For the last 12 years, Madrid-born, Valencia-based artist-designer Jaime Hayon has gifted the artistic and design worlds with characteristic humour and exuberance. We find out what propels him.
If there is one thing you should know about Jaime Hayon, it is that he is a serial doodler. “It’s like I’m possessed!” he quips. “I draw everywhere, all the time.” Pen in hand and a stack of paper by his side, the Spanish artist-designer churns out three sheets worth of sketches during our 40-minute chat. He does this mostly as a means of illustrating his point, but we also get the feeling that his mind is constantly bubbling over with thoughts and ideas, and these must find an outlet somewhere.
The 41-year-old’s sketches have a humorous, cartoonish quality to them — bulbous, whimsical shapes are recurring features. These might evolve to become actual products, as they have in the past, in such items as a green chicken rocking chair (2008), a series of vases with animal heads (2011) and a side table shaped like a monkey (2015). It is his signature calling card, a quirk that has endeared him to his clients and earned him legions of fans. “It’s totally unconscious,” he explains, when asked how he comes up with these animated designs.
Only an imagination as fertile as Hayon’s could produce a spectrum of things as diverse as bathrooms, crystalware, furniture and sculpture to jewellery stores, shoe emporia and restaurants.
Any designer would kill to have a client list like his: Baccarat, Bisazza, Camper, Cassina, Fabergé, Fritz Hansen, Lladró, Magis, Piper- Heidsieck, Swarovski and &Tradition, to name a few. Essentially the world’s finest brands in their respective product categories, both historic and contemporary.
We are at the Fritz Hansen showroom in Bukit Timah. Hayon is here on a whistle-stop visit to promote his latest designs for the 143-year-old Danish furniture manufacturer: the Fri lounge chair and Sammen dining chair, both of which were launched at the Salone del Mobile in Milan this year. “The Sammen started with the fact that I had designed a table for Fritz Hansen, the Analog. The table is not [oval] or round or square — which are the usual shapes you find in tables — but has a new geometry. Then I thought about creating a chair to fit the table. It had to be comfortable and look nice whether in a restaurant or a house.
“If you think about what Fritz Hansen has in its collection, there aren’t so many upholstered chairs. Apart from the Drop chair, they’re mostly made of wood. [Fritz Hansen is] very good at upholstery, but they don’t use [this know-how] very much. So, this is the chair I thought they needed. It shows their capacity for high-end upholstery.” The chair’s seat and backrest are padded and upholstered, while its four legs are made of wood. Unlike Hayon’s more outré pieces, Sammen’s design is simple and timeless. “When you think of a chair, [its design] has to last, not be fashionable for six months,” he says, matter-of-factly.
Before the Sammen chair and Analog table, there was the Favn sofa, Hayon’s first collaboration with Fritz Hansen in 2011. Then came the Ro lounge chair two years later, which the designer describes as his update of the classic Egg chair designed by Arne Jacobsen in 1958. “If you think about the Egg chair, the first thing you notice is the sculpture. It represents something, it’s symbolic. There’s a certain storytelling [quality]. But the surface that you sit on is very small, and the padding in it, not so much. When I first started [designing] the Ro chair — not that I don’t love the Egg; it’s an icon of modern design, so it’s hard for me not to love it — I just felt it could be better. The Ro chair does the same thing the Egg does — provide privacy — but I wanted more comfort, a more inviting [shape].”
There were practical reasons, as well, for Hayon’s desire to create a more open and inviting shape. “A lot of loungers are used in hotel lobbies, and people come in with their bags and [personal belongings], so I wanted a 1½ seater. If you have an iPad, you want to have it next to you. If you have a handbag, you don’t want to put it on the floor. If you have a little kid, you want to be sharing your space.”
The new Fri lounge chair expresses Hayon’s quest for openness. “If the Ro chair was about privacy, then the Fri chair is about being free. It looks like we shortened the Ro, but it’s more than that. The opening is wider, the armrests and backrest are lower, so it’s inviting you in. It allows different movements. You can sit up, move to the side and so on. You can create clusters of seating [so that groups of people can sit and chat with each other]. The way I think about products for Fritz Hansen is very different to how I would think for other brands; the idea is to look at the way we live, to learn by observing, instead of just making fashionable items.”
Cult persona
Intellectually fearless, buzzing with a childlike energy and a showman through and through, Hayon has built a culture around himself. Born in Madrid to a Spanish father and Venezuelan mother, he was a rebel from an early age. Midway through secondary school, he grew bored of the academic routine and dropped out, heading straight for San Diego, California, where he ended up working for a skateboard company. It was the late 1980s, and the thriving DIY aesthetic, along with the West Coast graffiti subculture, proved irresistible to the impressionable teen. “All around me, people were screen-printing T-shirts, designing skate decks. It’s how I got interested in design,” Hayon told The Guardian in a 2006 interview.
