We’re just a few days away from one of the most iconic luxury brands on the planet taking a bold step into the unknown. The full unveiling of the Ferrari Luce – only the interior control surfaces and seats have been revealed at time of writing – will truly set the cat amongst the pigeons as the progenitor of the luxury sports car sector ventures into pure electric propulsion for the very first time.

When even the unveiling of the Luce’s dashboard – usually not a subject to trigger controversy and provocation – spawned endless amounts of comment and opinion, it became clear that the combination of electrification and deviation from a pre-conceived norm could not fail to be anything but rage bait.

Wallpaper* can confidently predict the rage-bait churn will get another hearty stir – not because of any aesthetic shortcomings, but because sports cars have been sucked into the culture wars. We’re pretty sure that wasn’t Ferrari’s intention when it signed up LoveFrom and its car-mad directors, Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson, to steward the aesthetic of Ferrari’s first EV, working closely with Maranello’s engineering team to create the ultimate expression of luxury electric mobility.

You might well ask why a car maker going electric is even remotely controversial in 2026. To answer that, one must strap in to experience a perfect storm of misplaced idealism, a layer of wishy-washy governance, a vociferous fandom who have become vocal gatekeepers, and the endless but near mythical search for the true soul of a machine.

Thirty years ago, the latter Grail Quest would have been considered fully done and dusted, with the glorious mechanical symphony that is the V12 engine placed upon a pedestal in the eternal temple and henceforth worshipped forevermore.

To the fury of the temple gatekeepers, that’s not what happened. The inconvenient truth of mobility’s fossil fuel addiction was no longer possible to ignore, except to the most steadfast denialists and exceptionalists. Unfortunately, it’s this contingent who rule the roost in the small but high-profile world of luxury sports automotive.

So what’s the true status of electrified performance? One of the side effects of electrification has been that hitherto unattainable levels of performance are now handed on a plate to drivers of ‘everyday’ machinery; in its most powerful form, the humble Volvo EX30 will hit 62mph in 3.6 seconds. That’s quicker than the limited production 1995 Ferrari F50, now comfortably commanding upwards of £3.5m.

In divorcing the thrill of out-and-out performance from the exclusivity of extortionate prices, the luxury performance market is having to push the boundaries of design, materiality and technology to retain its edge. The new inclusivity of electrification effectively divorces the emotive qualities of performance. And perhaps more than any other carmaker, Ferrari once considered itself the be-all and end-all of emotional machinery.

That’s why the Luce is not a two-seater, but a grand tourer, perhaps the last bastion of romance on four-wheels. But even this sanctified typology – with its evocation of great journeys, open roads and a life of leisure – hasn’t quite cracked the apparently tainted image of electric luxury.

Will the Luce change this? It’ll certainly help shift the dial. This year also sees the release of Jaguar’s new Type 01, the production iteration of the car revealed as the no-less controversial Type 00 Concept. The first all-electric Bentley is also on the way, previewed by the EXP 15 Concept last year, while Rolls-Royce has been quietly operating in this electric realm for several years, first with the Spectre and more recently with the coachbuilt Project Nightingale.

So are all these companies doubling down on an unchangeable course they might conceivably come to regret? That’s certainly the takeaway from the more performance-focused slice of the luxury market. Porsche, Maserati and Lotus have all performed screeching U-turns on their pure EV strategies.

Maserati scrapped a near-completed electric variant of the MC20 supercar, while Porsche has delayed its Boxster replacement, despite engineering a fully electric variant, in order to accommodate ICE power as well – not on the original spec sheet. Meanwhile, Lotus has just announced the Type 135, a hybridised V8 supercar that’s a world away from the electric-only Evija hypercar and Theory 1 concept, reversing plans to make the brand electric only.

Meanwhile, Lamborghini, McLaren and Aston Martin are blocking their ears and pretending their customers have a perfect right to carry on polluting and they have a perfect right to carry on allowing them to do so. The reason? There’s no demand for EVs amongst buyers who favour V8s and V12s, the pop of unburnt fuel crackling in the exhaust pipe and the roar of mechanical combustion.

Despite technical agreements (McLaren with Nio, Aston Martin with Lucid and Lamborghini as part of the VW Group), the fruits of these labours are still shrouded in their respective design studios, waiting for positive customer clinics and enthusiasm from dealers. The 2023 Lamborghini Lanzador concept now looks like a dead end.

Like so many manufacturing and technology sectors, the luxury car industry is in danger of being left behind by China. Right now, the only thing the country doesn’t have is the lustre and leverage of a heritage automotive brand. Otherwise, Chinese EVs are attaining new levels of luxury and performance. The extraordinary 300mph Yangwang U9 Xtreme (parented by BYD) is just a foretaste of what’s to come. The country’s fleet of luxury EV GTs is even stronger, from the Xpeng P7+ to the Zeekr 001 FR and Ferrari-aping Denza Z9 GT.

So is the customer always right, or can they be swayed by new brands without the accumulated centuries of heritage that still shapes our understanding and perception of cars? Companies might cry that ‘our customers don't want an EV!’ but the viability of ICE is increasingly running counter to social norms. No one would welcome fumes in a smoke-free space just because the smoker could afford a pricey cigar. So why would an expensive but outlandishly noisy exhaust be a socially acceptable thing to inflict on a city?

Perhaps it’s the beginning of the end for the traditional supercar and hypercar, their unfeasible abilities hamstrung by social norms and legal restrictions. Genuine enthusiasts know that power isn’t everything, let alone price, and that the best driving thrills don’t necessarily even need speed. A beautifully balanced small sports car will always triumph over a bloated, oversized performance machine.

There are signs that EVs are starting to head in this direction. Consider the return of the ‘hot hatchback’, once a mainstay of affordable ICE performance, now reborn for the electric era. There’s a veritable stable of smallish, sporty electric cars either here or on the way, from the Alpine A290 to the Hyundai Ioniq 5N, as well as the Vauxhall Corsa GSE, Peugeot e-208 GTi, Cupra Raval VZ, and the Volkswagen Polo GTI, even the supercar-baiting Renault 5 Turbo 3E. These run the gamut from affordable to outrageous, but all pack a dynamic punch that more than matches up to ICE equivalents. Zero emissions, more space, less sound and more reliability are all added bonuses.

Those with more patience might want to hold out for the Caterham Project V, due to be revealed in 2027 (when there might also be an electrified successor to the Audi TT to talk about), while fellow small manufacturer Morgan has also dabbled in electric concepts (including the riotous XP-1) and could still be a contender in this defiantly niche market.

The pressure on the traditional sports car is technological, cultural and economic, threatening to squeeze this once highly desirable form factor into obsolescence, afforded only by a tiny coterie of confused collectors unsure as to what they’re even signifying. As it stands, China has almost all the cards when comes to the premium electrified GT (despite Porsche and Audi’s valiant resistance). Will Ferrari’s top-tier competitors respond to the boldness of the Luce, or will they simply wait and see how it all pans out?

Lest we forget, the very first EV of the modern era, the Tesla Roadster, was a sports car (engineered by Lotus, no less). It was a simpler machine from a simpler age but still retains some charm. Nearly 20 years later, a true successor is nowhere to be found. Whoever can convincingly splice electrification with true driver engagement could still come up with a winner.

It’s half a century since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, a tech-minded entrepreneur and a shy-minded computer engineer, emerged from the counter-cultural fug of San Francisco to found Apple Computer in the suburb of Palo Alto. With their shared passion for electronics, Dylan bootlegs and practical jokes, the two men pooled capital raised from the sale of an HP-65 calculator and a VW Bus to start Apple, with the official partnership agreement signed on 1 April 1976 in Mountain View, California.

From the outset, it was hardware that drove the Apple machine. The Apple 1, the personal computer designed by Wozniak and aggressively marketed by Jobs, was available as a kit ($50 for the main PCB) but also as a fully assembled machine, for $500 wholesale. Customers wanted the latter, which transformed Jobs’ house and garage in Palo Alto into a basic assembly line.

The rest is history, thoroughly burnished with retelling. The Apple 1, selling for $666.66 retail, was still rather ad-hoc, less polished and complete feeling than the rivals that started to emerge. It was time to step up. The Apple II, with a housing designed by local consultant Jerry Manock, was to be the first product from the new Apple Computer Co, officially incorporated in January 1977.

The computer was a runaway success, putting the nascent company on a firm financial footing and – crucially – served to reinforce Jobs’ belief that when it came to design, detail, and presentation, it was his way or the highway.

It’s salient to recall how many of the building blocks of the modern digital world have been laid by Apple, even if the company wasn’t always responsible for baking the bricks in the first place. Apple is a company of firsts and taking first dibs, from the graphical interface created at Xerox PARC that was to form the basis of Apple’s operating system and hence every icon-driven screen in the world (either a massive dropped ball by Xerox or a canny steal by Apple – according to his biographer Walter Isaacson, Jobs described it as both) to the barely disguised homages to Dieter Rams and post-war minimalism ushered into the public realm by Jobs and Jony Ive.

Over 50 years, Apple has set physical and aesthetic standards that others have had no choice but to follow. Inspiration might be the jumping off point, but it has always been perspiration that takes Apple above and beyond.

Now, more than ever, the company’s influence is felt. When Apple has a new idea, the world still sits up and takes notice. When Apple makes a (rare) misstep, the commentariat churns out millions of words to examine exactly what went wrong.

Unsurprisingly, the half-century has been substantially focused on hits, rather than misses. Every Lisa or Vision Pro is countered by literally billions of other devices. The iPhone alone has sold three billion units over 50 variants since its introduction in 2007. The MacBook, first seen in 2006, has sold in the hundreds of millions, with the newly launched MacBook Neo looking set to expand that reach still further.

Depending on the data, the Californian giant sits comfortably in the top ten of global companies by value, nestling alongside other titans of tech like Amazon and Alphabet. But while the latter are better known for their services, Apple has managed to retain the lustre of physicality, with its products acting as the ambassadors for the brand.

Apple has consistently demonstrated an uncanny genius at shifting the cultural conversation and rewiring our consumer desires. From the democratising principle of the first 1984 Macintosh, and its irresistible alignment with culture and creativity, through to the creation of the PowerBook, iMac, MacBook, iPod, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, Siri, Apple TV and Apple Music and now the Neo.

All of this has been stewarded with impeccable precision, ruled first by the iron fist of Jobs, partnered with the eagle eyes of Ive, and latterly by Tim Cook, who became CEO in 2011.

Unlike the eco-systems developed by many of its peers, Apple’s walled garden has remained consistently appealing to consumers, an experience that perpetuates the silky smooth, friction-free experience Jobs was so determined to provide from the outset. Although failures are few, Apple has never been afraid to pivot away from a wayward bet or switch back to its core focus when distraction threatens.

The much-hyped and hugely amortised Apple car project, for example, or the technically astonishing but content-starved Vision Pro, any number of UI or hardware missteps or even the sub-par first iteration of Maps, have all been diplomatically dispatched yet also thoroughly absorbed into the lore; the company never makes the same mistakes twice. Apple’s relatively light involvement with AI, which was initially dismissed as being too little and too late, is looking smarter by the minute.

The seamless confluence of hardware and software, a rigid house style for presentation and graphics, packaging, architecture and retail environments, from the multi-billion dollar Apple Park to a recyclable iPhone box, the devil continues to inhabit the details.

On top of this is a steely determination, if not to win friends, certainly to influence people, from journalists to fanboys, rivals to challengers, suppliers to governments. It was Apple that reshaped the music industry, that initiated the tap-to-pay methods used around the world, that broke Silicon Valley hegemony by building its own award-winning chips, that gave the smartwatch industry a flagship to aspire to. It is also Apple that is providing a benchmark for sustainable manufacturing in the shape of the Apple 2030 plan.

Apple is a behemoth in every sense. In 2025, the App Store alone saw over 850 million average weekly users around the world. Since 2008, Apple says that developers have earned over $550 billion on this platform. Annual hardware unit sales in the tens of millions make stated carbon neutrality targets a tough reach, but the company’s dominance over its supply chain makes it better placed than almost any other manufacturer in history to affect meaningful change.

So what of the next 50 years? An American company with global reach and near-universal admiration, Apple is also representative of the tentacles that are tightly wrapped around the global network of material supply, manufacturing, distribution and sales.

Apple doesn’t just facilitate interpersonal connectivity but demonstrates how geopolitics are integral to our current way of life. In an era of enforced reactionary behaviour and international isolationism, could our continued desire for technology help drive a less destructive path?

Apple.com, Apple.com/store

Christie's rostrum – originally designed in the 1700s by Thomas Chippendale, with reproductions used in more recent times – has always been a central element of the auction house's operations. Now, it is making way for a new design by Jony Ive and LoveFrom.

Unveiled on 5 March 2026 on the occasion of the 20/21 sale at London's King Street, the redesign marks Christie’s 260th year, and was produced by British woodworking specialist Benchmark.

Jony Ive and LoveFrom’s new rostrum for Christie’s

'Our collaboration with Christie’s has been unforgettably special,' says Ive. 'This has been a wonderfully curious and challenging project requiring so much research and unexpected learning. The original Thomas Chippendale design is masterful and remains rather intimidating.

'We have designed a modest object that celebrates craft and material. The purpose of the rostrum is to literally and figuratively elevate the auctioneer, providing a stage for their authority and expertise that proudly carries the Christie’s mark.'

The rostrum is made of sustainably sourced oak, from the same forests that supplied the timber for the recent restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral, with further elements in stainless steel. For the design, Ive worked closely with the Christie’s team: essentially, the rostrum is conceived as a tool and the British designer approached it with the reverence one expects for a functional, utilitarian object.

The rostrum has to hold the auctioneer, be easily moved and stored, but at the same time, it commands a room during the auction, so its presence is paramount – Ive and his team thought of it as a stage more than a piece of furniture.

‘The rostrum is at the heart of our business,’ says Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan. 'I feel blessed that for our 260th anniversary, we can unveil this remarkable object as our legacy for Christie’s future.’

This is your first glimpse of the much-anticipated Ferrari Luce, the Italian manufacturer’s first foray into a pure EV. The anticipation – and trepidation – pours in from all quarters for several reasons. For the Ferraristi, the challenge is how the company can transition from a legacy based on combustion into the electric era. For everyone else, it’s the first time that two of the most accomplished industrial designers of an era – Jony Ive and Marc Newson – have been tasked with designing a production car.

The road to this point is long and windy and the final destination – for the public and media at least – has still not been reached. The full picture and complete reveal of the Luce will take place towards the end of May. What you see here was unveiled at an event in LoveFrom’s native San Francisco, attended by a smattering of design, tech and automotive media and presided over by Ive, Newson and Ferrari’s Chief Design Officer Flavio Manzoni.

The Ferrari Luce has to do many things, forging a new technological identity for the brand, as well as a new path through largely uncharted but undeniably treacherous territory. You see, the electrification of luxury and performance hasn’t gone quite as well as the auto industry wanted it to. Even though EVs bring bushels of performance, innovative design and levels of luxury and craft that equals traditional platforms, the world’s superrich haven’t exactly fallen over themselves to buy into the zero-emission era.

Ferrari’s statement on the matter is therefore eagerly awaited. The decision to hand design over to Ive and Newson and their team at LoveFrom is therefore simultaneously bold and prudent. Bold, because few brands have the self-confidence and the financial wherewithal to support such a complex project, and prudent, because by hiving off the Ferrari EV to an outside consultancy – however esteemed – there’s always scope to walk it back should the venture not live up to expectations.

Having experienced the second stage of a three-part reveal, we reckon that expectations – thus far – have been exceeded. Ive and Newson were brought on board at the behest of John Elkann, the youthful chairman of Ferrari and Stellantis and member of the mighty Agnelli dynasty.

Elkann’s global outlook is why we’re here in America to see an Italian car designed by an Englishman and an Australian. LoveFrom have chosen the 27th floor of the Transamerica Pyramid for the reveal, recently spruced up to impressive effect by Lord Foster (who worked closely with Ive on Apple Park, lest we forget).

It’s been nearly four and a half years since the collaboration was announced and four months since Ferrari unveiled its new bespoke Elettrica platform to the world. Stage two of this process is the unveil of both the new car’s name – Luce, or ‘light’ – and the key interior components. The exterior (most people’s only experience of a Ferrari) will be shown in May.

But for those familiar with Ive, Newson and the LoveFrom ethos, with its compulsion for flawless kerning, pixel-perfect graphics and the ability to coax hitherto unseen quality from the mass production process. All this is the product of decades of experience, not least at the head of one of a vast, hugely profitable company that had – and still has – the ability to ensure suppliers obey its every whim.

Ferrari is no faceless tech supplier, however. Fiercely independent and beholden to no one in its pursuit of excellence, it is uniquely suited to this kind of partnership. ‘It was a very intense collaboration – our chairman wished to make a clear statement in terms of innovation,’ says Manzoni, resplendent in a black Ferrari baseball cap, ‘the first electric Ferrari had to be something special.’ ‘A designer’s duty is to seize the opportunity of new technologies,’ he continues, citing the work of Bruno Munari, Achille Castiglioni and the other pioneering names who made Italy an industrial design nexus in the 1970s. ‘The idea was to avoid the conventions and codes of car design,’ Manzoni concludes.

After a brief presentation, at which Ferrari’s CEO Benedetto Vigna and Chief Design Officer Flavio Manzoni extol LoveFrom’s virtues, the farsightedness of Mr Elkann and their own humility at handing over such a large and important project, we’re shown a short brand film which introduces the Luce name for the first time.

Let’s be clear, with an EV, Ferrari is going out on a limb regardless of LoveFrom’s involvement. Public opinion – the wealthy, 1%-er Ferrari-buying public that matter – is still lukewarm about the idea of an electric luxury car, let alone one coming from the manufacturer of some of the most famous and fulsome combustion cars in automotive history. Vigna might enthuse about the Luce’s role – ‘a project that will enlighten the future and the road ahead’ - but first the weight of expectation needs to be banished by the jab of cutting-edge design.

Then it’s over to Newson and Ive, each resplendent in casual but contrasting pastel suits. ‘We’re enormously excited, completely terrified, but also honoured,’ Ive begins, before speaking of a ‘strong sense of affection between the two teams’ over the multi-year development program.

LoveFrom’s USP isn’t just for clients; Ive and Newson have carefully constructed a fortress of excellence for themselves, buoyed up by 60 multidisciplinary designers. The lion’s share of the design work, right down to the coding was done here in San Francisco, with Maranello handling the engineering and the all-important drive testing.

The Dash

It’s still a while before anyone outside of Ferrari gets behind the wheel. First, we have to actually see it. Ushered up a few more floors, the fruits of LoveFrom’s labours are revealed; the instrument binnacle, steering wheel, centre screen, control panel, centre console and overhead control panel, along with elegant seats trimmed in tan leather.

At first glance, the ensemble exudes a classical elegance, an analogue familiarity that invites touch and engagement. This is not an intimidating interior, far from it. It’s a space that celebrates materiality, engineering, innovation, craft and information design, rendered with a signature precision that preserves the dominance of the physical over the digital, even though there's a reliance on the latter for the actual display of information.

‘It’s a bizarre and lazy assumption that the interface should be digital if the power source is electric,’ Ive says simply, ‘I love Ferrari’s connection with the joy and love of driving. Their engineering team are breathtaking – we spent a lot of time trying to make this functional, simple and effective.’

In essence, the control surfaces of the Luce have been broken down into these discretely individual elements, related through function, material and aesthetics but treated as individual components. It’s strongly reminiscent of the kind of gadgetry the team has associated with in the past – a smartphone, a Leica camera, a wristwatch, a turntable.

The centre screen has touch capability but it’s not the priority interface. Instead, an array of five toggle switches and a dial provide the primary interaction to control the HVAC. Along the top, two layers of crisp graphics show power output and efficiency, while the centre section of the screen will presumably contain mapping and entertainment information (not yet revealed).

Most essentially, the centre screen contains an analogue clock embedded in the upper righthand corner. Featuring physical hands over a digital face, the clock can be repurposed as a compass and a chronometer, the graphics seamlessly shifting beneath the hands. Two physical buttons add another layer of engagement.

Many contemporary Ferraris offer an optional driver information screen embedded in the dash, but the Luce avoids any duplication by means of a simple mechanical device; the display can be orientated to the passenger by means of the aluminium grab handle mounted below the screen. This doubles up as a palm rest for activating switches or entering information – no hovering over a grimy touchscreen trying to stab the right spot.

