it’s even more rewarding when people show interest in my projects.

I think beauty and originality along with a great attention to details are absolute requirements. But I think a successful product is a product that charms both the manufacturer (so the design is produced), the press and the marketers (so the design is promoted) and the consumers (so the product is bought). I think if the designer can satisfy with a single product those 3 protagonists, his design will most probably be successful. Inevitably, the design has to have multiple features to meet the expectations of those different protagonists. For instance the manufacturer will consider with attention the production cost, the potentiality to bring market share, the coherence with its catalog when the press and the marketer would focus more on the originality of the look and the story around the product. The designer should constantly switch attention between all these points to design a successful product.
Publicity campaign or manufacturer’s means of distribution can also boost a design success.

Someone once said: “Good design is like a refrigerator—when it works, no one notices, but when it doesn’t, it sure stinks.” I think there is truth in this quote, it’s easier to judge a design than to explain why it is good or bad. However, in my experience bad design is often design that doesn’t respect implicit codifications. For instance, a chair with vertical legs is not pleasant to the eyes. Another common mistake is when the design is not adapted to industrial production. Of course, it depends on the market you are targeting but unless the shape complexity really enhances the look, the product should stay easily manufacturable.

I think designers can use their creativity to find innovative ideas and help solving society crisis. And that is what designers do, for instance during the sanitary crisis we are currently facing, many designers developed projects to help care givers like masks or face shields.

Walter Gropius said: “Limitation makes the creative mind inventive.”
To me, constrains are a great motor for creativity. Constrains give a starting point and some building blocks to work with. That is why I like to impose myself to work with a particular material or with a particular technology… My work is also influenced from the work of many designers and artists that I admire. And my greatest source of inspiration is the observation of everyday objects. You can never switch off; ideas are all around.

I currently live in France, but I spent two years in Milan, and I think it influenced my practice of design a lot. Italians have an inborn sense of elegance and share a common style in design and probably in many other creative fields. If I had to describe the Italian style in two words, I would say: chic and sexy. In the field of high-end furniture, they really pushed the industry to another level with a wide collaboration with artists and designers. They gave an incredible freedom to the designers and were able to overcome many technical challenges. Such brave manufacturers really revolutionized the industry of furniture raising it to the rank of art.

I am looking for a manufacturer for my award-winning project Tomeo, a light and stackable outdoor metallic chair.

You can go to my website www.hugocharlet.com, where you will find a selection of my work exhibited and my contact details.