Eventually, Hayon found his way back to Madrid, where he enrolled in the Istituto Europeo di Design. Unfortunately, the curriculum did not prove stimulating enough. Luckily, he won a scholarship to study at L’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris for a year. After graduating,he joined Fabrica, a design and communication academy funded by Italian clothing giant Benetton, and was quickly promoted to head of design. “I never thought about being a designer,” he admits. “It just came out.”
By 2003, Hayon decided to go solo, staging his first exhibition, Mediterranean Digital Baroque, in David Gill Gallery, one of London’s most progressive art venues. Featuring oversized, otherworldly plastic sculptures and super-scaled graphic doodles, it made the art and design community sit up and take notice, though no one was quite sure what to make of it or its creator. Today, multidisciplinary creative professionals are a dime a dozen, but back then, genre-defying acts were relatively unheard of. The following year, Hayon produced a series of bathroom furniture for Spanish company Artquitect, featuring, as centrepiece, a bathtub with a built-in champagne bucket.
With that project, Hayon started hitting the big time, attracting blue-chip clients such as Bisazza, BD Barcelona, Metalarte and Piper- Heidsieck, who were some of his earliest supporters. Since then, he has earned plaudits including Wallpaper Magazine’s Breakthrough Creator and Maison & Objet Designer of the Year 2010. Hayon’s healthy disregard for convention was the foundation of his success. It is this quality that attracted, and continues to attract, his patrons. Occasionally, however, clients remain slightly apprehensive, as it was with Fritz Hansen. “When I went to Fritz Hansen for the first time, they were not very sure if they trusted me or not. My aesthetic might not have fit,” he admits, referring to how his flamboyant style might not have gelled with the Danish manufacturer’s typically restrained approach.
One should not judge a book by its cover, though. “I’m much more controlled than people think. I have two sides: the wild Jaime, who goes out at night and has to challenge everything he sees in the world. And the other Jaime, who is very pragmatic.” His design process follows a simple formula. “First, I need to establish a theme, something that will make sense [with regard] to what I’m making. Then I explore the theme, introduce materials and start to see what comes out. [It all happens] very fast because everything can be a theme.” To demonstrate this speed, Hayon proceeds to scribble a few unrelated words, but within minutes, he has managed to conceptualise a fictional new restaurant based on an amalgamation of those words.
Spanish reign
The nerve centre of Hayon’s empire — he has offices in Italy and Japan — is his studio in Valencia, Spain, which popular design blog designboom describes as being very homelike, “with its own kitchen, a common room with library and sofa lounge area”. Like a wonderland of creativity, it is filled with sketches (of course), models and prototypes of furniture and sculptures. He shares this space with his wife, Dutch photographer Nienke Klunder, with whom he has two sons aged four and two.
It is here that Hayon dreams up artistic installations that have been exhibited in such institutions as London’s Design Museum, Paris’ Centre Pompidou and Basel’s ArtBasel. It is here also that he conceives his fantastical designs, which these days increasingly veer towards interiors. “I’m doing more interiors. It’s just a consequence of doing everything in a space — furniture, graphics, artworks. I’ve done a few restaurants, and now I’m working on a hotel, my first hotel. I’m happy. It fits me.”
Asked which have been his most memorable works — out of the hundreds he has created over the last dozen or so years — Hayon rattles off: “There’s so many: the first installation I made in London. The first bathroom collection [for Artquitect], which was really complex to achieve. Nobody believed in it. My question was: why was the bathroom not a living room? Why did living rooms have all the money and colour and comfort, while bathrooms remained sterile — like a hospital — all white and [featureless]?
“I still remember how small our booth was at the [2004 Salone del Mobile]. We were next to [German bathroom behemoth] Duravit, which had 3,000 sq m, and we had 40. They had a bath with speakers in it, and here, I had a bath that had a champagne bottle in it; it was large enough to fit two girls in it…! But then we had nice reviews and people started buying it — for different reasons — because it was a joyful, beautiful bathroom.” These days, people are used to Hayon’s theatrics. But he had to show them the way. “You learn how to jump from planes, in order to make people jump out of planes even more,” he says.
Aaron De Silva enjoys experiencing the world and relishes writing about it afterwards.
This article appeared in the Options of Issue 701 (Nov 2) of The Edge Singapore.