The primary instrument binnacle is another self-contained unit, only this time it’s united with the steering column and wheel; they all move and adjust together as a single object. Three digital dials, with another analogue needle in the large centre dial, provide a clarity of information more akin to a helicopter cockpit than a road car. The glass here is lens-like, creating a parallax effect when you move your head, reinforcing the sense of depth and quality.

LoveFrom developed their own typeface for the car, LF Maranello, overseen by resident typographer Antonio Cavedoni. It's all part of a user-centric approach that aims to simplify and demystify. ‘Within a minute of looking at this, you know how to use it,’ says Ive, adding that ‘we’ve drawn on everything we know as a team.’

The Wheel

The wheel is another piece of purist industrial design, the distillation of decades of Ferrari heritage with the utmost graphic simplicity. It has three spokes, as per tradition, with the aluminium structure laid bare. The leather clad rim has a slim, delicate profile, while Ferrari’s signature manettino dial is duplicated – one for driving mode, one for handling mode – set each side of the wheel along with other key drive functions. Indicators are recessed aluminium buttons on the centre spokes, while the paddles operate the Luce’s regenerative braking system.

The Centre Console

The centre console contains the drive selector, window controls and key dock. The latter is a rectangular yellow Ferrari badge, with an e-ink display that turns the yellow background black when the key snaps magnetically into its receptacle and sinks into the glass finished surface. It’s a little piece of theatre, one that goes part way to replacing the snarl and bark of conventional ignition.

The Overhead Console

A separate overhead console houses the aviation inspired Launch Control selector, which must be pulled down and twisted to activate the Luce’s maximum acceleration mode. The centre console extends through the cabin to serve the two rear seats, with another screen, switch bank and two of the most meticulously composed air vents you’re ever likely to see.

These mirror the vents on the dash, with matt aluminium housing and a simple twist mechanism to open the airflow. The move is accompanied by a delightfully mechanical click, a noise and feel that has been carefully honed over countless iterations.

The minimalist material palette transcends the usual automotive mix of metal, carbon fibre, and hard and soft touch plastics. 100% recycled aluminium is used extensively, often CNC machined from solid billets and anodised to create a soft, microscopic texture. Glass surfaces use scratch-resistant glass from Corning, the original iPhone supplier.

The Seats

The seats are more classical, with a ribbed back panel and integrated headrest that references Ferraris of old. Finished in soft tan leather, they eschew the luxury industry’s fascination with elaborate inserts, stitch patterns and sporting form factors.

Like every component in the new industry, the seats, console and particular the dash binnacle are designed to be appreciated from every angle. Because the latter stands proud of the bulkhead, the rear is just as important as the front – you wouldn’t expect anything less from a team of product designers, right down to the last screw.

Despite all this tactile delight there’s still no indication of what the Luce will actually look like. All we know is that it is a large four-door, four-seat GT, along the lines of Ferrari’s Purosangue SUV. The Elettrica EV platform, revealed late last year, will put out around 1,000bhp through no less than four electric motors, be powered by a sizeable 122kWh battery and have a target range of over 300 miles.

There will be no artificial engine noise, but instead a soundtrack generated by the electrically amplified noise of the mechanical components, tuned by a noise cancelling system to exclude unwanted frequencies and capable of running completely silently when required. Handling will be bolstered by active suspension, a development of the system onboard the Purosangue, that makes use of the four individual at-wheel motors to enhance the dynamic experience. In the absence of combustion, feedback, drama and sensation will be created in other ways.

Thus far, design predictions have shown an evolution of current Ferrari design language. Clean sheet briefs are truly rare things to find in the world of car design. We think – and hope – Ive and Newson have gone much further. Will the Luce take on the crisp wedgy profile of the 1973 308 GT4, the poised muscularity of the 1966 275 GTB4 or the fluid sci-fi drama of Pininfarina’s 512S Modulo concept from 1970 (just three examples of the cornucopia of iconic car design in the Ferrari annals)? It could be a synthesis of all three and more or a deliberate avoidance of everything.

These historic cars - and many more – were lovingly dissected and redrawn as handsome vignettes by the LoveFrom team, part of the lavish four volume set of bound research findings and recommendations created in the first six months of the project. ‘You can’t work across disciplines without an insatiable curiosity to learn,’ says Ive, explaining how this research phase is crucial to any LoveFrom project. ‘It demonstrated our deep interest in the culture of Ferrari, both as an automotive brand and from an Italian cultural perspective,’ Newson adds, ‘you really have to get into character.’

The two men have a 30-year friendship, and a love of cars is a shared preoccupation. Often seen at the world’s great concours – Villa d’Este, Pebble Beach, Goodwood, etc., both are noted collectors of classic machines (Newson’s 1934 Bugatti Type 59 won Best of Show at the 2025 International Concours of Elegance in St Moritz). This project is in many ways the culmination of a long personal and professional association.

According to Manzoni, the LoveFrom collaboration has ‘really enriched our approach.’ The Sardinian-born designer, who joined Ferrari as CDO in 2010, describes the Luce as being ‘independent of the design strategies of the [Ferrari] range… this is unico.’ ‘The rest of the range is evolution,’ he continues, ‘we’ve learned a lot, especially in HMI, but we want to keep this car unique.’ Manzoni – nor anyone else – will be drawn on the Luce’s exterior aesthetics. ‘You can imagine the approach [LoveFrom] have used on the exterior,’ he teases, ‘the formal philosophy is the same – very rigorous and very pure.’

The Luce’s interior is fascinating for what it omits as much as much as what it includes. Ive is uncharacteristically blunt in one assessment, telling us that ‘touch doesn’t belong in cars.’ There is touch input, of course, but it’s definitely secondary to the analogue experience. The interior is a defining example of that horrid portmanteau ‘phygital’ (a word which is conspicuously and thankfully absent from any of today’s discussions), a fact that’s all the more interesting coming as it does from one of the preeminent architects of our modern digital lives.

Ive maintains that the distraction-free cockpit of the Luce will ‘save lives’, and it’s hard not to imagine Ferrari’s rivals taking copious notes once they lay eyes on the LoveFrom design. Ferrari itself describes the cabin’s forms and displays as being ‘simplified and rationalised in the service of driving'; it's worth noting that they’re quite a long way from the company’s current interior ethos.

There are some caveats to this blanket anti-screen statement, not least the auto industry’s billion-dollar push towards autonomy. San Francisco is the home of Waymo and the company's LiDAR-encrusted Jaguar I-Paces are a common sight on its streets. It’s one area where the distraction of more screens might be welcome, although a self-driving Ferrari is perhaps even more heretical than an electric one.

Flavio Manzoni acknowledges that the Luce is not designed for traditional Ferrari customers, rather those who are new to the brand and perhaps more taken with the tech and luxury backgrounds of Ive and Newson than with Ferrari’s 79-year history of sports car manufacturing. It could even be more appealing to women, traditionally underrepresented in Ferrari’s customer base (although younger markets like China have a more equitable female/male ratio than the West).

The Luce interior has a clarity of execution and function that few other car companies can currently muster, if they ever could. By avoiding the overt reliance on giant touchscreens and by amplifying the importance of touch and feel, the Luce is taking its own path, parlaying the importance of a true analogue physicality to the spirit and emotion of driving.

Stage two of the Luce reveal certainly corroborates Elkann’s intention to avoid the industry’s existing dogma. As Newson says, ‘we were approached as an outside entity, so our approach was going to be different – that was the whole point of the exercise. The fact that it was an EV was an interesting starting point and a welcome and exciting level of newness.’

From the initial research to the final interior, the Luce project is a showcase for LoveFrom’s obsessive, intensive and unashamedly multidisciplinary approach. ‘If you don’t have a very strong philosophy and discipline, it just won’t work,’ Ive says of the project’s vast complexity, working hand in hand with Ferrari’s engineering team, its suppliers, production partners and the reams of legislation that bind the auto industry.

Newson still enthuses that ‘Ferrari are by far and away the best partner we could have,’ strongly implying that the realisation of this detailed and comprehensive brief would simply not be possible anywhere else.

Ferrari.com, LoveFrom.com

Read our May 2026 report from the full Ferrari Luce reveal in Rome

Jony Ive's LoveFrom and Japanese company Balmuda unveiled the ‘Sailing Lantern’, a new portable lighting object born from their first collaboration and mutual admiration.

Precisely engineered and crafted by Balmuda's team in Tokyo, the design originated from Ive's quest for a lantern for his sailboat. 'I have been sailing since I was a little boy, and when you are on the water, your connection to nature and the elements is so clear. I think there's something about using a lantern in these extreme conditions,' he told Wallpaper*. 'I was surprised that I couldn't find something that could survive in extreme maritime conditions.'

His design is quietly familiar, with a silhouette recalling vintage Fresnel lamps – although Ive was careful to create a design that wasn't nostalgic. 'The reason this feels familiar isn't because we took elements that previously existed. The reason it is familiar is humanity and ingenuity.'

Encased in a precision-machined stainless steel frame is a polished, textured glass module that conceals an LED centre. The shine on the materials and the precision with which they are refined make the 1.5kg object look like a piece of jewellery.

‘It’s not precious,’ Ive is quick to point out. And as he takes the lantern and casually throws it around between his hands, the object comes alive and reveals itself not as a delicate piece of decoration, but as a utilitarian, precisely engineered tool where beauty is a consequence of a rigorous manufacturing process.

As with all LoveFrom designs, every element is carefully considered from an aesthetic and experiential point of view. The flower-shaped dial gently clicks as the lantern is turned on and off, and the lanyard is made from textured polyester that can resist salt, sun and oil, fixed in place with a corrosion-resistant stainless steel button. ‘The lantern will scratch. And over time, I actually think that it will look better and better.’

The design is a reflection of the experience of sailing, of the elements at play, the sense of movement and, of course, the light. Ive wanted to honour that experience, with something 'that feels similarly truthful and elemental. If you hold it, it just feels right. And with the movement on a boat, it feels so alive.'

LoveFrom and Balmuda

Ive is clear that what really made this project is the collaboration with Balmuda, more than his own design. 'As I've got older, who I work with has become far more important than what I work on,' adds Ive.

The Japanese company was founded by Gen Terao in the early 2000s, with a 2003 design of a cooling platform for Apple Macintosh laptops widely considered as the design that kick-started the sequence of events that turned a personal mission into a global brand. Today, Balmuda straddles precision engineering and minimalist design – comparisons to Ive's Apple era have been a constant in the past decade, as the Japanese company has released minimally modern appliances that range from a toaster oven to an elegant electric kettle.

Ive had been observing Terao’s work, regularly visiting Balmuda’s Tokyo store. 'There are all these diverse products, but they all expressed the values and care of a person, and there was a clarity and a truthfulness that I thought was really striking,' he recalls. 'So more important than [making] a lantern, it was the opportunity to be able to collaborate.'

'When Jony came to me with the idea of this lantern, I found it really romantic,' says Terao. 'Combining this nautical idea with the contemporary technology of LEDs, I just got the impression that he wanted to create an excellent tool. And we are tool makers.' What followed were 'a very hard couple of years' in which the Balmuda team developed Ive's idea. 'The level of precision and polish that he wanted was something I'd never come across before,' Terao recalls. 'So my team had to learn as we went along, and it was a very valuable experience for us.'

Nature informing light

Terao's team had already worked on a portable lantern, which became the starting point for the collaboration's lighting element. And the light given by the ‘Sailing Lantern’ is both precise and poetic: as the dimming dial is turned on, the low light starts with a pink-red glow, quietly growing in intensity until it reaches its full illumination with a white-blue tint. This, Terao explains, is the same effect of the previous lantern he produced, achieved thanks to a series of red and white LEDs that can be controlled as the light is dimmed, to create an effect that is as close to natural light, or fire, as an industrially produced light can be.

'It's the same that you find with flames: lower flames are red, and as they become hotter, they turn blue. They are the colours of nature,' notes Terao. Switching off the lantern is a pleasure in itself, with the light going off slowly, almost imperceptibly.

This, Ive notes, is a consequence of his design process, driven by language as much as design. 'I can only draw a small percentage of the characteristics of this object, but I can write about many more. You don't switch off a candle or a bonfire. So when you use a word like extinguish, that to me is so open: the possibilities, the provocation. And I think when you switch this off, the feel of the mechanism and the sound and then the glow just gently goes. That's what makes us happy.'

A project rooted in collaboration

'Jony Ive’s attention to detail is world famous,' notes Terao. 'And for us as engineers, meeting his requirements was hard. But we took on this challenge, and maybe the biggest gift that Jony has given us is just that our abilities in science and technology have improved as a result.'

Ive echoes the sentiment. 'Gen is not interested in sailing, but we're both interested in solving these tough, crazy problems,' he adds. 'When you make something, people focus very often on the tangible expression of it. But the other consequences are what you learn, and your relationship.

'As you gain more experience in your practice, what seems really valuable gently starts to shift. And I feel overwhelmed with gratitude to be lucky enough to find somebody that I just love working with. I think you would be foolish and arrogant not to celebrate that, and I am very mindful of how rare and precious it is.'

Sailing Lantern is available for $4,800 (€4,500) in a limited edition of 1,000, from balmuda.com/lovefrom-balmuda

The Wallpaper* USA 400 celebrates Creative America in all its dazzling breadth and diversity. Our snapshot of the people who are shaping the country’s creative landscape in 2025 spans community builders, tastemakers, business leaders and more. It’s all a testament to the abundance of stellar talent that’s defining the discourse here in the United States – and the world more broadly.

Here are the names to know in America now.

Wallpaper* USA 400: a guide to Creative America in 2025

Creatives working in fashion, architecture, visual arts and more: the rising stars getting us excited for the future.

ADAM CHARLAP HYMAN AND ANDRE HERRERO
Principals, Charlap Hyman & Herrero

AIDEN BOWMAN AND JOSH METERSKY
Self-taught designers and founders of lighting studio Trueing, which takes inspiration from their art history and engineering backgrounds

ASTRAEUS CLARKE
Furniture and lighting designers, based in Brooklyn

AUGUSTA HOFFMAN
Interior designer

CASEY KENYON
Interior designer

CATHERINE HOLSTEIN
Founder of womenswear label Khaite, known for its balance of masculinity and femininity, strength and softness, structure and fluidity

CHASE HALL
Artist who applies coffee to cotton canvas (both inextricably linked to Africa and slavery) to explore ‘the impossible absolute of biracial identity’

CHRIS MAGGIO
Photographer, his work playfully reinvents the genre of Americana and subverts internet culture

CHRIS WOLSTON
Artist and designer who has collaborated with with the likes of Fendi, Phillip Lim and Dior

DANIEL PATRICK GILES
Founder of Perfumehead, an olfactory label that challenges traditional perceptions of fragrance

DAVID FARRUGIA
Founder, Uniform Object

DEAN LEVIN
Artist-designer and architect

DEVIN WILDE
Ceramic artist creating geometric works in clay

DONNI DAVY
Make-up artist, founder Half Magic

ENY LEE PARKER
Ceramic designer and artist

ETHAN HIDALGO
Furniture designer, founder of Studio Hidalgo

FREDERICK TANG
The founder of the eponymous architecture studio creates contemporary chic that’s not afraid of colour

HEATH WAGONER
Designer

IDO YOSHIMOTO
Artist and arborist whose work focuses on forms and objects from the natural world

ISABEL ROWER
Ceramic artist

JAYE KIM
Ceramic Artist

JEAN AND OLIVER PELLE
Founders of design studio Pelle, which merges art and engineering to create expressive lighting, furniture and design objects

JEREMY ANDERSON
Visionary ceramic artist, taking the material to unexplored creative expressions

JOHN MAY & ZEINA KOREITEM
Founders of architecture studio Millions

JOMO TARIKU
Ethiopian-American artist and industrial designer defining a new design language of modern African-themed furniture (featured in the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever movie set)

KATIE STOUT
Artist and designer who creates furniture and objects that use traditional craft techniques and materials, but which are shaped by an urge to subvert utilitarian forms with unexpected results

LEAH RING
Designer/founder of Another Human

LIAM LEE
Creates biophilic furniture using colour-saturated felt

MARQUEL RASHAAD WILLIAMS
Designer

MARTINE GUTIERREZ
Artist and performer

MAX WORRELL AND JEJON YEUNG
Founders of architecture studio Worrell Yeung, creating architecture that looks effortless and transforms the lives of its users (see Worrell Yeung’s refresh of a Charles Gwathmey home)

MILES GREENBERG
Performance artist

MINJAE KIM
Korean-born designer whose work explores ideas of identity and belonging (Kim has previously shown alongside his artist mother, at Matter Projects)

MISHA KAHN
Blurs boundaries between sculpture and design with a wildly imaginative approach (as seen in our interview ahead of Kahn’s 2020 Friedman Benda show)

NATALIE SHOOK
Designer

NICHOLAS OBEID
Furniture and lighting designer

NOAM DVIR AND DANIEL RAUCHWERGER
Partners, BOND

NOEL HERNANDEZ & VIKTORIA BARBO
Co-Founders, Ollin

OLALEKAN JEYIFOUS
Nigerian-born, New York-based visual artist and designer whose work reimagines social spaces that examine the relationships between architecture, community and the environment

PETER B STAPLES
Founder of lighting design studio Blue Green Works, known for its sensual yet masculine approach to form

RIFF STUDIO
Thoughtful, young, research-based architecture and design studio

RYAN LEIDNER
Founder of young and dynamic eponymous architecture office with a flair for creating residential spaces that commune with nature

RYAN TWARDZIK
Founder and designer of Unform Studio

SAM KLEMICK
Founder of Studio Sam Klemick, furniture design practice that utilises salvaged materials and deadstock/vintage textiles

SARAH BURNS
Furniture Designer and founder of Old Jewelry Store in New York City

SOPHIE LOU JACOBSEN
French-American designer whose focus is on simple objects and rituals that elevate the user experience

STUDIO S II
Erica Sellers & Jeremy Silberberg’s Brooklyn studio crafting interiors, furniture and lighting

TASKA CLEVELAND
Interior designer

UTHARAA ZACHARIAS AND PALAASH CHAUDHARY
Indian-born founders of studio Soft-Geometry

ZACK NESTEL-PATT
Founder, Ah Um Design Studio

Entrepreneurs and CEOs at the helm of the country’s leading design companies, from globally renowned furniture giants to small brands making waves in the design world.

BEN SOLEIMANI
Founder, Ben Soleimani

BEN WATSON
Chief creative officer, MillerKnoll

DAVID CALLIGEROS
Founder, Remains Lighting Company

GABRIEL HENDIFAR
Artistic director and CEO, Apparatus

GARY FRIEDMAN
CEO and chairman, RH

GREGG BUCHBINDER
Owner and CEO, Emeco

HOLLY HUNT
Founder, House of Hunt

JANICE FELDMAN
Founder, Janus et Cie

JERRY HELLING
President and creative director, Bernhardt Design

JON SHERMAN
Founder, Flavor Paper

LINDSEY ADELMAN
Founder, Lindsey Adelman Studio

NARGIS AND NASIR KASSAMALI
Founders, Luminaire

NICK AND RACHEL COPE
Co-Founders, Calico Wallpaper

SIAMAK HAKAKIAN
Partner, DDC

TONY MANZARI
President, Edelman, Knoll Textiles and Maharam

TYLER HAYS
Founder, BDDW

The creatives who have infiltrated the world of show business: architects and designers contributing to the aesthetics of popular culture, from cinema and theatre to museums.

DAVID ROCKWELL
Architect and designer, creator of sets for Oscars ceremonies and Broadway shows

FRANK OCEAN
Artist, founder of Homer

HERON PRESTON
Artist, fashion designer, DJ

RAMISHA SATTAR
Chappell Roan's creative director

TERRENCE O'CONNOR
Photographer and creative director

VICTORIA BRYNNER
Founder, Stardust Brands

WILLO PERRON
Canada-born designer known for his collaborations with Rihanna

Hailing from the realms of music and cinema, these stars’ creative excellence and entrepreneurship capably stretches to jewellery, fashion, art and more.

