Droog Rolls Out Its Quirky Style for the Mainstream
If one bare lightbulb bespeaks poverty, can 85 of them make a designer chandelier? This is the kind of riddle that has driven Droog Design to the top of the design-world charts.
Founded in 1993 by a Dutch jewelry designer and a design critic, Droog is known for edgy, forward thinking about basic furnishings. Magazine editors have admired every twist and tweak. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has 20 Droog pieces in its permanent collection. Donna Karan and Karl Lagerfeld, both collectors, have given Droog high-fashion gloss.
Now, Droog is off to capture upper-middle America. During the next two years, a Droog Design retrospective, which debuted at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York last May, will travel to retail outlets in 14 cities, including San Francisco and Sacramento. Shoppers from ultra-hip Miami to cozy Des Moines will have an opportunity to behold--and buy--such innovations as a rubbery gold fruit bowl fused to its own tablecloth, dinnerware sets intentionally misshapen during the firing, lamps made from recycled milk bottles, coat hooks shaped like miniature hangers, and bath tiles with water droplets built in. Prices range from $20 to $2,500.
“It’s the ‘Seinfeld’ show of the design world,” warns New York designer Constantin Boym, who teaches at the Parsons School of Design, has designed for Droog and owns the “85 Lamps” chandelier. “It looks almost normal. Nothing is happening, but for some reason it’s hysterically funny.”
In Dutch, Droog means “dry,” as in humor.
Droog is a mentality rather than a style, with designers striving to think as freely as children. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Aaron Betsky, who grew up in the Netherlands, once sought to explain the mentality with a Dutch saying: Act in a normal manner, and you will be strange enough already.
Technically, Droog is a foundation. Co-founders Renny Ramakers, editor of an industrial design magazine, and Gijs Bakker, a well-known jewelry and product designer, act as art directors. They come up with an idea and put together a team of designers. As long as the result is usable and makes a point, almost anything goes.
Commissions have come from Rosenthal, Bang & Olufsen, Levi Strauss and even the New York Times (for its millennium capsule). But not everything reaches the production line.
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Early designs were more handcrafted than high-tech. A “chest of drawers” is a jumble of old drawers bound with a mover’s strap. Fifteen have been made at $8,000 each. For a personalized “rag chair,” designers ask a new owner to send old clothing. In soft polyurethane vases, air bubbles are incorporated as decoration.
Last spring, during the Milan Furniture Fair, Droog conspired with another Dutch group to produce participatory furnishings. The collection, called Do Create, asks users to complete the design. For instance, a chair arrives as a cube of steel, which the owner can bash into the desired shape with an accompanying mallet. A vase made of porcelain has been lined with rubber; it is intended to be thrown to make the surface crack but not crumble.
“They are forms of criticism as much as objects of use,” explains Betsky. “They make us rethink the objects and rituals of modern life.”
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Bakker, who dreams of designing a car that would be “no styling, only transportation,” attributes Droog’s originality to his country’s long history of democracy. “People have learned to listen to each other,” he says. “People are very open. After four centuries, we are willing to be strongly individual.”
The design of the Knotted Chair, by Marcel Wanders, is more poetic than industrial. It appears at first to be nothing more solid than crocheted rope. But the fiber is braided aramid used in radial tires and bulletproof vests, with a hidden core of graphite. After knotting, the rope is dipped in epoxy and hung in a frame to harden. The final shape comes from gravity.
Among the places you can buy the Knotted Chair is Domus in Atlanta, where the Droog show goes next after its run in Lambertville, N.J. The chair is sold at the cut-rate trade price of $1,699. You can sit in it, but that’s really not the point.
“I don’t think you live with it,” says Betsky. “It changes the way you live.”
