A conversation with Ronan Bouroullec

You came from the countryside but have made peace with Paris. What made you feel more comfortable in the city?

I’m usually not satisfied with my life because I don’t like the idea of being at ease with myself. I consider life a subject of hidden things and doing new things. I like instability.

I was married to someone who loved Paris and knew every street and thing about it. But she hated Brittany, so I had to be a Paris hater. (Laughs)

Paris has always been difficult for me because it’s a city that doesn’t change. There’s no movement; it’s changing a bit, but it’s very conservative, especially compared to other cities. It’s not Berlin or Tokyo. It’s a beautiful city but could be boring when you want to see the world moving.

Do you find more change in the countryside?

Certain types of countryside, yes. Especially in Brittany, with its sea, giant tides, and the countryside, with its constantly changing sky. You have hundreds of colours for the sea. It can be dark and brown or turquoise and transparent. I am sensitive towards this aspect of the landscape. And when I return from Brittany, I am more tired than when I left because I have been feeling everything. To go on the water in the middle of February is to charge myself with colour and cold water. It’s about the changing beauty of things.

But I do like to disappear in the city. I feel more comfortable now, and I am happy to be in Paris at this moment.

And how does it feel to reveal the Baton collection? When I first saw the Kvadrat exhibition, I fell immediately in love with the simplicity of shape. There’s this idea of movement. It can be so many things carried around with a poetry.

I was happy when you noticed the beauty of that object. I liked it a lot. When you asked me if it could be for BD, I said yes, and I am very happy we did it.

Relationships with designers often come with an expectation of success and a price. Here, I am interested in the fact that people see the piece and seem to like the Baton for the simple pleasure of it.

They understand it. It’s something elemental and carries a ritual. You can hold and move it. Lighting candles, looking at the mirror, and hanging your clothes… I suppose it works around our daily rituals. Are you a person with daily rituals or a routine?

No, I am too lazy for rituals. Even when I am in Brittany, I do practically nothing but still come back exhausted. I sometimes go fishing with my neighbour, his net full of holes and the most dangerous boat in the harbour. Then I go swimming, I draw a bit, I drink.

There’s a beautiful simplicity to that. To everything you design. Your apartment also represents this idea. To me, it feels effortless. There’s thought, but not obsession.

I like to have only some pieces. I want to look at them and see them around. That is why this apartment is great with its changing light and areas of space. I like to be surrounded by beauty or what I consider beautiful. What interests me is an environment that can change and the objects that generate that environment. And that’s why I like apartamento (magazine) because you choose people surrounded by a beauty generated by their personalities and choices that are not conventional.

It’s important for me that things change. It was the same thing here, arriving without socks.When you came here the last time, it had a different atmosphere.

In a way, this apartment is your reaction against Paris because it is constantly changing. Connecting it to Baton again, having the handle gives you this idea of moving things around; they come with you and are not fixed in one place.

It’s very true. I would like to be an architect but prefer making things you can move. I like furniture. Something that you can dismount, that you can live with, and that you can put in another room. I like the fact that you reconfigure things.

And did this translate directly to the Baton? How did the Batton collection start?

After Covid, the world began to change again. Everything changed, and it was like moving everything into a new room and trying to find comfort in the unknown. I was thinking about how a paravent can change a domestic context to make it feel like something. It can change how everything looks, even if you live in a tiny room. It could be a wall and separate spaces in so many ways, and if it is made in a textile, it can be dismounted and moved around. The idea was bizarre because its functionality was to change the visual landscape of a room. It is not functional like a tool, but it has a language that triggers feelings. I like that its cast base has the rigidity of stone yet is balanced with a perfect steel piece and a delicate cut.

I think it is in the cut where there’s more poetry. I love that gesture.

Yes, it is somewhere between Enzo Mari, who would probably have treated it more roughly, and Andrea Branzi, where there’s this vegetal organic aspect.

There’s something to do with your drawings. It’s like a line…

In my drawings and my objects in general, the main characteristic is the way the objects are joined. When I draw, it’s the same thing. My teachers always said that it was not the right way of drawing because, when you draw a landscape, you usually position certain points to start and then continue with details. I am totally the bad one who started to draw a tree first, and then another one…and then built the drawing around that. The same is true for an object. My professor said I was a very bad design student because if I had a wardrobe to design, I’d spend three weeks designing the door handle. (Laughs). Well, in the case of Baton, the handle was the starting point for the collection. (more laughs).

That’s amazing. To see a starting point that is almost maniacal to see in simple detail and joints. But then again, it can work and be the language for the whole family. Even the Baton family has become quite large. Do you see it growing more?

Yes, because you have to consider that this construction is the starting point for holding something, and there are various subjects in a domestic landscape or office. I think it’s important to keep this delicateness and mobility.

We hope to do it well. You just made me think again that it’s a good collection for BD because historically, the brand has always been about the tension between very pure industrial design and very bizarre, over-the-top bold pieces where function is not principal, but what is important is the personality.

I think this collection has a lot of personality. There’s still function, but in the way I’d like to envision the company going forward, where there’s poetry that joins both things. It’s a bold object made simple, and it can be very silent and still have character.

It was interesting to see yesterday the two pieces at the Center George Pompidou show that just opened. The point of this exhibition was to show my version of different types of subjects, from drawing to textile, from ceramic to colour, from industry to craft, and from a limited number of pieces to a million pieces. I thought I was getting totally lost and unable to see my point of view, but the last two years have helped me feel free to mix all of these aspects. I think all objects have their own quality linked to their context.

They blend together without one being louder or more important than the other. It's about how you arranged the room. The show feels excellent and balanced. And I think that’s how you work.

I thought it was a detriment before. Rolf Felbaum told me once: your principal problem is that you are good at many things, which could be a problem because you can not concentrate on one thing. But I don’t think that’s true. It’s good to give a chance to different possibilities in different fields.

I think it’s a blessing. It also helps that you are not obsessed with being an artist or a successful industrial designer. It seems it is all part of life and work and is very well balanced.

I feel I am in this dream where you run after something you can’t have. I think my life as a creative person is that I am constantly running after beauty, and I try different mediums in different contexts. Sometimes, the hardest work is drawing at my table in the morning.

When I first saw your first book of drawings that Cornel Windlin designed, they looked like automatic drawings you do when you speak on the phone.

It’s true, it’s like that. I think the drawings are better when I am thinking of something else. At a certain point, it is best to be quick with drawings. And the result is not something I ever really imagined at the beginning.

There are lines and an accumulation of things, and I enter into a sort of uncontrolled meditation. Like when you walk from one place to another, you don’t really care that your body is moving, and then suddenly you arrive. You don’t need to think about the act of doing it.

And do you ever go back to the same drawing?

I never look back at a drawing. For many years, I thought it was idiotic to buy paper. My studio was in front of a printer so the garbage was full of paper and it was marvellous. Drawing has many essential elements. From the sharpness of your pencil to the different types of paper, the sensuality of this contact on various types of surfaces.

I mostly draw on Cromolux paper which stops my felt pen brush from being damaged by the texture of the paper. I can use thick strokes with varying pressure. It’s interesting because when I was a kid at school, around five or six (in France in the mid-seventies), everybody had wallpaper, and there were wallpaper shops everywhere. We sometimes drew on wallpaper catalogues, and they had awful textures. But for every 5 or 10 samples, we had a change. There would be a photo printed on glossy paper, and I loved that shift into a glossy texture. It was a new pleasure and a different way of seeing colour from a refreshing surface.

And what an impact a change can have…