COLE ESCOLA
Comedian, actor and playwright

DONALD GLOVER
Actor, comedian, rapper, singer, writer, director, and producer known as Childish Gambino

MARY-KATE AND ASHLEY OLSEN
Founders of fashion label The Row

MEGAN STALTER
Comedian and actor

PALOMA ELSESSER
Model

PHARRELL WILLIAMS
Record producer, rapper, singer, with fashion and design collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Moncler, Adidas and Pentatonic

RYAN MURPHY
Television writer, director, producer, design enthusiast, owner of many architectural gems

SETH ROGEN
Actor, ceramicist, co-founder of cannabis lifestyle brand Houseplant

SOFIA COPPOLA
Film director and screenwriter, serial creative collaborator, including a collection with knitwear brand Barrie and a range of lip balms with Augustinus Bader

TYLER THE CREATOR
Rapper, singer, record producer, and fashion designer

The curators preserving and promoting creative culture, from heirs enthusiastically promoting the family’s artistic legacy to new-generation curators of the country’s leading institutions.

ALEISHALL GIRARD MAXON AND KORI GIRARD
Co-directors, Girard Studio

ALEXANDER MAY
Creative consultant and curator, founder of Sized

ALEXANDRA CUNNINGHAM CAMERON
Curator of contemporary design, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

AMANDA HUNT
Head of Public Engagement, Walker Art Center

ANDREA GLIMCHER
Art advisor

ANDREW BOLTON
Head curator, Anna Wintour Costume Center, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

ANTWAUN SARGENT
Director, Gagosian New York

BEATRICE GALILEE
Co-founder and executive director, The World Around

CARLOS VALLADARES
Filmmaker and critic

EAMES DEMETRIOS
Board chairman, Charles & Ray Eames Foundation

FLORENCIA RODRIGUEZ
Curator, Chicago Architecture Biennal

HOLLAND DENVIR
Founder of LA Design Weekend

JEFFREY DEITCH
Art dealer and curator

JOE SHEFTEL
Art advisor

JOHN MCILWEE
Architectural preservationist; founder, J McILwee & Associates, Inc

JONATHAN OLIVARES
SVP of design, Knoll

MARIAH NIELSON
Director, JB Blunk Estate and Blunk Space

NICOLA LEES
CEO and artistic director, Aspen Art Museum

PAOLA ANTONELLI
Senior curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and a Wallpaper* October 2020 Guest Editor

RICHARD VILLANI
Creative director, Tom of Finland Foundation

SONYA TAMADDON
Curator

SUZANNE DEMISCH
Gallerist

THELMA GOLDEN
Ford Foundation director and chief curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York

WAVA CARPENTER AND ANNA CARNICK
Co-founders of Anava Projects, a creative agency driven by a strong belief that good design can and should make a positive social impact

The ‘no introduction needed’ of creative America: the artists, architects and designers who have helped shape the landscape.

ANNABELLE SELLDORF
Founder of Selldorf Architects

ELIZABETH DILLER AND CHARLES RENFRO
Architects, partners at Diller Scofidio + Renfro

FRANK GEHRY
Architect

FRITZ HAEG
Artist, owner of Salmon Creek Farm

INEZ & VINOODH
Photographers, behind Wallpaper’s portfolio of 50 of America's top creatives driving the current discourse on American culture and its dynamic evolution

JASPER JOHNS
Artist

JENNY HOLZER
Artist

JIM OLSON AND TOM KUNDIG
Founders of architecture firm Olson Kundig

JOHN WATERS
Filmmaker, writer, actor, artist

JOHNNY ROZSA
Photographer and artist

JUDY CHICAGO
Artist, feminist icon

JULIE BARGMANN
Landscape architect, educator, founder of DIRT (Dump It Right There)

KEN LEWIS
Managing Partner, SOM

MARC JACOBS
Fashion designer

MARILYN MINTER
Artist

MURRAY MOSS
Founder of design gallery Moss and design consultancy Moss Bureau

NICK CAVE
Artist known for his fantastical Soundsuits and works that create space for the marginalised

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON
Filmmaker

RALPH LAUREN
Fashion designer

RALPH PUCCI
Founder of Ralph Pucci

RICK OWENS
Fashion designer

ROBIN STANDEFER AND STEPHEN ALESCH
Founders of interior design studio Roman and Williams

SHEILA BRIDGES
Interior designer, founder of Sheila Bridges Design Inc

SHOHEI SHIGEMATSU
Partner, OMA New York

SONIA ERAM
Owner, Mameg

STEVEN HOLL
Architect

THOM BROWNE
Fashion designer, founder of Thom Browne

THOM MAYNE
Architect, founder of Morphosis

TOD WILLIAMS AND BILLIE TSIEN
Architects

TOM FORD
Fashion designer

TORY BURCH
Fashion designer

Setting the creative agenda, from interior design and architecture to fashion and jewellery, these are the influencers behind some of the country’s most noteworthy projects, from buildings to jewellery.

ADA TOLLA AND GIUSEPPE LIGNANO
Founders of architecture studio Lot-Ek, whose client list includes the Guggenheim and Google

ADAM SILVERMAN
Sculptor

ALEX PROBA
Founder, Studio Proba

ALEXANDRA AND MICHAEL MISCZYNSKI
Founders of interior design studio Atelier

ALEXIS TOMPKINS AND LEANN CONQUER
Partners, Chroma

ANDRE MELLONE
Founder of Studio Mellone, whose work includes interiors for the likes of Jason Wu and Thom Browne

ANNA KARLIN
Designer

ATHENA CALDERONE
Founder, EyeSwoon and Studio Athena Calderone

BEN MEDANSKY
Ceramic artist

BENJAMIN BLOOMSTEIN AND AARON AUJLA
Artists, designers, founders of design studio Green River Project, whose work includes meticulously crafted furniture and interiors for fashion label Bode

BRETT WOODS AND JOSEPH DANGARAN
Founders of architecture firm Woods + Dangaran and devotees of midcentury modernism (their Desert Palisades house won Best Private House in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023)

BRIAN SAWYER AND JOHN BERSON
Founders of interdisciplinary firm Sawyer Berson

BRIGETTE ROMANEK
Interior designer

BROOKS WALKER
Principal, Walker Warner Architects

CATHERINE BAILEY & ROBIN PETRAVIC
Owners of Heath Ceramics, the tableware and tile company

CHARLIE FERRER
Interior designer

CHRISTIE WARD AND STAVER GRAY
Founders, Ward & Gray

CHRISTINE & JOHN GACHOT
Interior designers behind projects such as Jac's on Bond and Pebble Bar in New York, and high-profile residential projects, like this stunning Montana retreat.

CLIVE LONSTEIN
Interior designer

COLIN KING
Stylist, Artistic Director at Beni Rugs

CRAIG BASSAM AND SCOTT FELLOWS
Founders of lifestyle brand Bassam Fellows

DAVID BERS
Architect

DAVID BUCOVY
Architect

DAVID CAFIERO
Interior designer

DAVID SETH MOLTZ AND KAVI AHUJA MOLTZ
Founders, DS & Durga

DAVID, SUZIE AND RACHEL LUCAS
Co-founders, Lucas Design

DENISE WILLIAMSON
Founder, 180 the Store

DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN
Photographer

DYLAN DAVIS & JEAN LEE
Designers, founders L&G Studio

ELENI PETALOTI AND LEONIDAS TRAMPOUKIS
Founders of design studio Objects of Common Interest (former Wallpaper* Design Awards winners and judges)

ELIZABETH ROBERTS
Architect

ELLIOTT BARNES
Interior designer who honed his craft with Andrée Putman before setting up on his own

ENRICO BONETTI AND DOMINIC KOZERSKI
Co-Founders, Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture

ERIC HOFFMAN
Founder of Hoffman Creative, creating designs for Pamela Shamshiri, Steven Volpe and more

FERNANDA DOVIGI
Interior designer, founder FMD Design

FERNANDO SANTANGELO
Uruguayan-born, New York-based designer; contributed to the design of NYC’s Nine Orchard hotel

GABRIEL ABRAHAM
Founder, Atelier de Troupe

GABRIELLE SHELTON
Sculptor and designer, co-founder of Shelton Studios metal fabrication studio

GIANCARLO VALLE & JANE KELTNER DE VALLE
Founders Studio Valle de Valle

HARRY NURIEV
Founder of Crosby Studios, creating immersive design installations

HUMBERTO LEON
Fashion designer and restaurateur

INI ARCHIBONG
American-Nigerian designer whose furniture and lighting work is guided by heritage and spirituality

JACQUELINE AND DAMIEN HARRISON
Founders of landscape design studio Harrison Green

JAMES CHERRY
Sculptor, lighting designer

JANE MAYLE
Fashion designer, founder of Maison Mayle

JOHN DERIAN
Designer, founder of Decoupage

JOHN SHARP
Landscape designer

JONATHAN CROSS
Ceramicist whose work is created using ancient wood-firing techniques

KELLEY PERUMBETI & MICHAEL YARINSKY
Founders of Office of Tangible Space

KELLY BEHUN
Interior designer behind California home of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz

KELLY WEARSTLER
Interior designer for the hotel industry, residential, commercial, retail and hospitality spaces

KIMBERLY VON KOONTZ
Landscape designer

KULAPAT YANTRASAST
Founder and creative director of Why Architects, the go-to design studio for museums

LEO MARMOL AND RON RADZINER
Founders of architecture firm Marmol Radziner

LEONG LEONG
Architect brothers Dominic and Chris Leong

LISA EISNER
Photographer-turned-jewellery designer

LITTLE WING LEE
Interior designer, founder of Studio & Projects

LUCIEN REES ROBERTS
Interior and landscape designer

MALLERY ROBERTS MORGAN
Interior designer

MATT MURPHY
Designer

MATTHEW FISHER
Stone artist

MATTHEW LEVERONE
Interior designer

MICHAEL MALTZAN
Architect whose work spans everything from housing for the homeless to glitzy museums

MIRANDA BROOKS
Landscape designer

NANCY PEARCE
Designer

NICOLE HOLLIS
Interior designer behind Hawaii’s Kailua-Kona resort

OLIVER HASLEGRAVE
Founder of interior architecture and design firm Home Studios

OLIVER M FURTH
Interior designer

PALI AND JEJO CORNELSEN
Designers

PAMELA SHAMSHIRI
Founder of Studio Shamshiri, has designed homes for musician Paul McCartney and actor Anne Hathaway, and was a Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023 judge

PETER MARINO
Interior designer for high-end fashion boutiques

RAFAEL DE CÁRDENAS
Designer who has concocted visions of modern elegance for clients such as Cartier, Nike and Glossier

ROBERT HIGHSMITH, RYAN MAHONEY AND STEFANIE BRECHBUEHLER
Founders of design studio Workstead

ROBERT STILIN
Interior designer who mixes contemporary architecture with textured materials and vintage furniture

ROGAN GREGORY
Designer of sculptural pieces, represented by R & Company

ROMAN ALONSO AND STEVEN JOHANKNECHT
Founders of multidisciplinary studio Commune Design

RUBEN CALDWELL, JOU-YIE CHOU AND LEIGH SALEM
Founders of interior design studio Post Company, whose projects include Catskills wellness resort Inness and New York restaurant Raf’s

SANDRA NUNNERLEY
Interior designer

SARAH ZAMES AND COLIN STIEF
Founders, General Assembly Studio

SCOTT NEWLIN
Designer

SEAN ANDERSON
Interior designer

SHARON JOHNSTON AND MARK LEE
Founders of architecture firm Johnston Marklee

SONIA BOYAJIAN
Jewellery designer

STEFAN BECKMAN
The fashion industry’s favourite set designer

STEPHANIE BEAMER, CRYSTAL ELLIS AND HILLARY PETRIE
Founders of furniture design studio Egg Collective

STEPHEN BURKS MAN MADE
A global practice uniting craft, community and industry through its hands-on workshop-based approach while always advocating for greater diversity in design

STEPHEN KENT JOHNSON
Photographer

STEVEN HARRIS
Architect

STEVEN VOLPE
Founder of Studio Volpe, whose work includes elegant residences from Manhattan to LA, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Mrkt in San Francisco

SUCHI REDDY
Founder of architecture and design firm Reddymade

TED MUEHLING
Industrial designer who creates jewellery and decorative objects inspired by organic forms

TESSA WATSON
Creative director and stylist

THOMAS WRIGHT AND JOSEPH FRATESI
Founders of multidisciplinary design and manufacturing firm Atlas Industries

TODD NICKEY AND AMY KEHOE
Co-Founders, Nickey Kehoe

VANESSA ALEXANDER
Founder, Alexander Design

VICTORIA SAMBUNARIS
Landscape photographer

VICTORIA SASS
Interior Designer; Design Director, Prospect Refuge

VIRGINIA SIN
Founder, SIN ceramics

Leaders of design research, start-uppers and business leaders whose creative brilliance is paired with a strong focus on technology and sustainability.

ANDREW KUDLESS
Principal, Matsys Design

BRADLEY BOWERS
Designer using technology and advanced material research to create furniture, lighting and objects

GERMANE BARNES
Architect researching architecture’s social and political influence

GIORGIA LUPI
Data designer, Pentagram partner

JEANNE GANG
Architect, founding partner of Studio Gang, behind the American Museum of Natural History extension

JONY IVE
Former chief design officer at Apple, founder of design studio LoveFrom

JULIA WATSON
Designer, activist, academic, leading expert of Lo–TEK (nature-based technologies for climate resilience)

KATE ORFF
Founder of landscape architecture and urban design practice Scape

MARIE VERONIQUE
Beauty entrepreneur

RJ SCARINGE
Founder and CEO of electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian

TYLER HOBBS
Generative artist, creative coder, painter

VANESSA BARBONI HALLIK
Founder, Co-CEO, and Executive Chair of sustainable fashion brand Another Tomorrow

YVES BEHAR
Founder and principal designer of Fuseproject, a brand development firm working across industrial design, transport and technology

Owners of small boutique hotels and behemoths whose properties stretch beyond the US: the names to know in American hospitality today.

ANDRÉ BALAZS
Properties include Chateau Marmont in LA, The Chiltern Firehouse in London and Sunset Beach on Shelter Island

ARI S HECKMAN
CEO and Co-Founder, Ash

BARRY STERNLICHT
Chairman of Starwood Hotels, which has 1 Hotels, Baccarat and Treehouse Hotels in its portfolio

BRAD KORZEN
Founder and CEO, The Kor Group and Proper Hotels

BRAD WILSON
Managing Partner, Ace Hotel Group

HOMI VAZIFDAR
Founder of Canyon Equity, whose portfolio includes Amangiri and Six Senses Costa Rica

IAN SCHRAGER
Properties include Public New York, Edition hotels in New York and Miami

LIZ LAMBERT
McGuire Moorman Lambert Hospitality (Partner); Lambert McGuire Design (Partner); and Bunkhouse (Founder)

NADIM ASHI
Properties include the Four Seasons at The Surf Club in Florida

Musicians, filmmakers and sound artists, multidisciplinary creatives telling stories and working beyond objects and places.

CHRISTINE SUN KIM
Deaf sound artist working predominantly in drawing, performance and video, using musical notation, written language, American Sign Language, and the body

DAVID BYRNE
Musician, artist and filmmaker

DOECHII
Rapper and singer

ERYKAH BADU
Singer, songwriter, record producer, actor

HONEY DIJON
DJ and Producer

KIM GORDON
Visual artist, bassist, guitarist, songwriter, vocalist, now as a solo artist and formerly for alternative rock band Sonic Youth.

LORI SCACCO
Musician and composer

MOSES SUMNEY
Musician

PATTI SMITH
Singer, songwriter, poet, painter, author

SOLANGE
Musician; Founder, Saint Heron

ST. VINCENT
Grammy award winning artist, musician, songwriter with signature guitar line

STEVE LACY
Musician

SWIZZ BEATZ
Producer and collector

Personalities working in a variety of fields, using art and design as a tool to raise awareness and amplify the voices of the oppressed.

ADAM ELI
Activist

ALEXIS BITTAR
Jewellery designer, filmmaker

CATHERINE OPIE
Fine-art photographer, educator

CHEROKEE JACK
Model, Indigenous activist

DANIEL CHEW, TEN IZU, KIRSTEN KILPONEN AND TIN NGUYEN
Members of Concept Foreign Garments New York (CFGNY), a fashion and art collective exploring what it means to be ‘vaguely Asian’

DEANNA VAN BUREN
Co-founder and design director of nonprofit architecture and real estate development firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, working to end mass incarceration through place-based solutions

DERRICK ADAMS
Visual and performance artist, curator, work focuses on themes of Black identity and culture

EMILY BARKER
Multidisciplinary artist, activist, work focuses on topics relating to disability, discrimination and capitalism

INDYA MOORE
Actor, model and social activist

JOSH KLINE
Artist, curator, explores how emergent technologies are changing our lives

LEILAH BABIRYE
NYC-based sculptor Babirye uses her work to respond to the anti-homosexuality legislation in her home country, Uganda

MICKALENE THOMAS
Visual artist, studies the Black female body as a vehicle of power, eroticism, agency and inspiration

NAN GOLDIN
Photographer, activist

NANCY KRICORIAN
Writer, humanitarian and activist

QUANNAH ROSE CHASINGHORSE-POTTS
Model, Indigenous activist

ROBERTO LUGO
Potter and activist

DEVONN FRANCIS
Queer first-generation Jamaican-American artist exploring his heritage and culture through art and food

Artists, collectives and restaurateurs who have brought global flavours to the US, using food as a creative medium to connect people.

DONNA LENNARD
Restaurateur

IGNACIO MATTOS
Founder/chef of Mattos Hospitality, comprising restaurants Estela, Altro Paradiso and Lodi

JON GRAY
CEO and co-founder of Ghetto Gastro, culinary collective from the South Bronx, and a Wallpaper* Design Awards 2022 judge

JORDAN KAHN
Chef and creative director, with a penchant for expressionist desserts, and three Culver City restaurants (Destroyer, Meteora and Vespertine) offering deliciously avant-garde dining experiences

KEITH MCNALLY
Restaurateur, owner of several New York restaurants including Balthazar

KWAME ONWUACHI
James Beard award-winning chef

LAILA GOHAR
Artist working with food as a creative medium

RITA SODI AND JODY WILLIAMS
Founders/chefs of The Commerce Inn

SEAN SHERMAN
Chef

SIMON KIM
Restaurateur, owner of COTE Korean Steakhouse and COQODAQ

Designers and artists whose practice has become the basis for a larger scope, serving local networks and connecting people.

ALEX SCHATZBERG
Yoga instructor and entrepreneur

ANN STEPHENSON
Poet

BEN GREENE
Speaker and inclusion consultant

CATOR SPARKS
Life coach

DARRELL THORNE
Performance artist

DAVID GODSHALL
Co-Founder, Terremoto

ELIZABETH BAUDOUIN AND NATALIE SHIRINIAN
Filmmakers, founders of Not All Films and NES Creative

ERIN BESLER
Co-founder, Besler & Sons

JAY EZRA
Founder, Del Vaz Projects

JENNY NGUYEN
Founder, Hello Human

JONATHAN LYNDON CHASE
Artist

KAZEM NADERI
Founder, NAD Projects Inc.

LAUREN HALSEY
Artist, employs architecture and installation art to reveal the realities of urban neighbourhoods

MALI AND ALAN BACON
Founders, Butter art fair

MAXWELL L ANDERSON
President, Souls Grow Deep

MICHAEL FORD
Architect; Founder, Hip Hop x Design

MICHAEL K CHEN
Architect

NORMAN TEAGUE
Designer, maker, educator, focuses on connecting with local communities

PETER DO
Fashion designer, brand is rooted in community and dedicated to supporting New York’s garment district

RAUL LOPEZ
Founder of fashion brand Luar

RICK LOWE
Artist, champions people and communities through social practice-based art projects

RITESH GUPTA
Founder of Useful School, a virtual learning platform that puts people of colour front and centre

ROB AQUINO
Community builder and nightlife producer

SARA ZEWDE
Founding principal of design firm Studio Zewde, which focuses on landscape architecture, urbanism and public art

SEAN YASHAR
Founder, The Culture Creative

SHANE DAVIS
Co-founder and creative director of Public Records, a multi-faceted music, social and exhibition space for the community, and co-founder of new design studio for worldwide hospitality/residential projects, Public Service

SHEENA ZADEH-DALY
Founder of beauty brand Kosas, which offers inclusive shades in its make-up ranges

TAMARA HOUSTON
Author, entertainment producer, founder of heritage development enterprise Icon Mann, managing partner of a mobile design and educational installation, the Pavilion of the African Diaspora (PoAD), which she curated alongside Ini Archibong

WILLY CHAVARRIA
Fashion designer, explores and amplifies the Latino voice

Gallerists and collectors putting great design under the spotlight, bringing historical design, contemporary makers and emerging talent to the world.

