Industrial Designer Konstantin Grcic On Life, Design, And The Changing Concept Of Home

Grcic’s slightly unusual path into design began with an apprenticeship in antiques restoration in the mid eighties. “It wasn’t really what I wanted to do, but at that time it was very difficult to find work in Germany,” explains the softly spoken designer. “Yet even though it was clear that I wanted to build new, “To me, industrial design is about making good products, but affordable, available, and accessible ones” rather than repair or restore old, I learned a great deal from that experience,” he says. Having moved to London, in 1988 he enrolled in a furniture-design course at the Royal College of Art.

It was during this period of eclectic and colorful postmodernist furniture design that Grcic emerged as part of a new era of neo-modernist designers, carving out an aesthetic that championed simplicity in form and material. “I come from the modernist tradition of working with classical materials,” he says. “To me, industrial design is about making good products, but affordable, available, and accessible ones.” This philosophy has flourished in just about everything Grcic has done in his 30 year career. “I believe that the products you make should be legible; you see them and you understand what their function is and how they’re built—not that everyone is overly interested in that,” he laughs. “It’s a very nerdy thing I love, and I obviously never expect people to think about a chair in the same way as I do. But I do it because I have a passion for it,” he confesses.

From childhood Grcic was surrounded by art in his family: his German mother is a contemporary art dealer, his Serbian father was a collector of 18th-century art, and Grcic’s sister is an artist herself. “I grew up in an environment with a love for art on many different levels, and that informed the travel we did as a family; weekend trips to museums and so on,” he says. “There were always artists in the house too; it gave me an understanding of what an artist is, how they live, and what they do. There’s something very powerful in the expression of doing what they do because they believe in it.” This awareness has certainly influenced Grcic, whose path in design has always been with a certain form of authorship. “But still, I understood that I wasn’t going to be an artist myself,” he says. “I work in applied arts within a different kind of context; my projects are not self-initiated or self-fulfilling.”