ADAM BLACKMAN AND DAVID CRUZ
Founders of Blackman Cruz

ALEX TIEGHI-WALKER
Founder of Tiwa Select, a curatorial platform dedicated to craft and self-taught makers, with a New York gallery space (across the pond, Tieghi-Walker will curate the 2025 Brompton Design District in London this September)

AMAURI AGUIAR & BRYAN YOUNG
Founders of Verso

BENJAMIN CRITTON AND HEIDI KORSAVONG
Founders of gallery Marta, which champions emerging creatives from a diverse background

BENOIST DRUT
Head of design gallery Maison Gerard, which specialises in fine French art deco furniture

BIANCA CHEN & JOEL CHEN
Art and design curator (Bianca), and her antiques dealer father (Joel), who founded JF Chen Antiques

CHARLES CONSTANTINE AND CHRIS HELD
Co-founders, Dudd Haus

CLAIRE WARNER AND SAM VINZ
Co-Founders, Volume Gallery Chicago

DAVID ALHADEFF
Founder of Casa Perfect and The Future Perfect

DEIRDRE MALONEY AND MINYA QUIRK
Co-Founders, Shoppe Object and Afternoon Light

DOBRINKA SALZMAN
Gallerist

ED BE AND JARED BLAKE
Co-Founders, Lichen NYC, a design incubator and store

EMMA SCULLY
Founder of Emma Scully Gallery, which promotes applied arts through a curated exhibition programme

MARC BENDA & JENNIFER OLSHIN
Co-founders, Friedman Benda

GLENN LAWSON AND GRANT FENNING
Co-Founders, Lawson-Fenning

JEAN LIN
Founder, Colony

JEANNE GREENBERG ROHATYN
Founder of Salon 94 Design

JOHN RADTKE
Owner, Somewhere Someplace

KIM HOSTLER AND JULIET BURROWS
Founders of gallery Hostler Burrows

LIN AND MAGDALENA TYRPIEN
Co-Founders, Lyle Gallery

MASON VINCENT AND JACK REDPATH
Founders, Darling Studios

PAUL DONZELLA
Furniture dealer

REYES AND LILLIAN HARDY
Co-founders, Landdd

RODMAN PRIMACK AND RUDY F. WEISSENBERG
Co-founders of design gallery Ago Projects

STEPHEN MARKOS
Superhouse

TARIQ DIXON
Co-Founder, TRNK

YANCEY RICHARDSON
Gallerist

ZESTY MEYERS AND EVAN SNYDERMAN
Founders of R & Company, champions of collectible design from contemporary and modern names

The names defining American fashion right now, both on and off the runway.

ANN CARUSO
Fashion brand advisor and consultant

BRANDON MAXWELL
Fashion designer

CHRISTOPHER JOHN ROGERS
Fashion designer behind Vice President Kamala Harris’ inauguration outfit

DYLAN CAO AND JIN KAY
Founders of fashion brand Commission, inspired by memories of their mothers when they were women at work in Vietnam and Korea

EMILY BODE
Founder of fashion brand Bode, creating handcrafted clothing cut from antique fabrics, Victorian quilts, grain sacks and bed linens

FERNANDO GARCIA AND LAURA KIM
Creative Directors, Oscar de la Renta; Co-Founders, Monse

FRANCES HOWIE
Creative director, Fforme

HENRY ZANKOV
Fashion designer

JACK MCCOLLOUGH AND LAZARO HERNANDEZ
Creative Directors, Loewe

JOSEPH ALTUZARRA
Fashion designer

MICHAEL KORS
Fashion Designer

MICHAEL RIDER
Creative director, Celine

RACHEL SCOTT
Founder, Diotima

STUART VEVERS
Creative director, Coach

VERONICA LEONI
Creative director, Calvin Klein Collection

When these groundbreaking talents have a show, seek it out.

ADAM PUTNAM
Multimedia artist whose work puts the human body in dialogue with the spaces we inhabit

AMBERA WELLMANN
Artist

AMY SHERALD
Painter

ANNIE SCHLECHTER
Photographer

CINDY JI HYE KIM
Artist

CLARE CRESPO
Artist

DAHLIA ELSAYED
Artist

DOUG AITKEN
Artist

DYANI WHITE HAWK
Award-winning Native American artist

FIN SIMONETTI
Artist

IVANA BAŠIĆ
Artist

JACK PIERSON
Photographer and artist

JASON SCHMIDT
Photographer

JEFFREY GIBSON
Artist. His US Pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale was the country’s first solo presentation by an Indigenous artist at the event

JULIAN WATTS
Artist, woodworker

LOUISE BONNET
Painter whose large-scale works in oil touch on multiple themes ranging from sex and beauty to tension and humour

MAMALI SHAFAHI
Artist

MARIA MOYER
Artist

MATTHEW PLACEK
Photographer and film director

PIA RIVEROLA
Photographer and artist

RACHEL ROSSIN
Artist

RASHID JOHNSON
Artist

RICHARD STAPLETON
Photographer

ROKSANA PIROUZMAND
Artist

SASHA MASLOV
Ukrainian-American portrait and documentary photographer

SHUO HAO
Artist

SHUYI CAO
Artist

SIMONE LEIGH
Multi-media artist from Chicago

THOMAS LOOF
Photographer

WENDY RED STAR
Apsáalooke contemporary multimedia artist

William Stout Architectural Books is a San Francisco institution. Founded by Bill Stout in 1974, for over half a century the Jackson Square-based bookshop has been the go-to supplier of architectural monographs, biographies, material manuals, treatises and coffee table tomes. Beloved by the local design community and a regular stop-off for passing starchitects, Stout’s shop is also a favourite of one of their Jackson Square neighbours, creative collective LoveFrom.

When it became known that the store was changing hands and a new identity was required, LoveFrom stepped forwards to offer its services for free. ‘We love and cherish the store and want to support our neighbourhood,’ says the studio’s Chris Wilson, adding that ever since it was founded by Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson in 2019, the London- and San Francisco-based design agency has ensured it runs side projects just ‘for the love of doing it’, alongside regular long-term collaborators like Ferrari and Airbnb.

The redoubtable William Stout set up his bookshop in 1974 to cater for his fascination with architecture, which he studied at the University of Idaho from 1960. After a spell working in firms on the East Coast, steeping himself in the architecture culture of Yale and its alumni, Stout headed West. Disillusioned by the practice of architecture but fascinated with the mechanics, influence and physical feel of architectural books, he started his own library.

This rapidly evolved into a modest store, catering to the many practices in the area, even though it was housed in the apartment he shared with the architect Steven Holl. After a few years, booming business allowed the shop to move to proper premises, first at Osgood Place, then to its current location at 804 Montgomery Street.

Stout officially retired in 2022. Throughout his career, he not only catered to seekers of the new and notable but built up a formidable inventory of historic books (although he claimed to always keep the best works for himself when acquiring a new collection). That personal library is now the property of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, along with the store itself.

Lauren Smith, chief experience officer at the Eames Institute, is now in the enviable position of running a world-class design bookshop. The charitable organisation was launched in 2022 and is dedicated to ‘advancing the dynamic legacy of 20th-century designers Ray and Charles Eames’.

Speaking to us from the basement stockroom of the bookshop, theatrically framed by looming piles of books, Smith explains how the acquisition came about. ‘We’d learned through a friend of the Institute that William was selling his personal library of architectural books.’ With a catalogue of over 40,000 objects from the Eames’s career, life and studio, Smith describes Stout’s archive as ‘a natural fit to add to the collection – we’re in the business of preserving legacies’.

In the process of arranging this sale, Stout let them know he was also selling the business. The Eames Institute stepped in, deciding it was a great opportunity to only preserve a vital creative hub in the city, but also to help it ‘move on to the next phase’.

‘We’re looking to the next 50 years,’ says Smith, adding that ‘one of our missions is to create communities of curious problem solvers.’ A bookshop dedicated to art and design fitted right in.

At this point, LoveFrom also joined the fray after hearing that the team from Eames wanted to refresh the look and feel of the venerable store. Over the decades, the design and identity had evolved, with the original signage joined by a jumbled accretion of different styles and approaches.

‘We took Bill out to lunch to pick his brain about all this [visual] material,’ says Wilson. The principal identity was always the vaguely art deco-style sign, with an elongated, stylised sans serif that recalls both Mackintosh and the monogram used extensively by Frank Lloyd Wright from the 1920s onwards.

LoveFrom’s Antonio Cavedoni – described by Wilson as the studio’s ‘type detective’ – was set to research its origins. ‘It used a font called Washington, designed in 1970 by the Australian-born designer Russell Bean,’ Cavedoni reports. ‘As it references art deco, it has a very strong voice. So we decided to keep some elements, but also do something different.’

As Wilson says, ‘part of the brief was to understand the DNA of Stout – to help them see what they actually had. The quirkiness was what we liked – it definitely felt architectural as well, so we didn’t want that to go away. We wanted to give them a strong typographic voice.’

‘Because the original typeface was contemporary to when the store was founded, we reckoned they clearly wanted to have something that was of its time,’ Cavedoni explains. Washington had strong elements of Futura, a font that tended to be used for subsequent communications over the years.

LoveFrom approached Bean and asked if they could modify the original, as long as it was kept for use for the bookshop. The designer agreed and the result, shown here, is ‘LF Washington’, a bespoke sans serif that serves as the basis of the new identity.

‘There was a lot of overshoot in the original,’ says Cavedoni. ‘We wanted to tame it down a bit as well as make it a little bolder.’ The studio also lowered the waist and redrew the numbers to follow the consistency of Futura – the originals were rather eccentric.

‘We needed to keep some of the history in there – it’s the Stout voice,’ he says. In addition, LoveFrom’s team developed a range of ligatures. ‘They add whimsy and personality to certain words,’ says Cavedoni, adding that these were inspired in part by the FLW monogram.

‘We’re trying to use typography in an architectural way,’ says Wilson. The primary expression of this is the sign, a beautifully crafted piece of product design that builds on the original but not only renders the type more cleanly and graphically but boils the identity down to a crisply delineated square. ‘We also wanted to help people understand that this store has been around since 1974 – that gave the red bar at the base of the original logo a reason to be there,’ says Wilson.

The finished object, with its enamelled finish and polished stainless steel dividers, stands proud of the wall, a neat distillation of half a century of history both graphic and architectural.’ It also references the store’s internal reorganisation, removing a lot of the clutter ‘without removing the soul or the spirit’. In addition to the core palette of black, white and accents of red, LoveFrom has also developed an extended palette based on Le Corbusier’s Architectural Polychromy.

The other key element of the new identity is illustration. ‘The physical store really is a destination for designers and architects when they come to the city,’ says Wilson, ‘but we also wanted people who discover the store online to go and check it out in real life.’

To that end, the team commissioned illustrator Satoshi Hashimoto, renowned for his hard-lined but whimsical approach to portraiture and places, to create a series of illustrations of the store itself, flanked by the signature gingko tree beside the front door. This serves as the online landing page, complete with a different illustration for each season – indicated by the presence or absence of leaves. There’s also a subtle Easter Egg, a rendition of the Eames House Bird sculpture that hops around various locations in the scene and provides a direct link to the Eames Institute.

Additionally, Hashimoto has also created some illustrations of William Stout himself, a familiar and friendly character with beard and signature glasses, to continue the bookseller’s legacy and presence. ‘The caricature of Bill becomes the mascot for the store,’ says Wilson, showing how it illustrates the tote bags.

The designers will definitely be continuing their association with the bookshop. Next up is the 'Stoutmobile', a mobile bookshop housed in a 1970 Volkswagen Type 2 van that will soon be graced with a LoveFrom livery.

‘We don’t just design guidelines and hand them off and hope for the best,’ Wilson says. As well as signage and templates, there’s talk of reviving the output of William Stout Publishers, a publishing arm that began with the Pamphlet Architecture series, as well as quarterly bulletins and even architectural maps of the area.

‘Just because we do something pro bono doesn’t mean we don’t do what it takes to do a proper job,’ Wilson says. ‘Our approach at LoveFrom is as a team that mixes graphic designers, product designers and architects. This project was a real intersection for us – it really played to our strengths.’

The new identity and wider recognition for William Stout Architectural Books should mitigate the steep learning curve of learning old systems, adopting new ones and navigating the inevitable eccentricities one might find in a half century-old business driven by passion.

With a knowledgeable staff – the majority of whom are recent architecture graduates – as well as the collective retail experience on the Eames Institute team (including Smith, who started her own store in a former career), William Stout Architectural Books is in safe hands. Events, signings, talks and panels have already happened following the acquisition, and the new identity will take things up another gear.

The shop now has a Stout Junior section and recent publishing history has seen more and more design- and architecture-focused books for children. ‘It’s been so interesting as we’ve seen the clientele get younger and younger over the last few years,’ says Smith, who recognises that there will also be a hungry audience for beautiful design books amongst students.

‘Jony told us that the first time he came to San Francisco in 1989, he visited Stout Books,’ says Smith. ‘I have such a deep affection for this bookshop and the extraordinary community that Bill lovingly created over five decades,’ Ive says. ‘It has been an honour to be able to make a contribution to an institution we love and value so profoundly.’

While Stout has now stepped back from the day-to-day running of the bookshop, his presence is still very much felt, and not just through Hashimoto’s deft pen portraits. According to Smith, ‘Bill says he started this store because he wanted to buy books for himself.’ Bibliophiles of all ages will find memories and creative magic within.

William Stout Architectural Books is at 804 Montgomery St., San Francisco, California 94133 and at StoutBooks.com, @StoutBooks

EamesInstitute.org, @EamesInsitute

LoveFrom.com

How best to define a year in style? Here, we look back over a series of illuminating conversations Wallpaper* has had with fashion’s leading figures in 2024 – whether those helming vaunted maisons, or an energetic new vanguard of designers shaping the industry’s future.

There are threads that link these conversations: both Demna and Kim Jones talk about modernising the historic art of haute couture, at Balenciaga and Dior Men respectively, while Nadège Vanhée also talks about her quietly rebellious revolution of Hermès’ womenswear collections. Meanwhile, renegade British designer Martine Rose talks about bringing her disruptive vision to the usually polite Milan Fashion Week. America – perhaps down to its shifting political landscape – is also a thematic thread, explored in conversations with Tory Burch, Willy Chavarria, and a new generation of New York-based designers who consider the future of New York Fashion Week.

Selected by Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss, these wide-ranging fashion interviews tell the intriguing stories behind the designers who’ve shaped 2024.

Nadège Vanhée on a decade of womenswear at Hermès

In the September Style Issue of Wallpaper*, Nadège Vanhée – the artistic director of Hermès’ womenswear collections – opened up about her past ten years at the venerable French Maison. ‘It’s a balance between what I love and what I want to explore – my obsessions, my feelings. What I want to wear, yes, but also pieces that go out of my comfort zone,’ she says of her quietly rebellious design philosophy, which contemplates ideas of female liberation and sensuality. Or in her words: ‘What is the life of a woman today?’

READ: ‘What is the life of a woman?’: Nadège Vanhée on a decade of womenswear at Hermès

The story behind Kim Jones’ first Dior Men couture collection

In June, Kim Jones presented his first couture collection for Dior Men, a virtuosic expression of savoir-faire that drew on the on-stage uniforms of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (the designer’s uncle, Colin Jones, was a former dancer who photographed Nureyev in 1966 for Time magazine). Speaking to Wallpaper* in Paris a few months later – amid preparations for his S/S 2025 show – Jones said the impetus for the collection was a growing desire from consumers for the unique and precious. ‘People want something that nobody else has,’ he told us.

READ: The story behind Kim Jones’ showstopping first couture collection for Dior Men

Willy Chavarria on rewriting American fashion

Ahead of a standout show at New York Fashion Week in September, Willy Chavarria – one of American fashion’s most distinct new voices – sat down with Ann Binlot to discuss the collection, which was titled ‘América’ and paid homage to immigrants’ contribution to the country’s infrastructure (Chavarria is of Mexican-American descent). ‘The community that I grew up in as a kid had a tremendous influence on not only my aesthetic and my work ethic, but also my view of what the country is that we live in, what it means to be American,’ he said. 'I wanted to shine a light on the people who make this country work.’

READ: How Willy Chavarria is rewriting American fashion

The renaissance of Tory Burch

‘I feel like a new designer,’ Tory Burch told us in the August issue of Wallpaper*, a celebration of creative America. A perennial fixture on the New York design scene – her eponymous label began in 2004 – recent seasons have seen something of a renaissance for Burch, who is flexing her creative muscle with experimental and unexpected collections that have garnered her a whole new generation of fans. ‘The only regret I have is that I didn’t do all of this sooner,’ she says.

READ: Inside the renaissance of Tory Burch

A rare conversation with Jil Sander

The occasion of a new Irma Boom-designed monograph led to a rare conversation with seminal German designer Jil Sander this November, seeing the designer reminisce on a career in fashion that began in 1968. ‘I was surprised by the strong feminine side of my work,’ she told Wallpaper*. ‘Some voices categorised me as a designer for business wear. But I was always interested in changing the general performance of men and women... I looked for a more intellectual sensuality.’

READ: A rare conversation with Jil Sander as she releases a career-spanning monograph

Demna’s thoroughly modern haute couture for Balenciaga

Speaking to Dal Chodha in the March Style Issue of Wallpaper*, Demna opened up about his distinctly contemporary vision for the Balenciaga’s haute couture line – a pitch for the historic medium’s relevancy today. ‘I always knew that couture had this kind of magic to it, of being an experiential way of wearing clothes,’ he said. ‘I just wondered if it would still be like that. The world we live in is so oversaturated with information, colour, visuals. We’ve become numb to the beauty of the world. Why don’t we see the beauty anymore? We need it to survive as a human race.’

READ: Balenciaga’s Demna on creating thoroughly modern haute couture

Martine Rose on bringing her disruptive vision to Milan

‘You have to do what you believe in,’ renegade British designer Martine Rose told Joe Bobowicz as she brought her disruptive, subculture-infused vision to Milan Fashion Week (in a particularly enjoyable contrast, it took place just after Prada and a few hundred yards away). Cue plastic noses, trailing wigs, and influences from kink, clubland and street culture: ‘I trust that people will come with me, that people are curious enough,’ she said.

READ: Martine Rose on her disruptive Milan Fashion Week debut

Molly Goddard on creating a community of brides

‘It was really something that I resisted for a while. Partly, it was because people often chose to wear pieces from our ready-to-wear collections and that felt enough,’ said Molly Goddard of her foray into bridal wear, which has been adopted by a community of brides seeking something more unexpected for their nuptials. Sharing her tips on how to approach bridal attire – ‘my main tip is not to suddenly become a totally different person’ – we also catch up with three Molly Goddard brides on wearing the designer for their big day.

READ: Molly Goddard on creating a community of contemporary brides

New York’s next generation designers weigh in on the future of fashion week

‘Beneath the glamorous surface, a new generation of independent designers have been increasingly vocal about how difficult it is to not only launch, but maintain, a successful brand in New York City,’ wrote Nicole DeMarco her introduction to a series of interviews with the city’s rising talent, ahead of the September edition of New York Fashion Week. Talking to the designers behind Diotima, Willy Chavarria, Collina Strada, Meruert Tolegen, Theophilio and Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, she asked: what is the future of New York Fashion Week? And: can you still ‘make it’ in New York City?

READ: What is the future of New York Fashion Week? The city’s independent designers weigh in

Jony Ive on collaborating with Moncler

‘If you’re a proper designer, you can design many different forms,’ said Jony Ive about a foray into fashion, a collaboration between LoveFrom – Ive’s design agency – and outerwear behemoth Moncler. Catching up with Laura May Todd in Milan, Ive unpacks the unique collaboration, a shape-shifting, modular collection five years in the making. ‘I love the rigour of this kind of research,’ says Ive.

READ: Jony Ive unpacks his modular LoveFrom, Moncler outerwear collection

It’s a gloomy day in April and the designer Jony Ive is in Milan. The former chief designer at Apple, dressed in a powder blue suit and aviator glasses, is discussing the upcoming release of his latest project with the Italian luxury outerwear brand Moncler. ‘A phone and a building are very different things,’ says the designer, who would know better than most: he has worked on our generation’s most era-defining objects, including the iPod, iPhone and MacBook, as well as Apple Park, the brand's Cupertino campus, with Foster + Partners. ‘But if you’re a proper designer, you can design many different forms. The important thing is the curiosity to go beyond what you’re used to. You need to be aware that you’ve got so much left to learn.’

Jony Ive on his LoveFrom, Moncler modular jacket collection

When Ive left Apple in 2019 after 27 years to found his creative collective, LoveFrom, alongside industrial designer Marc Newson, it gave him the opportunity to follow a range of new and different paths. Their first projects have included rethinking a turntable for audio brand Linn and the development of electric cars for Ferrari. But this latest collaboration with Moncler, a modular collection of jackets that can be mixed and matched with a single down-filled base layer, has allowed the London-born designer to explore a host of new fields: fashion design, textile development and even a reimagining of the humble button.

But how did Ive, a longtime California transplant, and Moncler’s CEO Remo Ruffini, who lives in Milan and hails from Lake Como, begin a conversation about coats? ‘We have a lot of friends in common,’ says Ruffini. ‘When we first started talking, it wasn’t about business, it was just about life. The collaboration, for us, is an opportunity to learn about another world.’

Though the endeavour marks LoveFrom’s first foray into fashion, Moncler has made a habit of teaming up with creatives of all disciplines. Recent collaborators have included rapper Jay-Z’s Roc Nation record label and high-end luggage brand Rimowa. But from the sounds of it, the partnership with Ive presented a new and exciting challenge for the brand. According to Ruffini, the collection’s four pieces took nearly five years to develop. ‘It was quite a long process, one that we’re not used to,’ says Ruffini. ‘Usually we release a collection every three months. But with this, we really allowed ourselves time to create something unique.’

The collection revolves around the Moncore base layer – a simple, collarless, waist-length jacket with a zip-up front – that can be worn by itself or beneath one of three outer layers: a slightly longer field jacket with four patch pockets and a raised neckline; a mid-thigh-length parka; and a poncho with a fixed hood that can be packed into a kangaroo pocket with snap closures.

And though the design may seem simple – the pieces have a distinctly minimal aesthetic – the complexity is in the details. Each coat is made using a single swathe of fabric that has been folded like a kimono to achieve its mostly seamless form. Ruffini’s fabric developers had to look outside their usual techniques to produce it: a typical bolt of fabric is made on a 1.5m loom, but the design required the fabric be woven on a 2.2m version. ‘It’s a much larger loom than we’re used to,’ explains Ruffini. ‘They’re not usually used for clothing, but rather curtains and furniture upholstery.’

Moncler and LoveFrom even developed proprietary textiles for the collection. The recycled nylon used for the shell and core has been produced without using water. Instead, compressed air creates an irregularly textured thread that looks and feels similar to a natural fibre. The fabric, which is yarn-dyed, will be available in a series of muted colours: a butter yellow base, a pale green field jacket, a baby blue parka and a light orange poncho – or universally in a baby powder white (a limited edition of each will also be available in navy). ‘Culturally, a parka, a field jacket and a poncho are all very functional, utilitarian pieces,’ says Ive. ‘But they’ve been made curiously gentle with these soft colours.’

However, the most technically advanced element of the collection is also its smallest. ‘I became obsessed with buttons,’ reveals Ive, who designed an entirely new kind for the project. ‘It’s an idea that is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and maybe it’s perfect, but as a designer, you want to challenge that assumption.’ So how does it work? The inner core and outer layers are connected via a system of five, double-sided magnetic discs on the front, back and sleeves of each garment. When worn separately, each side lays flush with the fabric, but when an outer layer is slipped over the core, they snap together easily via a central dowel that pops out to ensure the two sides don’t move or come loose. ‘I love the rigour of this kind of research,’ he continues. ‘I’ve tried to do new zips in the past, but it’s really hard.’

According to Ive, this won’t be the last we see from Moncler and LoveFrom. ‘This is just the first manifestation of this collaboration,’ he says. But he’s quick to clarify that the process resulted in more than just a cleverly designed line of coats. ‘When you make something, there are two products. There’s the thing you make and there’s what you learned. And what we learned together was, I would argue, more important than what we made.’

LoveFrom, Moncler arrives December at moncler.com and selected stores.

Models: Eduarda Muehlmann at PRM Agency, Tobias Gurd at The Squad Management. Casting: Ikki Casting at WSM. Hair: Tobia Bartolini. Make-up: Faye Bluff at Of Substance Agency using Westman Atelier and Elemis skincare. Set design: Tristan Tilagone at Canvas Represents. Set build: London Art Makers. Photography assistants: Sam Girdler, Pablo Gallegos. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor. Set/production assistant: Archie Thomson. Digi tech: Nico Barbieri. Post-production: Mia Gianini.

This article appears in the November 2024 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands from 10 October, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Taking a hard turn from its traditional role as the custodian of mainly 19th-century French art, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris is staging the first contemporary exhibition in its central sculpture nave. ‘L’Addition’ is an exploration of depictions of masculinity by Elmgreen & Dragset that draws on the museum’s collection of figurative sculptures, reinterpreted in new work by the Berlin-based artists. As our newsstand cover suggests (and that’s a silicone model of a small boy, by the way), it’s an audacious and, at times, disorientating undertaking, one that profitably pits the present against the past – a process discernible in work created by other artists that feature in this month’s Art Issue.

Take Rachel Feinstein, for instance. For the Miami-raised, New York-based artist, capturing the wild extremes of her hometown involves creating vast panoramas that are rife with historical rococo and gothic influences. Or this month’s Dakar Biennale, where a new generation of designers in Africa and its diaspora are showing work that links old and new – like the Marrakech-based Younes Duret’s reinterpretation of a teapot that, he says, reflects a fusion between tradition and modernity.

Our limited-edition cover features the first foray into fashion by Jony Ive’s design studio LoveFrom, which has collaborated with Moncler on a collection of jackets that can be mixed and matched with a single down-filled base layer. Here, too, the designer wrestles with the past. Ive tells our Milan editor Laura May Todd that, during the five-year development process, he ‘became obsessed with buttons. It’s an idea that is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and maybe it’s perfect, but as a designer, you want to challenge that assumption.’

Buttons; a thread: finding connections is at the beating heart of this issue, an idea brought vividly to life by the collaboration between composer Max Richter and choreographer Wayne McGregor, whom you can find in conversation in our article, and the union forged between fashion designer Jonathan Anderson and artist Christiane Kubrick (wife of the late master of modern cinema), whose work we are honoured to document in a series of unforgettable images shot at the Kubricks’ Hertfordshire manor house. Eyes wide open? Good. Enjoy the issue.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

The November 2024 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 10 October, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

On 26 June, the Royal College of Art announced the ten finalists for the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s 2024 Terra Carta Design Lab. Launched in 2021, the Terra Carta Design Lab is a student-led, global competition for high-impact solutions addressing the climate and biodiversity crisis, with previous winners including a wearable device for cows to reduce methane emissions, a start-up spearheading the capture and monitoring of tyre wear, the first 100 per cent recyclable and chemical-free outdoor performance textile, and aerodynamic seed pods made from food waste for plant and tree restoration.

'I am thrilled that the Terra Carta Design Lab has gathered momentum this year to include four international design schools,' says Jony Ive, who launched the project in collaboration with His Majesty King Charles III, then HRH The Prince of Wales. 'The lab elevates the rigorous and imaginative ideas from all these students, and demonstrates the power and importance of multidisciplinary design and collaboration in meeting global challenges.'

2024 Terra Carta Design Lab: meet the finalists

The 2024 Terra Carta Design Lab is in partnership with long-term supporter, the RCA, as well as three other design universities, including Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (UAE); National Institute of Design Ahmedabad (India); and Rhode Island School of Design (USA). Students and recent alumni from the four schools were invited to develop high-impact solutions to the climate and biodiversity crisis.

The RCA's shortlisted projects 'showcase a wide breadth of innovations and solutions to help address climate change and biodiversity loss and explore themes of regenerating nature, reducing waste, engaging communities, and mitigating climate change impacts,' reads a note introducing the finalists.

These include a soluble-on-demand polymer composite which deteriorates in warm water overnight to tackle e-waste, a project to improve the aerodynamics of merchant navy vessels to reduce their fuel consumption by up to 5%, a series of newly-developed textiles from truly regenerative fibres and a low-cost wildfire detection system imagined for vulnerable communities, among others.

Eight winners (two from each university) will be announced in autumn, and the teams behind the winning projects will receive funding and mentorship to further develop their innovations with a goal of scaling them to market.

'I am humbled and inspired to see the level of innovation, ambition, dedication and professionalism demonstrated by the RCA community during the competition so far,' comments Professor Christoph Lindner, President & Vice-Chancellor of the Royal College of Art. 'These ten finalists are the tip of an iceberg filled with potential to change how we live and care for the world in the future. I can’t wait to see the impact they can make. The Sustainable Markets Initiative must be commended for its ambition and its influence in coordinating this global edition of the Terra Carta Design Lab.'

Adds Jennifer Jordan-Saifi, CEO of the Sustainable Markets Initiative: 'At the Sustainable Markets Initiative, we are accelerating a sustainable future through the collision of ideas and co-creation between the private sector and the next generation of global leaders, including our Design Lab finalists. Their work exemplifies what is possible when we put design, engineering, innovation, technology, art and global experience at the heart of systems-level change.

'[...]As one people, sharing one planet and facing one common future, we have much to learn from this optimistic, multi-disciplinary and multi-generational approach that is embodied in the Terra Carta Design Lab.'

sustainable-markets.org

The Terra Carta Design lab announces a second edition, once again inviting students to imagine high-impact, low-cost design solutions to address the climate crisis. 

The programme was originally launched in 2021 by His Majesty King Charles III, in his former role as HRH The Prince of Wales, with Sir Jony Ive. The project was part of The Sustainable Markets Initiative – an organisation created to address the threats posed by climate change and biodiversity loss. 

The Terra Carta Design Lab becomes international

The Terra Carta Design Lab is addressed to students and recent alumni (graduated within the past five years) from London’s Royal College of Art (the programme’s original partner), Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (UAE), National Institute of Design Ahmedabad (India) and Rhode Island School of Design (USA). Submissions will be judged by a panel of experts led by Ive, and the eight winning designs (two from each school) will be announced in autumn 2024, their designers to then be mentored by Sir Jony Ive and the Sustainable Market Initiative’s network, with the aim to develop and scale their ideas further.

‘Through the Sustainable Markets Initiative and the Terra Carta Design Lab, we aim to inspire accelerated action on the world’s sustainability targets while illustrating a vision of what is possible,’ says Jennifer Jordan-Saifi, CEO of the Sustainable Markets Initiative. ‘Cross-disciplinary engagement, creativity, and design provide a unique opportunity to co-create and discover new paths that can drive the sustainable transition we so urgently need.’

The decision to expand the Terra Carta Design Lab to a global scale was driven by the desire to expand the initiative’s search for groundbreaking design ideas, and reach a wider number of next-generation creative leaders. ‘Multidisciplinary collaboration has never been more important,’ adds Ive. ‘It is incredibly rewarding to see an even broader group of students use deep creative collaboration to develop thoughtful ways of tackling the multifaceted challenges of the climate crisis.’

The 2022 Terra Carta Design Lab winners include Aerseeds, Amphico, The Tyre Collective and Zelp, who together have already raised £18 million in investments and grants, and have been supported in their development by InnovationRCA, the RCA’s centre for entrepreneurship and incubation. Additional participants to the 2022 edition also saw some important results: now crowdfunding for a pilot reef, Resting Reef was noticed for its eco-memorial service design, while Shellworks, one of two highly commended entries, is working with Hæckels to create naturally biodegradable packaging for the brand.

‘I'm incredibly proud to be part of the Terra Carta Design Lab and the momentum it has built over the past two years,’ adds Ive. ‘The mission of addressing the climate crisis is more relevant and urgent than ever, and I'm very excited to see the ideas these international design students will have developed by next autumn.’

For more information on the Terra Carta Design Lab, visit sustainable-markets.org

It’s rare for a piece of consumer technology to remain in production for half a century. Linn’s Sondek LP12 turntable was designed by the company founder, Ivor Tiefenbrun, and launched in February 1973. Since then, over 100,000 Sondek LP12s have been manufactured at Linn’s Glasgow factory, during which time the design has been continuously refined, with older models regularly updated and refurbished. 

With the 50th anniversary fast approaching, Linn’s CEO (and Ivor’s son) Gilad Tiefenbrun was given an extraordinary opportunity when he was contacted out of the blue by Jony Ive of LoveFrom. ‘I had actually visited the Linn factory in the late 1980s soon after I graduated,’ Ive tells us. ‘It’s a wonderful building, designed by an old friend, the late Richard Rogers.’ Ive was enquiring about buying a new turntable, and mentioned in passing that LoveFrom was looking for passion projects. 

Tiefenbrun suggested a collaboration based around the LP12. ‘It’s a legendary product and the opportunity to create something very special to celebrate its 50th anniversary was incredibly attractive,’ he says. Ive was immediately on board. ‘The goal wasn’t just to make it different,’ says the designer. ‘That’s easy – what’s hard to make something genuinely better.’ 

The resulting Linn Sondek LP12-50 is subtly but demonstrably enhanced from the ‘standard model’. Describing LoveFrom’s contribution as ‘respectful and gentle in nature,’ Ive and his team approached the turntable with care, thoughtfully re-evaluating the design. ‘Linn is a company with an insatiable appetite to research to improve performance,’ Ive notes, explaining how the new plinth, formed from compressed orthogonal layers of beech, is the result of the company’s ongoing exploration of new techniques and materials. 

‘It’s going to be the best-performing LP12 ever,’ Tiefenbrun says. ‘The new plinth gives it a big sonic lift. Jony and his team honed in very quickly on elements of usability and interaction that we might have not seen as we’re so driven by the sound quality.’ 

These refinements include a new circular power switch and speed selector, neatly recessed into the top surface. Finally, there’s an all-new hinge design for the cover, using precision-engineered parts, as well as a recessed, numbered name plate. 

There’s a paradox in finding one of the key drivers behind the age of digital music lavishing so much attention on a traditional turntable. ‘I have always had a deep love of music,’ Ive says, ‘and I’ve had the privilege of designing a range of music players, most notably Apple’s iPod. But these interests have never detracted from my love of vinyl.’  

Like all Linn products, the 50th-anniversary turntable will be built, tested and packed by one individual whose name goes on the product. The company has 165 employees and the 35-year-old, Rogers-designed factory remains incredibly cutting edge, with automation, circuit-board printing, and CNC-milling capabilities. ‘We're one of the few companies that is really committed to manufacturing in the UK,’ says Tiefenbrun. ‘It's a real long-term value proposition for the community.’ 

Just 250 Sondek LP12-50s will be made, available in either a natural finish and white lacquer. Both men separately describe the collaboration as ‘joyful’, and it’s clear the process has been a real meeting of minds. ‘I’m profoundly grateful that each LoveFrom collaboration is so different,’ Ive says, adding that ‘Focus is so important to the way we work, and sometimes focus is about saying no.’  

Linn Sondek LP12-50, £50,000, €60,000, $60,000

Linn.co.uk, LoveFrom.com

The Linn Sondek LP12-50 turntable also features August 2023 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today 

The Sustainable Markets Initiative has launched Astra Carta, a framework document that sets up an intriguing and far-reaching initiative to ensure that private sector companies act responsibly and sustainably when they engage in any form of space exploration, development, and cooperation. Launched in January 2020 by the then-Prince of Wales, the Sustainable Markets Initiative’s first act was to establish the Terra Carta, a seal bestowed upon private sector companies that lead the way in creating sustainable markets. LoveFrom, the ambitious creative studio established by Sir Jony Ive, shaped the richly decorated Terra Carta seal and the studio has returned to give the new Astra Carta seal a complementary and evolutionary look. 

‘We were fascinated by the celestial rhythms that were illuminated during this design process, and how they are profoundly connected to the patterns of life on Earth,’ says Ive. ‘This feels a crucial time to do more to protect the natural universe in the broadest sense, and we are deeply honoured to have been able to contribute to this important and pioneering project.’

Astra Carta seal by LoveFrom

The aim of Astra Carta is to build momentum for what the SMI calls ‘space sustainability’, ensuring that the private sector is guided by sustainability goals, approaches, and standards that are shared with governments, international organisations and other stakeholders. The famous Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, enshrines the duty of states to ensure that the ‘exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind’, as well as making them ‘liable for damage caused by their space objects [and to] avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies’.

The Sustainable Markets Initiative brings this ambition into the private sector. The new seal is ringed with the Astra Carta’s motto – ‘to care for the infinite wonders of the universe’ – in English and Latin, while the typographic approach uses the newly designed LoveFrom, Serif, just like the Terra Carta. 

Although the visual elements still incorporate the St Edward’s Crown, with a structural that has been similarly defined by sacred geometry. In addition, LoveFrom has overlaid the field behind the lettering with patterns inspired by astronomical motion. 

At the centre of the seal is the Earth, surrounded by the planets and constellations, including Cepheus, Orion, Monoceros, Centaurus, Crux, Leo, and Charles’ Wain within Ursa Major, as well as the North Star. Over this backdrop are the Sun, the annular eclipse of the Moon, along with the transit of Mercury, and the dance of Venus and Mars. In striking contrast to the Terra Carta seal, the Astra Carta is set against the blackness of deep space. 

The seal was unveiled this week by King Charles at a Space Sustainability reception at Buckingham Palace. ‘The Astra Carta is a collective call to action that seeks to unite the public and private sectors and other stakeholders in a shared commitment to the responsible and sustainable use of outer space,’ says Jennifer Jordan Saifi, chief executive officer, Sustainable Markets Initiative. ‘The Astra Carta harnesses the power of collective will, curiosity, scientific discovery, sustainability, and ethical stewardship to guide us in this new frontier of possibilities.’ 

These possibilities include the potential role that space-based and related industries can have on our planet. The first draft of the Astra Carta was created in collaboration with experts from around the world, with key input from Colonel Chris Hadfield, the former Canadian astronaut and commander of the International Space Station.

Sustainable Markets Initiative, Sustainable-Markets.org

LoveFrom, LoveFrom.com

In its short existence, Sir Jony Ive’s studio, LoveFrom, has demonstrated that it is prepared to go above and beyond in its creative endeavours. Bringing together designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, writers, engineers and artists, LoveFrom is based out of San Francisco and London. 

Early work includes the Terra Carta Seal, and ongoing work with Ferrari, as well as the announcement of a series of scholarships at CCA and RISD in the US, and London’s RCA. 

Before any of that work had been announced, Ive and his key collaborators, Marc Newson and Peter Saville, set to work on shaping LoveFrom’s identity. Working with Chris Wilson, former head of UI design at Apple (and an old university friend of Ive), engineer Patch Kessler and Milan-based typographer Antonio Cavedoni, the team began a multi-year design and research project.

The making of LoveFrom, Serif

Jony Ive: Marc and I started a conversation with Peter, who became a part of LoveFrom. He had a really lovely sense of [how to use] our identity, which wasn’t to constrain it with a traditional logotype, but to use it in order to invite a dialogue.

Peter Saville: My most active contribution came when Jony asked me what the LoveFrom logotype should be. I was actually really surprised they’d managed to register ‘LoveFrom’ as almost every combination of words has been taken.

Starting back in autumn 2019, the initial discussions were about the words themselves, and how they should be presented. 

Peter Saville: Jony asked me about how it should look. It was difficult at the beginning because of the familiarity of these two words, ‘love’ and ‘from’. I initially thought it should be in a modest typeface, maybe a neutral sans serif. However, the most significant thing I contributed was the comma. This gives the words a sincerity and places them on one side of a dialogue. It performs this kind of inclusive act. 

Jony Ive: Peter’s insight was that LoveFrom’s approach could be defined by the comma in the logotype. Chris and Antonio’s work on our website makes it very clear how that works in practice. 

One of the first jumping-off points for the project was a Saville-designed album cover. The 1981 album by Blackpool band Section 25, Always Now, featured a full-bleed typographic composition set in Bembo. 

Peter Saville: I knew that cover had made a big impact on Jony. The idea of using a comma was very well received by the team, so from that point on it became a question of typography. I’m not familiar with many logotypes that have commas in them. Full stops, yes. 

Jony Ive: The first typefaces we looked at weren’t crafted in a way that satisfied our creative nature. We started with Bembo before looking at Baskerville and then realised that we’d never find something that we totally loved, so why [not] develop one for ourselves?

LoveFrom, Serif was born. Its first official public outing was on the LoveFrom website, and its first appearance in print in the recent limited-edition Steve Jobs book, Make Something Wonderful; the typeface is also used in the Terra Carta Seal and the LoveFrom design for the official emblem of the Coronation of King Charles III. Years in the making, the effortless simplicity of the letterforms belies a hugely complex, long-winded process. 

Marc Newson: It struck me at the outset as a really curious endeavour – when you really manipulate and play with fonts. Fonts are really, really technical things. Even being a graphic designer doesn’t entitle you to understand typesetting. It’s an old-school preoccupation. 

Peter Saville: When Chris, Patch and Antonio came on board, it moved from Bembo to Baskerville. At which point I just sat back in wonder and admired their attention to detail. They have delivered their own extraordinary iteration of it. For the last 30 years at least there’s been a remarkable enthusiasm for typography. It didn’t used to be that way. Typography was once seen as boring. When I was at college, I remember falling asleep in the type-setting room. 

Marc Newson: Typography is a very analogue medium – a true craft. Jony and I find that craft compelling. Some might perceive it as anachronistic to even think about fonts. But that’s OK, because we love to do things that maybe other people don’t. It was a very conscious decision to focus on typography and have people like Chris and Antonio on board and give them these opportunities.

There are many reasons why John Baskerville’s eponymous typeface attracted the LoveFrom team. Baskerville (1707-1775) was an artistic and creative pioneer in many spheres, from paper-making to printing. Throughout his life, he printed numerous books, with a quality and simplicity of presentation that looked forward to the modern era. The original punches used for his most celebrated typeface are remarkable survivors, now in the care of Cambridge University. 

Cavedoni already owned a collection of antiquarian volumes set in Baskerville, whilst Robin Hull at Cambridge took exquisite macro photographs of these precise, tiny steel punches, with some letters just 1mm tall. Cavedoni, whose typographic credits include designing Apple’s seminal San Francisco font, describes Hull’s images as ‘an enormous breakthrough’. They revealed the shapes and eccentricities of the typeface in meticulous detail. 

Chris Wilson: A lot of people do custom typefaces these days just for the sake of it. We didn’t want to jump on this bandwagon. My intuition was that Baskerville felt like the right balance. There was a really interesting synergy with modern design throughout its history. I also quite enjoy the constraints.  

Antonio Cavedoni: [John] Baskerville was always in search of perfection. He talked at length about his love of letterforms. He was someone who made everything – the press, the ink, the paper, and of course the original punches for all the different sizes of type. His almost obstinate preoccupation with getting it right was very attractive. 

Jony Ive: I consider myself fairly ignorant of typography. But even though I don’t have Antonio’s exhaustive knowledge, I was still drawn to this beautiful face. Our approach was one of respect and reverence to Baskerville’s work. 

The long research and development process, which occupied Cavedoni and Wilson throughout the Covid lockdown, involved drafting and redrafting endless subtle variations of John Baskerville’s forms. As well as the printed page, Cavedoni researched slate letters cut by Baskerville, in addition to contemporary lettering manuals and the work of the typographer’s peers. 

LoveFrom, Serif is supremely flexible. The project included working on very light and very heavy iterations of the font, styles that simply wouldn’t have existed in the 18th century. Then there were numbers to design (John Baskerville only used old-style numerals), as well as italic weights, which have a flatter, more two-dimensional character. A  set of alternate shapes for many characters was also created, taking advantage of Baskerville’s different iterations of forms like the ‘R’, and ‘Q’. 

The typeface is optically sized – depending on the point size, the space between letters is dynamically adjusted to deal with different print quality or monitor resolution. There’s also a complex algorithmic approach to the curves, that blends them seamlessly into the straight lines of the descenders. 

Patch Kessler: At Apple, we spent a lot of time on curves to get things just right on things like the app tiles. It’s the same principal here, just massively more complicated, involving math, optics, and geometry. 

Marc Newson: Continuous curvature is a new concept to implement in type, the sort of thing that would once have required a super-computer. It’s a very compelling way to explore digital technology in a craft-based sense. You don’t often get examples where the two can harmoniously benefit each other.

Jony Ive: These forms are so extraordinarily beautiful, so pure, with a serenity and fluidity. The typeface was intended to be scalable and useful in many different manifestations, particularly digitally. We also wanted to share it for special collaborations, some of which I can’t talk about. 

Chris Wilson: There’s so much we can do when expressing it in the digital world. It’s something you can’t do with an off-the-shelf product.

Antonio Cavedoni: The typeface can be a platform for making bespoke pieces of lettering.

Jony Ive: I’ve always felt really strongly that you hope a design solution gets to the point where it doesn’t feel like there’s any other alternative. And that there’s no sense of a designer wagging their tail in your face.

Another early, under the radar outing for LoveFrom, Serif was in a self-published memorial book for Richard Rogers’ final project at Château La Coste, a project undertaken to ‘honour a dear friend’, according to Ive. Work is also apace to design a complementary sans serif (no prizes for guessing the name), all part of Ive’s desire to give LoveFrom the ultimate bespoke tool kit. 

Jony Ive: At its heart LoveFrom is about gathering together experts, people who are pre-eminent in their various fields. The tools we use as creatives tend to establish and reinforce the differences in our practice, not the similarities. When you make things with love and care you express your gratitude to humanity, to our species.

Peter Saville: In a way, I made my contribution 40 years ago when I realised that typography triggers certain contextual and cultural associations. I saw how it could be very evocative in creating a certain gravitas as well as a sense of cultural significance. I think pop culture in the 1980s turned a young generation on to type. But it’s also something that either works or it doesn’t.  

Marc Newson: On a project like this, we can spend as much time as we want – we are the client. Luxury is the wrong word, but we don’t often have this kind of opportunity in our line of work. There’s always space, not necessarily to improve, but to refine something. It’s simply about the detail. 

Peter Saville: Jony has that obsessive mania for everything – he’s very particular. You can obviously see that in his work for Apple. It results in extraordinary things. His approach is to say, ‘Let’s do it until there’s no more that can be done.’ LoveFrom, Serif evokes art and craftsmanship, values that Jony wanted to associate with LoveFrom. 

Jony Ive: Designers often talk about how we work, but not why. Our name describes our motivation, which is to be in service of humanity. It’s great to have a motivation of that gravity. LoveFrom, Serif speaks perfectly to our collective approach and to our experience. It has its basis in the physical world – via the original steel punches – and it has its final manifestation in the digital space. I can’t think of a better first product.

LoveFrom.com

LoveFrom, the design collective led by Jony Ive, has announced the launch of LoveFrom Scholarships, a new programme that supports prospective design students with the aim of increasing representation in design. 

Launched in 2019, LoveFrom is a multidisciplinary collective based on developing new visual ideas, with clients including Ferrari, Terra Carta and the Steve Jobs Archive.

The launch of LoveFrom Scholarships

‘We recognise that lack of diversity has negatively impacted both the design community and society,’ reads a note introducing the initiative. ‘The LoveFrom Scholarship programme aims to increase representation by encouraging and supporting routes into industry for designers of all backgrounds.’

Every year, LoveFrom will support one student at California College of the Arts and Rhode Island School of Design, and up to two students at London’s Royal College of Art, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. The scholarships will cover tuition fees in full, as well as some living expenses, and will be targeted at disciplines that reflect LoveFrom’s scope. 

The scholarships, LoveFrom announces, are funded through endowments, with long-term financial commitments to each college that will provide permanent annual funding for each scholarship. Information on how to apply will be provided directly by the schools, which will be able to offer guidance as part of the annual fall admission process.

lovefrom.com

For more information on the schools' admission process:
cca.edu
risd.edu
rca.ac.uk

As the contractual connection between Sir Jony Ive and Apple Inc is finally severed, it brings to an end three decades of collaboration. Ive and Apple were one of the great industrial design partnerships of the modern age, the driving force behind what became the world’s first trillion-dollar company (and first $2 trillion and $3 trillion company as well). 

Following Ive’s arrival at Apple in 1992, his promotion to lead the design teams in 1996 was serendipitously timed. Not only did it coincide with the founding of a pioneering design magazine called Wallpaper*, but it was just before the start of Steve Jobs’ second and more significant tenure at the company he co-founded in 1976 and left in 1985. Ive joined the San Francisco-based firm straight from Tangerine, a London-based design consultancy. Tangerine began consulting for Apple back in the early 1990s, working on ‘Project Juggernaut’, the initial design development for what would eventually become the PowerBook. Working alongside Martin Darbyshire and Clive Grinyer, the 20-something Ive came up with a tablet computer design quite unlike anything on the market. 

Apple had its lures out. Some have since speculated that Project Juggernaut was little more than a fishing exercise to reel in the British designer, initiated by Apple’s then director of industrial design Robert Brunner (who had met Ive when the latter was a student). Urged on by his colleagues at Tangerine, Ive eventually jumped ship and would go on to succeed Brunner as head of the company’s internal design department.

Wallpaper* had its first audience with the newly promoted Ive back in issue 3, when Andrea Coddington and photographer Matt Hranek travelled to Cupertino to meet the 29-year-old, black clad, goatee-sporting Ive and marvelled over influences that included rave flyers, underground music and classic Jaguars. The occasion was the launch of the eMate, a short-lived clamshell laptop with a touch screen and the Newton operating system. Within a few months of our story, CEO Gilbert Amelio was out, and Jobs was back in charge. 

Ive and Jobs rapidly developed a close working relationship, with both prizing non-conformity and a desire to do things differently, indulged and enhanced by the ability to transform technology into totemic objects of desire. The cult of Apple was born. By October 2006, when Wallpaper* featured Ive in our ‘40 under 40’ feature, we were already hailing him as ‘the most important British industrial designer of all time’ – ‘… imagine no iPods, no iMacs, no iBooks?’ we lamented.

Then came the iPhone. In December 2010, Sophie Lovell interviewed Ive, alongside a moody portrait by Jason Schmidt and a teetering tower of highly desirable Apple goods, including the candy-coloured iPod Nano and the relatively newly launched iPad, shot by Matthew Donaldson. Ive and Jobs – by this point gravely ill and conspicuously absent from the profile – were creating whole categories and reshaping great swathes of the cultural landscape.

Ive rarely spoke of his influences, but one name shone through. The work of the legendary German industrial designer Dieter Rams is often cited as a precursor to many of Ive’s most rigorous and minimal design statements. Indeed, when Lovell came to write the acclaimed monograph on the Braun designer’s work, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible, it was Ive who provided the introduction.

Perhaps Jobs’ death in 2011 was a watershed moment for Ive’s time at Apple. Certainly, he was starting to allow himself to look beyond the standard confines of consumer tech.  In 2015, the newly minted partnership of Ive (by now Sir Jonathan Ive) and Marc Newson took the top spot in our 200th issue Power List.

Ive saw a kindred spirit in the Australian designer and ostensibly brought him into the Apple fold to consult on the newly launched Apple Watch. We also speculated that the car-crazy Newson (a passion Ive shares) was working on the much-rumoured Apple Car. Seven years on, and Project Titan, as the car programme is known, is still shrouded in rumour.

A year later, in October 2016, we crowned Sir Jonathan as one of our global game-changers, returning to California once again the following December to explore the endless curves of one of his largest and most significant projects, Apple’s new 2.8 million square foot HQ in Cupertino. Designed by Foster + Partners, with Ive closely involved in almost every aspect of the form, layout, and interior, Apple Park opened in April 2017 and marks the zenith of the designer’s time at the company.

For Wallpaper*, it also marked the arrival of one of our most coveted limited-edition covers, which saw our logo rendered in the colours of the original Apple spectrum and left blank the space usually intended for cover artwork.

Like all things Apple, the circular HQ was conceived and created in great secrecy, before being unveiled to the world as a fully formed, fully realised thing. It’s a strategy that goes back to the early days of Jobs, as he sought to dispel Apple’s reputation for quirky experimentation and devices that tended to suffer public growing pains. To counter this, design and engineering were fervently locked down, enhancing the sense of near-miraculous technological leaps with the high-profile arrival of each new device. ‘The way that we work is quietly,’ Ive told Wallpaper’s Nick Compton in 2017. ‘We are conspicuously different in that, and it is an important part of who we are.’ He was talking about the design team, a closely-knit group of professionals who have many years of shared experience and an intuitive sense of collaboration.

In fact, the company was so forward-thinking that when it came to compile the hefty photographic monograph Designed by Apple in California, Ive realised that the design studio simply didn’t own many of its creations. ‘Many of the products that you see, we actually had to go out and purchase,’ he told Wallpaper’s then-editor-in-chief Tony Chambers in 2016. ‘It’s a rather shameful admission, but it’s just not an area that we really invested much time or energy in, so we started to build an archive of the physical products.’

In June 2019, Ive announced he was stepping down from the chief designer role at Apple and setting up a new venture, LoveFrom, which also includes his longtime collaborator Newson. LoveFrom began with Apple as its primary client (with a non-compete clause to prevent competitors from gaining access to Ive’s skills), and rumour has it that the two men remained close to Project Titan. Perhaps Ive’s final severing of ties implies another shift in focus for the car concept, but with that contract officially ended, LoveFrom is now free to work for whoever it chooses.

The inaugural iPod model in 2001 had a combined exterior; a single sheet of formed and polished 304 stainless steel with laser-etched graphics for the back, and a double protection of PC/ABS and clear polycarbonate for the face. Featured in Designed by Apple in California, by Jony Ive

Tech design operates on a skewed timetable, with studios typically working on products that are two or three years from market. Ive’s stepping back in 2019 probably means that his hand will no longer be on any of Apple’s next-generation products. In any case, the signs are that Apple design is taking a more democratic approach to design authorship, mindful of the huge marketing power and name recognition that Ive brought to the firm, but also the perennial problems of attributing massively complex designs to the creative processes of a single person.

When we caught up with Design Team leaders Evans Hankey and Alan Dye at Apple Park in 2021, the spirit of Ive was still very much present in the studio. Whatever Apple does next, the values and ethos that he brought to the company will endure, and his name will be indelibly associated with some of the most influential technology ever made. 

Old habits die hard and LoveFrom’s client and project list is kept low-key and under wraps. The company is certainly working with Ferrari and Airbnb – on what we know not – and created the elaborate Terra Carta Seal, an award bestowed on companies with a pioneering approach to sustainable business.

This month, Wallpaper* provided another exclusive, bringing Sir Jony together with HRH Prince Charles for the magazine’s August 2022 issue, to discuss the Terra Carta Design Lab, an educational offshoot from the awards that recognises students making an important contribution to this vital field. Ive is coming to the end of a stint as chancellor of London’s Royal College of Art, and it’s clear he considers engagement with making and manufacturing is just as important as the process of design itself. 

With his portfolio, Sir Jony Ive will endure intense scrutiny on whatever he turns his hand to next. Like every tech behemoth, Apple balances its environmental and social responsibilities with a deep respect for the bottom line. Under Ive’s design leadership, the company made great strides in areas like minimising packaging and increasing product recyclability. Given the scale of the challenges facing the world today, perhaps we should be grateful that this keen and caring mind is now free to turn his mind to different aspects of the world of product design.

Sir Jony Ive signs off the website of his creative collective, LoveFrom, with two startling, contradictory words: ‘Love’ and ‘Fury’, connecting them with a meticulously drawn ampersand. They suggest a more complicated and surprising designer than the purist who gave the enigmatic first-generation iPhone its Dieter Rams-inspired calculator interface.

Ive is unfailingly polite, solicitous and considerate in conversation, and yet every so often he uses the word ‘fury’ or ‘furious’, or ‘angry’. It makes him sound a bit like William Morris, who gave up design to campaign for socialism, complaining within the hearing of his clients of spending his life ‘ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich’. Ive certainly isn’t giving up design, but he suggests that, when discussing work in his studio, he is sometimes arguing with himself: ‘mostly it is an internal monologue’. He belongs to a generation of designers who grew up reading Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World, which made the notorious claim that ‘there are professions more dangerous than industrial design, but not many.’

His career to date has been inextricably associated with the giant company that has done more than most to define modern industrial production, and perhaps even modern life. Though he stepped down from the chief design officer role in 2019, he continued to work with Apple until this year. His current clients include Ferrari and Airbnb.

Terra Carta: a new charter for the planet

Alongside his work for industry behemoths, Ive recently designed a seal for the Prince of Wales’ Terra Carta campaign, with the words ‘For Nature, People and Planet’ around the edge rendered in the specially drawn serif font, derived from the work of the 18th-century printer John Baskerville, that Ive reserves for his personal projects. The seal has an elegance and emotional punch that somehow hints at the sensibility of both William Blake and Damien Hirst.

Terra Carta, named in a conscious echo of the 13th-century Magna Carta, is a document designed to guide business in averting climate catastrophe. Magna Carta, which promised trial by jury and the abolition of cruel and unusual punishment, was written with considerable elegance by the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time. The new Terra Carta, which aims to show that capitalism and enlightened self-interest are compatible with saving the planet, may have a Latin name, but its vocabulary is unsurprisingly accented by the language of modern management theory. With its frequent references to ‘road maps’, ‘value chains’ and ‘game changers’, Terra Carta aims to identify 13 fruitful areas for investment, including biomimicry, electric flight propulsion, carbon-neutral construction, nuclear fission, and green infrastructure. 

It’s an approach that has drawn the attention of Greenwash.Earth, an Extinction Rebellion-backing activist group that calls out organisations that ‘claim to care about the natural world while knowingly destroying it’. They call Terra Carta ‘a great idea’ and say ‘we don’t think Terra Carta is greenwashing’. But they have expressed scepticism about some of the 450 organisations, which include HSBC and BP, that have signed up to support the document.

As chancellor of the Royal College of Art (RCA), Ive does not confine himself to dressing in a colourful cod-medieval outfit once a year to officiate at the degree ceremony. He has worked with the Prince to kick-start what he calls a design lab at the college, to support the aims of Terra Carta, and perhaps to prove Papanek was wrong, even if he shares some of the latter’s concerns.

Terra Carta Design Lab: the four winners

The Prince and Ive were at the college at the end of April to announce which four projects, chosen from 125 submissions made by RCA students and recent alumni, would share £200,000 from the Prince’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, and benefit from time with Ive and other advisors to find ways to use that money to take their ideas to market.

The successful entrants range from a group of designers working on methods of dealing with the microplastic pollutant released from vehicle tyres, which, it turns out, is almost as damaging as single-use plastic, to a muffler device that can convert methane emissions from cows into comparatively less threatening CO2, as well as a waterproof textile that does not bleed harmful chemicals into the water table, and an idea for low-tech aerofoil-assisted reseeding projects for degraded natural environments. The four, plus two runners-up, have been chosen for their ability to make a visible difference, and how close they are to being realised. For example, the Zelp methane capture project set up by Francisco Norris, an RCA graduate from 2017, has already secured substantial investment and has 26 employees.

‘The design lab idea came from a conversation between Jony and the Prince,’ says RCA vice chancellor Paul Thompson. ‘It’s had a powerful impact on the whole RCA, bringing everybody together.’

As Charles shook hands with the winners, he told his audience how proud he was to be associated with such remarkable ideas. He spoke of ‘the urgency of the crisis that confronts us in all directions,’ and of the need to find solutions rapidly, ‘through the combination of art, science and technology, that together have a better chance of winning this battle.’

Prince Charles and Jony Ive: a meeting of minds

Ive first met Charles more than a decade ago when he and Steve Jobs went to Highgrove, the Prince’s private residence in Gloucestershire. He admires the Prince’s command of the issues confronting us on climate change, and even more the way in which he addresses them. ‘It’s easy to say the threat is too profound and too existential to do anything but retreat. With the certainty of knowledge that comes from looking at the issues for a long time, the Prince has described the problem, but his engagement does not come from fear.’

Ive confesses that he is an anxious person. As the reference to Love and Fury on LoveFrom’s website suggests, his strategy for dealing with that anxiety is to convert fear into fury. ‘Fear seems passive. I am more angry than I am fearful,’ he says. ‘It’s dangerous when you feel powerless in the face of a challenge. The thing about fear is that it is passive, corrosive and deeply unhealthy. It encourages you to retreat, because you don’t think you can effect change.’

When Ive talks about design, his language is fiercely moralistic. ‘I am angry that most of what is made seems so thoughtless. So many products do not deserve to exist. The minimum that they should do to justify themselves and consume all that material is that their designers should care about them.’ 

Ive is heartened both by the young designers whose work is the basis of the Terra Carta project, and by their ideas. He sees their work as ‘a wonderful antidote to dodging and retreating’. He is equally impressed by how articulate they are. ‘I used to struggle to speak, and to have heard every one of them talk with passion and knowledge, with fire in their bellies, but with no arrogance, was tremendously encouraging.’

Ive is an optimist about what designers have to offer. As he sees it, design is still in flux. ‘We have lost sight of how recent industrialisation is. Unlike architecture, design is still a new profession. It developed by putting a design office on top of a manufacturing plant, then discovered authorship, and is still trying to find how to make sense of the equation.

‘I am struck by the conspicuous lack of a completely identifiable movement,’ continues Ive. ‘Perhaps the last one was Ettore Sottsass and Memphis. Perhaps because it’s easier to identify a movement that can be summarised by appearance.’

If Ive has his way, the future of design is to combine the care of makers with the potential of contemporary industrial manufacturing. ‘In the 1980s, when manufacturing started to be outsourced from North America, it was not because of the rate for labour, it was because of skills that could not be found in other places. The narrative is that it was cheaper. That was not the case, it was to find capability. When you design, you must have a thorough understanding of materials, otherwise you get a fractured development of form. You often hear people apologising that things are not made the way that they wanted. I understand that excuse, but at Apple, I spent months at manufacturing sites, and my apology would have had no currency.

‘Makers never say, “it’s not been made quite the way that I wanted”. If it’s designed and made with care, a mass-produced object can have the resonances of a batch production. It comes down to motivation and the sacrifices you make for the exercise.’

For Ive, design is about care, something that he once discussed with Jobs. It was a conversation from which his other sign-off word came. ‘He told me, “When you make something with care, even though you don’t know who the people using it will be, they will sense it. Care is a way to express our love for the species”.

INFORMATION
The August 2022 Design for a Better World issue of Wallpaper* is available from 14 July in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

sustainable-markets.org/terra-carta
rca.ac.uk
lovefrom.com

HRH the Prince of Wales and Sir Jony Ive’s Terra Carta Design Lab announced the initiative’s winners on 27 April 2022. Picked from 125 submissions, the four winners include a wearable device for cows to reduce methane emissions, a clean-tech start-up spearheading the capture and monitoring of tyre wear, the first 100 per cent recyclable and chemical-free outdoor performance textile, and aerodynamic seed pods made from food waste for plant and tree restoration. 

Prince Charles and Ive launched the Terra Carta Design Lab in partnership with the Royal College of Art in July 2021, with the mission of highlighting ‘the urgent need to focus on the creative collaboration between art, science, design, and engineering to produce credible and sustainable solutions to the climate crisis’.

Terra Carta Design Lab winners 

‘All the Terra Carta Design Lab winners have ideas and designs that deserve to be developed,’ said Ive. ‘The ingenuity and determination of these designers have produced some extraordinarily creative responses, and they now embark on the journey to turn these great ideas into practical solutions.’

Zelp, a wearable to reduce cows’ methane emissions, addresses one of the leading causes of global warming. The harness-shaped devices are developed to fit comfortably on the animals, ensuring that there is no change to feeding, rumination, or interaction within the herd. As the cattle exhale, methane is oxidised by passing through a catalyst, so that it’s released into the air as CO2 and water vapour. The device connects to an app to monitor methane reduction and provide key data for farmers, including welfare, efficiency, and fertility metrics.

Considering that tyre wear is the second-largest microplastic pollutant in our environment, The Tyre Collective developed the first device that captures tyre wear at the wheel, with the aim of accelerating a shift to zero-emission mobility. Additionally, the team are exploring upcycling it into various applications, creating a circular system.

Amphitex’s research into outdoor textiles revealed that traditional waterproof breathable textiles are impossible to recycle, and their manufacturing often employs harmful chemicals. The team created the first 100 per cent recyclable, chemical-free and carbon-negative outdoor performance textile, made from a combination of recycled and plant-based feedstock.

Finally, Aerseeds are aerodynamic seed pods, made from food waste: mimicking natural processes, they are carried by the wind to cover large areas and reach difficult terrains to deliver nutrients and seeds to soils depleted by human activity, accelerating ecological restoration and reforestation.

Each winning team will receive £50k funding and access to mentoring from Sir Jony Ive, chancellor of the RCA, and the corporate members of the Sustainable Markets Initiative network.

Says Ive: ‘We can all have good ideas. I find it reassuring, particularly facing the overwhelming challenge of climate change, that we can all contribute ideas that could evolve into valuable solutions. I love not only the power of a good idea but how egalitarian and inclusive they can be.’

HRH The Prince of Wales and Sir Jony Ive’s Terra Carta Design Lab has announced the 20 finalists chosen to develop design-led solutions to the climate crisis. Launched in July 2021, the Terra Carta Design Lab was spearheaded by Prince Charles and Jony Ive in collaboration with the Royal College of Art (RCA). Each shortlisted team will be expected to further develop their proposals and submit them to the Terra Carta Design Lab Grand Jury in spring 2022, after which four winning teams will be offered the opportunity to be mentored by Jony Ive and introduced to the industry leads of the Sustainable Markets Initiative, as well as receiving financial support. 

'The Design Lab is a visionary and imaginative way of helping address the increasingly urgent climate crisis – the greatest design challenge we face,’ says Ive. ‘This work demonstrates the ingenuity and creative brilliance of RCA students, and I am so very excited to see these concepts develop.'

Terra Carta Design Lab finalists

The 20 shortlisted projects were selected based on innovation, technical feasibility, potential for impact, as well as their alignment with one of the ten themes of the Terra Carta – energy in industry and buildings; natural capital, including agriculture, land use, forestry and oceans; mobility and road transport; fashion and textiles; health systems; technology; waste; plastic, chemicals and petrochemicals; aviation; and shipping. 

The shortlist includes Zelp, an innovative device worn by cattle to reduce methane emissions; the Resting Reef, an eco-friendly funeral service that aims to regenerate marine biodiversity, sequestering carbon and preventing coastal erosion; and the Race for the Arctic, an adventure game that lets players experience climate catastrophe and work to create a more positive future. 

Software-based projects also feature on the shortlist, such as inC2, a platform built on the blockchain that helps companies track, analyse and reduce their supply chain emissions; and Carbon Counting Club, a system that uses blockchain technology to bring trust, transparency and rigour to the carbon offset market.

Among the chosen designs are also a series of material innovations, such as an alternative to plastic that is currently being tested as a solution for the beauty and personal care industry, developed by Shellworks (a former Wallpaper* Re-Made collaborator); and the Notpla Seaweed Paper Project, an alternative to wood-based paper and cardboard with comparable performance and cost. 

‘This shortlist shows the potent alchemy of bringing together the arts and sciences to tackle urgent global challenges,’ comments Paul Thompson, vice-chancellor of the Royal College of Art. ‘The variety and viability of these 20 projects is testament to the talent, innovation and dedication of our students and alumni to solve real world problems affecting communities around the world.’

On 5 November 2021, Wallpaper* editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas chaired a conversation between His Royal Highness Prince Charles and Sir Jony Ive, introducing the aims of the Terra Carta Design Lab, a day after launching the Terra Carta Seal honouring companies making an effort towards sustainability.

Held at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum on the occasion of COP26, the conversation touched upon the motives that have driven Prince Charles to launch Terra Carta, his collaboration with Jony Ive, and the importance of the next generation facing environmental challenges globally. 

Prince Charles in conversation with Sir Jony Ive

‘What really has driven [the Terra Carta] is the fact that finally, after some 40 years of trying to raise awareness about all these issues, and trying to bring a whole series of people together, particularly from the business sector to get them to understand more and more about the need for sustainability, one of the things we could never really do was get the financial services sector to take it seriously,’ said Prince Charles. He noted how he always believed that the private sector would be key to developing solutions to the global environmental crisis, and that exchanges between public and private sectors are key.

As well as cross-sector conversations, the creative collaboration with Ive has been crucial to the development of the Terra Carta. ‘When His Royal Highness was describing the Terra Carta, I was hugely struck by the fact that in spite of the profound nature of the challenges that it was trying to address, the Terra Carta wasn't characterised by fear or terror, there was a rather beautiful optimism,’ he says. 

The latest instalment in the collaboration between the two saw Ive and his LoveFrom team creating a paper and digital seal inspired by nature, symbolic of the Terra Carta’s mission. ‘I feel so strongly that we must reconnect with nature,’ observed Prince Charles. ‘Nature has to be put at the centre of the whole operation and [Jony Ive’s] design, I thought, brilliantly helped to encapsulate that. But this is another reason why it's always seemed so valuable to learn from nature. After all, nature has found answers to these problems over billions of years of evolution.’

As Douglas pointed out, the young generations are key to the initiative’s mission, and Prince Charles’ grandchildren have actually helped inspire his environmental work and desire to engage the next generations. ‘If you’re going to start young, I think there's a real opportunity,’ he said. 

On that topic, when asked about his advice to the next generation, Ive responded: ‘Very often overlooked is how we actually begin the process, how we understand the problem, how we frame the problem, and if we don’t, we miss enormous opportunities before we really start. I think critical practice is that of being curious and inquisitive. But with real discipline and with real intention. And I think very often just looking at a problem in a curiously different way can make a whole range of solutions immediately clear.’

INFORMATION

sustainable-markets.org/terra-carta

Coinciding with COP26, HRH Prince Charles’ Sustainable Markets Initiative and LoveFrom unveil the Terra Carta Seal, recognising private sector companies that are leading the way in creating sustainable markets. Designed by Jony Ive and his team at LoveFrom, the seal embodies Terra Carta’s values and its aim ‘to reunite people and planet, by giving fundamental rights and value to Nature’. 

The seal is presented as Prince Charles and the Sustainable Markets Initiative host the Terra Carta Action Forum (taking place 3 – 5 November 2021 at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow). 

Terra Carta Seal by LoveFrom

Forty-four private sector companies (including L’Oréal, Siemens Energy and AstraZeneca) have been awarded the inaugural, annual Terra Carta Seal for their commitment to an accelerated action to limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2050. The Sustainable Markets Initiative partnered with Corporate Knights, whose 100 Most Sustainable Corporations Companies were invited to apply to receive the seal. 

The Terra Carta Seal design features an illustrated composition of flora and fauna, embodying the charter’s vision and ambition to set a recovery path ‘For Nature, People and Planet’. The circular design includes an intricate pattern of oak leaves and acorns, fern, magnolia, phlox, ladybirds, monarch butterflies, birds and honey bees, surrounded by the Terra Carta motto of ‘concordiae naturae, hominum et planetae’ – for the harmony of nature, people and the planet. 

‘The Terra Carta Seal recognises those organisations which have made a serious commitment to a future that is much more sustainable, and puts nature, people and the planet at the heart of the economy,’ comments Prince Charles. ‘We all need to make changes if we are to preserve the planet for our children and grandchildren and these businesses have pledged to make it easier for us all to do so.’ 

LoveFrom’s design process

The seal design is sincere, modest and beautiful, its intricacies conveying the complexity and weight of the meaning behind it. Initially conceived as a black and white graphic, the core of the design is defined by typography: LoveFrom’s own bespoke serif, not commercially available and used exclusively for special projects such as this, surrounded and taken over by nature. 

‘We spent all this time creating a typeface that we would use for our identity: we didn’t want a logo, we wanted something far more modest, more similar to a dialogue,’ says Ive of creating the LoveFrom Serif, inspired by John Baskerville’s letterforms and based on studies of his original punches and matrices. ‘We thought we would use this typeface for our friends; we couldn’t think of a better way to take advantage of a few years of work around the Terra Carta, and I think it works really quite well. You can see the typography is clearly central to the seal, but I was seduced by the gentle, slightly anarchic dominance of the natural references.’

As well as the flora and fauna that can be seen in the seal, the team was also inspired by patterns and compositions found in the work of William Morris, Josef Frank, Nick Knight and Christopher Marley, and in the sacred geometry of nature, from shells to the structure of plants, galaxies and meteorological phenomena.

‘We have reinforced the resilience and fertility of nature by allowing these natural elements to gently take control of the image,’ says Ive. ‘This is a visually lush celebration of the power of nature, and far from being superficial decoration, these natural forms are what gives the design life.’

The Terra Carta Seal design has been designed with a series of different chromatic treatments, including monochrome green and blue, and multicoloured versions that speak of the natural elements featured within the circular design. 

A paper seal in collaboration with James Cropper

In addition to the digital seal, LoveFrom has created a paper seal in collaboration with British paper mill James Cropper. Used for the commemorative summarium, the paper-engineered seal was crafted using a combination of printing, embossing, die-cutting and micro-perforation.

The text is letterpressed onto handmade paper made by James Cropper’s Paper Foundation at its mill in Burneside, Cumbria – a workshop using solar and hydro power and with a connection to Prince Charles, who visited the location in 2018. ‘For this project it would seem natural and obvious to work with them, it was a natural partnership.’

The project reflects LoveFrom’s creative process; Ive describes the team’s aim ‘to be heavy with our thinking and light with our implementation’. 

‘For decades at Apple, one of my preoccupations has been this idea that if we have discipline in our thinking practice we hold ourselves accountable with our thinking, and the result is that we can be light with our implementation,’ he continues. ‘This really has become such a central part to the way that we see problems and the way that we practice.’

As part of the Terra Carta Action Forum at COP26 in Glasgow, on 4 November 2021, Wallpaper* editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas will be speaking with His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Jony Ive on the subject of design and sustainability.

INFORMATION

lovefrom.com

LoveFrom, the creative collective founded by Jony Ive which includes his long-time collaborator Marc Newson, has unveiled its website, LoveFrom.com. The launch marks the most public move to date by the collective, which has worked quietly since its founding in 2019 and only made general announcements of collaborations with Apple, Airbnb and Ferrari.

LoveFrom.com went live today, 11 October 2021 at noon Pacific time, revealing a visual identity designed by members of the team including Ive, legendary art director Peter Saville, and Chris Wilson and Antonio Cavedoni, both former members of the Apple design team. The site is as intriguing as it is declarative, opening with a simple wordmark, and followed by a brief text described as ‘a concise and finely crafted definition of the LoveFrom collective and its work’.

LoveFrom Serif – an expression of the collective’s identity

Both the wordmark and ensuing text are set in a new typeface, LoveFrom Serif, which is inspired by John Baskerville’s letterforms and based on studies of his original punches and matrices. From this basis, the design team created an expanded type family with flexible, scalable digital faces in multiple weights and optical sizes. ‘Each character has been lovingly redrawn, refined and meticulously crafted over the past two years,’ explains the collective in an accompanying press release. 

Within the wordmark, the ‘LoveFrom’ name is given an additional flourish by a comma, a move that Saville describes as initiating a dialogue and shared conversation. In its animated version, a text cursor blinks as the eight letters of ‘LoveFrom’ appear to be typed out. The comma then appears, rotating, rolling around, transforming and bouncing atop the other letterforms before it finally settles into place. 

LoveFrom.com – a statement of purpose

The text opens with familiar lines: ‘LoveFrom is a creative collective. We are designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, writers, engineers and artists.’ It acknowledges that the viewer may already know LoveFrom by its members’ past work, and then offers a statement of purpose: 

Further down is the line ‘We work on projects for joy’, echoing a sentiment shared by Ive and Apple’s former chairman, CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs. In a remembrance first published by WSJ Magazine a week ago, on the tenth anniversary of Jobs’ death, Ive wrote: ‘He truly believed that by making something great for people, something empowering, beautiful and culturally significant, we express our gratitude and our love for humanity.’ Both the LoveFrom name and the timings of today’s website launch are an homage to Jobs, and an indication of the creativity, collaborative spirit and generosity he continues to inspire. 

The collective adds, ‘We look forward to continuing the conversation about our work, our team and our creative process.’

The animated LoveFrom wordmark features a comma that rotates, rolls around, transforms and bounces atop the other letterforms before it finally settles into place. Peter Saville describes this typographic flourish as initiating a dialogue and shared conversation.

INFORMATION

LoveFrom.com

Jony Ive, former chief design officer of Apple, reflects on the tenth anniversary of Steve Jobs’ passing, in a published remembrance in WSJ Magazine.

Jobs, who was Apple’s chairman, CEO and co-founder, appointed Ive as Apple’s senior vice president of industrial design in 1997. After Jobs died on 5 October 2011, following an eight-year struggle with a rare form of pancreatic cancer, Ive delivered a eulogy at a celebration of Jobs’ life on the Apple campus in Cupertino.

Since then, ‘I have not spoken publicly about our friendship, our adventures or collaboration,’ Ive states in the remembrance. ‘But I think about Steve every day.’

Jony Ive: ‘I think about Steve Jobs every day’ 

In the eulogy, Jobs had declared Ive his ‘closest and most loyal friend’. In the new remembrance, he elaborates on a close creative partnership that became an enduring friendship: ‘We worked together for nearly 15 years. We had lunch together most days and spent our afternoons in the sanctuary of the design studio. Those were some of the happiest, most creative and joyful times of my life.’

Most people have an innate curiosity, but Ive contends that after a conventional education, or in a collaborative work environment, curiosity becomes a decision that requires ‘intent and discipline’.

Jobs liked to explore tentative ideas. As Ive describes, ‘for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right’.

It was a reverence of tentative ideas, and a lack of fear for the ‘terrifyingly new’, that made Jobs a visionary. ‘He understood creating should be afforded rare respect – not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances easy and convenient.’

Design as an expression of love for humanity

Ten years on, Ive says that his understanding of Jobs continues to grow and evolve.

Ive recalls that Jobs was obsessed with ‘simplicity, truth and purity’. ‘Above all else, I have come to appreciate and understand his singular and beautiful clarity that defeated the chaos, the roar of opinion and ugly rush to judge.’

In 2019, Ive left the chief designer officer role at Apple to create LoveFrom, a London- and San Francisco-based creative collective of designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, writers, engineers and artists. He now attributes the collective’s name to ‘Steve’s singular and powerful motivation’.

LoveFrom announces its collaboration with the Emerson Collective

Beyond Apple, which became LoveFrom’s first client, the collective is working with leading global companies such as Airbnb and Exor (Ferrari’s holding company). To this list of collaborators, it now adds The Emerson Collective, set up by Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs.

‘Laurene and I are close,’ Ive describes. ‘Our families have been close for nearly 30 years. We have endured deaths and celebrate births. We talk all the time. [...] Mostly, we talk about the future and her extraordinary and inspiring work with the Emerson Collective.’

Founded in 2004, Emerson Collective is an organisation that works towards a more equal and just America, with a focus on ‘creating systemic change in education, immigration, climate and cancer research and treatment’.

Ive continues: ‘Laurene and I are at last working together. In truth, we have been working together for decades.’

Jony Ive on missing Steve Jobs

Ten years ago, as Jobs and Ive bade each other farewell, Jobs’ last words were that he would miss talking together.

After Jobs died, Ive walked out into the garden. Ive recalls, ‘I thought how talking often gets in the way of listening and thinking. Perhaps that is why so much of our time together was spent quietly walking or eating.’

He concludes: ‘I miss Steve desperately and I will always miss not talking to him’.

INFORMATION

The remembrance article appears in WSJ Magazine

Jony Ive and Marc Newson gear up with Ferrari

Jony Ive and Marc Newson of creative collective LoveFrom are joining forces with Exor, Ferrari’s holding company, for a long-term, multi-year partnership.

According to Exor’s announcement, released on 27 September 2021, ‘the first expression of this new partnership will bring together Ferrari's legendary performance and excellence, with LoveFrom’s unrivalled experience and creativity that has defined extraordinary world-changing products’. 

The partnership represents LoveFrom’s first major project beyond Silicon Valley, a highly anticipated move from the creative collective. Comprising designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, writers, engineers and artists, LoveFrom was founded in 2019 after Ive left the chief design officer role at Apple. It maintains a close relationship with Apple (its first customer), and began to work with Airbnb last year to design the sharing economy platform’s next generation of goods and services.

Jony Ive and Marc Newson gear up with Ferrari

Says John Elkann, chairman and chief executive of Exor and chairman of Ferrari: ‘Soon after LoveFrom was founded, we began to talk with Jony and Marc about opportunities to combine their world-renowned creativity with ours in complementary and incremental ways. Ferrari represents a first exciting chance to do great things together as we build our future.’

Ferrari had previously confirmed that it would launch its first all-electric car in 2025, anticipating the European Union’s effective ban on new fossil-fuel cars from 2035 – so LoveFrom is poised to make its mark on the luxury carmaker at a historic moment.

Add Ive and Newson: ‘As Ferrari owners and collectors, we could not be more excited about collaborating with this extraordinary company, and in particular with the design team, expertly led by Flavio Manzoni. We see some uniquely exciting opportunities of working together.’

The Ferrari partnership follows a flurry of high-profile design collaborations by the carmaker. In 2017, it celebrated its 70th anniversary with a blockbuster exhibition ‘Under the Skin’, with 3D design by Patricia Urquiola; while the following year saw the publication of a monograph, published by Taschen and enclosed in an aluminium engine-inspired case designed by Newson. An ambitious brand diversification project rolled out earlier this year, with a fashion collection overseen by Rocco Iannone, formerly of Pal Zileri, and a new flagship store in Maranello, Italy, by Sybarite.

LoveFrom’s next steps

Beyond the Ferrari collaboration, ‘LoveFrom will explore a range of creative projects with Exor in the business of luxury’, says the announcement, fuelling speculation about next steps. Other brands in the Exor portfolio include Italian football team Juventus, Italian media conglomerate Gedi, Chinese luxury fashion label Shang Xia, and Britain’s The Economist Group; collectively they could offer a wide range of possibilities for design innovation.

Exor additionally announced that Ive would join its Partners Council, an annual forum that ‘draws on the experience, expertise and insights of a group of highly successful Exor friends and partners to share ideas and explore potential business opportunities’.

The Sustainable Markets Initiative – an organisation created by HRH Prince Charles in 2019 to address the threats posed by climate change and biodiversity loss – is launching a new programme to create small designs with a big impact, which facilitate the world’s transition to a sustainable future.

Called the Terra Carta Design Lab, the programme is a collaboration between Prince Charles, Sir Jony Ive, and the Royal College of Art (RCA). It will bring together young and emerging architects, designers, scientists, engineers, historians, writers and artists to repair the planet and give back to nature.

These include 2,300 RCA students drawn from the college’s four schools: architecture, arts & humanities, communication, and design. They represent over 70 countries and will collaborate in multidisciplinary teams, also joined by RCA alumni from 2011 to 2021.

Terra Carta Design Lab aims to inspire solutions

According to the launch statement, lab participants have the opportunity to explore ‘local initiatives to restore biodiversity, reduce greenhouse gases, support developing countries, and catalyse a new economic and social model that realigns people with their environment.’

Their projects will be assessed by a panel of the RCA’s senior academic staff based on a trio of metrics: feasibility, measurable impact, and potential to present engaging and inspiring solutions to urgent problems. 

A shortlist of up to 16 concepts will be presented in November to a jury that includes Prince Charles, Jony Ive, and Paul Thompson (the college’s vice chancellor), alongside strategic and supporting partners of the Terra Carta Design Lab and the Sustainable Markets Initiative.

The winning designs will be announced in 2022, and their creators given strategic and financial support to transform their ideas into reality. Winners will also have the opportunity to be mentored by Ive, who served as chief design officer of Apple before launching his own creative collective, LoveFrom. 

Chancellor of the RCA since 2017, Ive calls the Terra Carta Design Lab ‘a visionary and imaginative way of helping to address the world’s increasingly urgent environmental problems.’

The design lab follows on Prince Charles’ Terra Carta, launched in January 2021. Deriving its name from the Magna Carta, which inspired a belief in the fundamental rights and liberties of people, Terra Carta ‘aims to reunite people and planet, by giving fundamental rights and value to Nature’. 

‘Small ideas can have a big impact if they are supported with the right design, science and engineering and that is the key idea behind today’s Terra Carta Design Lab,' says the prince.

The lab’s launch announcement comes at a pivotal moment for global cooperation to fight the climate emergency. ‘We only have 100 days until COP26, the big UN conference in Glasgow to tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis,’ continues the prince. ‘We will all need to play our part, old and young, if we are to change how we look after the Earth, making it sustainable for Nature, People and Planet.’

Announcement video for Terra Carta Design Lab, produced by Sustainable Markets Initiative, an organisation created by Prince Charles in 2019 to address the threats posed by climate change and biodiversity loss.

Sir Jony Ive – former chief design officer at Apple, and founder of the LoveFrom collective – has given some heartfelt and truly moving messages to the next generation of design talent, during a virtual ceremony at California College of the Arts, for the graduating class of 2021.

‘As a generation of creatives, with your own new and hopeful ideas, you are critically important,' says Ive, to the 500 graduating artists, makers, architects and designers he is directly addressing. Listening too, are countless others striving to find footing in a world hit hard by the pandemic. ‘This is not the time to seek the comfortable familiarity of the past,' Ive continues in a poignant reminder of the urgency of ideas, imagination and innovation, ‘but rather to build and make something new.’

In the address, Ive draws a line of difference between ‘the specifics of design’ and ‘the fundamentally important skills of creativity’. The rigidity of the former tugs at the free and childlike musings of the latter. Go with the latter, Ive urges. ‘Without profoundly new thinking and ideas, our practice has no purpose.’

He leaves us with soundbites of brilliance; post-it sized mantras that will no doubt be pinned to the noteboards and iPads of these 500 creatives as they move from job, to role, to career, to change-maker. ‘Opinions are not ideas, opinions are not as important as ideas, opinions are just opinions,' says Ive. ‘Being curious fuels our appetite to learn and wanting to learn is far more important than being right.'

Watch: Jony Ive on the importance of design in contemporary culture

Graduation ceremonies, like all events necessarily transformed by events of the last year, have been adapted digitally. The CCA's virtual commencement rose to the virtual challenge with a special film directed by photographer and director Nick Knight and produced by SHOWStudio, which you can watch in full below.

Film directed by Nick Knight, produced by SHOWStudio

INFORMATION

showstudio.com

Tomorrow morning, Apple’s anticipated Carnegie Library store will open its doors in Washington DC. Designed by Foster + Partners, the four-year-long project has seen the 200-year-old library painstakingly reinvigorated, in what is Apple’s most extensive historic restoration project to date.

The Beaux-Arts style building has a rich and varied history, which has been respected within the fabric of the new design. Once home to Washington’s Central Public Library, it opened in 1903, and was chiefly funded by Andrew Carnegie, renowned for his vision of public and free space for all.

Carnegie’s ethos chimes with Apple’s shifting retail philosophy. As the tech titan moves away from devices and into subscriptions, its store designs have changed shape too; into places for community and experience; where products are available to purchase, but aren’t the sole motivation for visiting. Instead, there’s designated space for Apple’s free programme of creative events, and the stacks have been converted into the ‘Genius’ area where tech-advice is doled out where the books once were.

‘Because of changes to traditional shopping patterns, Carnegie was about coming and exploring and feeling a sense of calm in what is a magical space,’ explains Chris Braithwaite, Apple's senior director of retail design. ‘If you then walk away with a positive feeling then we’ve done our job.'

Uniquely, Carnegie is also home to the new DC History Center, which includes the Kiplinger Research Library, three galleries and a museum store, all owned and operated by the 125-year-old Historical Society of Washington DC. The non-profit has benefited enormously from the Carnegie Library refit; but the relationship is a symbiotic one. Apple benefits too, through the Society’s community-orientated approach, and its emphasis on interaction and learning – key pillars in Apple’s own retail strategy.

Visitors are welcomed by the renewed grand entry plaza, onto which, the 100-year-old Vermont marble façade stands anew, complete with totally restored sculptures. A skylight that once illuminated the original library’s circulation desk has been blessed with a new design, creating a new double-height atrium – the impressive height of which offers the kind of visual punch common to Apple stores globally.

Inside, restorative flourishes are what Stefan Behling of Foster + Partners calls ‘subtle gains’. They will impress the eagle-eyed, and the design literate alike. Traditional wooden skirting boards have been assiduously matched-up to contemporary ones. A newly instated, but timeless, terrazo flooring could have been there forever – and now, probably will be, thanks to its durability.

‘Many architects deal with old and new, and some decide to go to the extreme of expressing new or elaborate shapes,’ Behling explains. ‘Our collective decision with Jony [Ive] was to go with a very careful and minimal differentiation. It's almost invisible – like the roof at Apple park, for example. It’s completely effortless. You’re not drawn to the skylight itself, but the sky beyond it.’

Apple's design chief officer Jony Ive was very much involved, and helped to instill a sense of respect for tradition throughout the project's duration. ‘With Jony, we agreed that it was important to know our place,' Behling continues. ‘The building has obviously been here for 100 years, but it will be here for another 100 to come.'

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Foster + Partners website, and the Apple website

ADDRESS

801 K St NW
Washington
DC 20001, USA

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‘I’m here by choice, not by obligation,’ Jony Ive tells me as we trek through the dense, mysterious forests of Yakushima in southern Japan.

Me too! My 12,000-mile round-trip from London to this remote island was arduous, but worth it. It’s not often you get to spend time in such a magical environment in the company of Apple’s chief design officer and Hermès’ artistic director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas.

Extraordinary products created by extraordinary partnerships should lead to extraordinary experiences, and the purpose of this two-day sojourn was to better understand some qualities of the new Apple Watch Hermès Series 4. It may seem odd that a company renowned for accelerating digital connectivity would take you to an area that is almost totally off-grid, but finding time to unplug and connect in a different way – with yourself and with nature – is a key component of its new product. ‘We must strive to preserve a connection with nature and a reconnection with our senses,’ explains Dumas, ‘and Yakushima, with its thousand-year-old trees, its incredibly diverse flora and fauna, including 1,900 species of plants, 150 species of birds and around 20 different species of mammals, is a marvellous example of this.’

The watch’s fitness, health and breathing apps are now paramount: ‘We have included additional features and enhancements to help us to live an overall healthier, more active, more balanced life,’ says Ive.

Balance is also key to the overall Apple/Hermès working relationship – the balance of technology and craftsmanship. It is something Dumas is passionate about (he refers to it as ‘technocraft’) and is convinced it is the holy grail of modern design, manufacturing and making. ‘We are a manufacturing species, we make tools and we make tools to make objects. It is part of our culture and it is part of what makes us human,’ he says. ‘We are both so interested in the process of making,’ continues Ive. ‘After I met Pierre-Alexis some years ago, the idea of working with Hermès struck me as entirely natural and logical – almost inevitable.’

By spending time with Ive and Pierre-Alexis Dumas (I’m tempted to refer to them collectively as IPAD), you sense a total meeting of minds. There’s a shared admiration of materials and craftsmanship, and an uncompromising pursuit of excellence. The obsessive refinement in Series 4 is where the magic happens – such as the significant increase in the display size, by blending it with the curves of the watch. But the new Hermès user interface is the most elegant and succinct representation of the collaboration. As the minute hand sweeps forward, the screen shifts from one block colour to the next, matching the colours of the two-tone leather straps and creating a kind of digital sundial. Over dinner on the last evening in Yakushima, Dumas reminds me that the Hermès/Apple relationship first blossomed thanks to some Wallpaper* matchmaking back in 2010. The inaugural Wallpaper* Handmade project was in preparation and the iPad had just been announced at one of Steve Jobs’ legendary presentations. Who better, we thought, to design the perfect protective case for this yet-to-be-released technological game-changer than Hermès? It would be a marriage of craft and technology for our Milan exhibition that coming April. Technocraft, no less! Some five years later, the Apple Watch Hermès was born, and now it was fitting – by choice, not by obligation – to be present at this most extraordinary presentation of their latest collaboration, mindful that the first seeds of that working relationship were planted on the pages of this magazine. § As originally featured in the March 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*240)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Hermès website and the Apple website

Tony Chambers started wearing an Apple Watch in 2015. Seduced, as many were, by its marriage of elegant form, function and fun – it was the Mickey Mouse face that gave it extra appeal. ‘It adds an element of irreverence, preventing all the other design perfection becoming too, well, perfect,’ Chambers told The Telegraph at the time. ‘Mickey takes the edge off.’

Chambers, creative consultant and Wallpaper* former editor-in-chief, has monitored the iteration-by-iteration evolution of the world's most popular timepiece with interest ever since. Impossibly, each new series seems to get better, through subtle design tweaks, and system upgrades (not to mention improved Mickey graphics). It was with great curiosity, then, that Chambers learnt that the new Apple Watch – alongside the three new iPhones that launched yesterday via livestream at Apple Park in California – applies a more significant redesign than ever.

The livestream, which fizzed across the fourth wall and onto Apple screens worldwide, revealed that the Apple Watch Series 4 features the greatest leaps forward, in both hardware and software terms, since Apple Time began. After the launch, Chambers called upon chief design officer Sir Jony Ive via phone to Apple HQ – resuming a conversation they began at London's Royal College of Art earlier this year – to discover just how profound these shifts are, and why they've happened to products that, at the time of launch, seem difficult to improve upon. 

‘You’d be reckless to move away from the fundamental icon,' Ive says of the new Apple Watch, which, on first impression, maintains a similar footprint and profile as the Series 3 iteration. ‘Our aim was to develop it and evolve it as dramatically as possible.' The key visual difference is the 30 per cent greater display area, which seamlessly integrates into the thinner case, achieved by eradicating the void frame around the edge of the face (available in 40mm and 44mm). ‘When you see each watch series in isolation you can't comprehend how different they are. But when you look at them side by side, the change is extremely dramatic.’

Further crucial design advances come when you look behind the screen. A re-engineered interface ushers in easier to read, larger fonts; a watch-to-watch Walkie Talkie comms system (with watch0S5), 50 per cent louder speaker, and a more customisable homescreen, which you can even add a photo of your loved one's face to (if that's your thing).

The new health features boast some of the most compelling progressions, and, in Ive's words, are ‘absolutely insane'. Updates include a Fall Detector, which uses the Apple Watch's accelerometer and gyroscope to identify when a hard fall occurs, initiating a call to emergency services, then sending a message with your location to your emergency contacts (unless of course you confirm you're okay). Perhaps even more astounding, an FDA-approved electrocardiogram app can analyse your heart rate, alert you if it exceeds or falls below a specified threshold, and detect abnormalities like AFib, right from the wrist, via a new electrical heart rate sensor in the back crystal, built into the Digital Crown. ‘It's a real privilege to be part of a team developing products like this,' Ive impresses. ‘We’ve come to learn we’re able to get a sense of how the body is functioning in the broadest of contexts – not just in the doctor's office.'

When we looked around Apple Park last year, Ive told us that his team's goal has been, ‘in some ways, to get design out of the way.’ He said, ‘We try to define a solution that seems so inevitable that it does recede.’ The new watch unifies each of its design elements in complete harmony, from the curved corners of the larger, all‑new display to the architecture of the S4 chip, every detail has been thoughtfully moulded. Ive puts some of these successes down to the design team working ‘under one roof'. ‘The same designers have been working on this product for a few years, but until we arrived in Apple Park earlier this year, we didn’t enjoy a singular studio.' Now, haptic designers, font designers, material designers, and interface designers work in close proximity; creating product in a way that Apple Park was built for: collaboratively. The result is, in Ive's eyes, the most beautiful Apple Watch yet.

The Hermès iteration of the Series 4 watch, designed by Ive and Hermès creative director Pierre-Alexis Dumas, continues their collaboration. Disparate design elements (form, function, finish) tick together in unison; a testament to the complementary working attitudes of the two individuals. ‘I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to achieve together,' says Ive, stressing the high regard to which he holds Dumas. ‘We both derive a tremendous satisfaction in our work together.' In the singularly beautiful Hermès edition, a two-tone strap is complemented by a gradient face design, which, like a digital sundial, changes colour with the passing of minutes, measuring the hours with meditative simplicity.

Five years ago, Apple didn’t make watches. Today, the Apple Watch is the bestselling watch in the world. With such groundbreaking, and popular design – where can it go next? ‘I assume this is always a journey,' Ive explains. ‘Partly, it's because I’m working on the next thing – I’m always aware of the opportunities to do better.’

But a better object doesn't necessarily equate to a perfect object. Instead, it seems the Apple aim is to create a person object. An object with life, flexibility, relatability, personality. Something that works for you, and, as the voiceover said at the start of the livestream, an object that has ‘the ability to change your life everyday'. Just as the Mickey Mouse face on Tony Chambers' first Apple watch encouraged him to wear it daily, the watch's ability to reflect your personality is what makes it such a seamless addition to your arm. It might be Hermès' mindful sundial, or the reassurance you feel from knowing Fall Detector is running in the background, or perhaps by wearing your loved one's image on your wrist. Apple's real design success? Giving you the ability to find your Mickey.

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Apple website

Apple's new approach to retail has landed in Italy. The first iteration of its community concept store has revitalised a piazza in the centre of Milan.

Located just off the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a high-traffic pedestrian street in the heart of the city, Apple Piazza Liberty opens up a new glass fountain that serves as the entrance to the store and a backdrop to the large outdoor amphitheatre. The piazza, clad in Beola Grigia (an oft-used stone in Milan) is open to the public day and night, and will host events year-round.

‘To work within one of Italy’s historic piazzas is both a great responsibility and wonderful challenge,’ Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer explains. ‘We combined two fundamental elements of the Italian piazza — water and stone — adding a glass portal that creates a multi-sensory experience as visitors enter the store through a cascading fountain that seems to envelop them.’

Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior vice president of retail, likens the project to the many ‘modern-day gathering places’ Apple has pioneered around the globe. The Milanese opening comes hot on the heels of Apple Store Macau, designed by Foster + Partners, which also combines a public outdoor square with innovative retail space, designed to improve the experience of people exploring the area, not just for buying the Apple products stocked inside.

The Milanese launch is of particular import to Ahrendts, with its ‘rich history of art, entertainment and creativity.’ It's a city well-matched to Apple's commitment to learning, creativity and connection. Apple Piazza Liberty, with its focus on community cultivation, will provide a local backdrop the the Today at Apple programme, which offers free hourly sessions on photography, filmmaking, music, coding, design. This September, the new Apple Piazza will host a special month-long Milan Series, where 21 local artists will share their visions for the creative future of Milan. 

INFORMATION

Apple Piazza Liberty opens Thursday 26 July at 5pm, and Today at Apple registration is available now here

With his inquisitive spirit and passion for hospitality, the late Azzedine Alaïa built enduring friendships with creatives near and far. Among the luminaries who happily fell into his orbit is Apple Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, who was introduced to the couturier via designer and long-time friend Marc Newson. A regular guest at Alaïa’s atelier on rue de la Verrerie, Ive would often observe the couturier at work. Their mutual admiration was made evident in 2013, when Alaïa’s pink ruffle dress became one of only two fashion items included in the blockbuster Red charity auction curated by Ive, Newson and musician Bono to fight AIDS in Africa. The next year, Alaïa would host a star-studded dinner at his atelier in honour of the Apple Watch.

Ahead of the Alaïa London store opening this evening, Ive reminisces with Wallpaper* Brand & Content Director Tony Chambers about a man he considered ‘an unambiguous master of his craft’.

TC: How did you meet, and what was the genesis of your lasting friendship?
JI: Azzedine was very close friends with Marc and it was vicariously, through Marc that I understood a little of him and his process. For many years Azzedine had been inviting me to a lunch or dinner in his famous kitchen. I think it was almost ten years ago that we had our first dinner together, which was preceded by spending a lot of time in his atelier. This turned out to be the first of many occasions I watched him work. Every single one was an extraordinary privilege, and we became friends very quickly. I don’t speak French and he didn’t speak English, but it’s quite extraordinary how sensitively he could communicate without the use of language. 

TC: Did you see any parallels between the way he worked and the way you do, or are the fashion and industrial design processes very different?
JI: The goals of our craft can be different, but very often the divisions between creative disciplines are somewhat arbitrary and artificially reinforced. What really struck me was that we shared a preoccupation with material – an intrinsic, fundamental understanding that you cannot disconnect a material from form. I found his tenacity and refusal to accept the limits of a material enormously inspiring. If something wasn’t working in the way he believed it should, he would go and create a new material. 

'Given Azzedine’s sense of culture, his sense of the future and of astute perception, I think it would be utterly bizarre if he didn’t have fascinations ranging from fine art through to industrial design.' –Jony Ive

TC: You are known for always starting your designs by hand, though you may then develop them in many different ways. Did observing Azzedine reinforce that process?
JI: If anything, it was an affirmation that our processes were extraordinarily similar. But as a consequence of the materials we worked in, there was this fundamental difference in the feedback loop. He could make design decisions and see their results immediately, whereas for me it can take months.

TC: Azzedine created clothes that people enjoyed wearing. His clothing really came to life when it was on the body. You kind of have to activate the design, which is something Apple products share. Across all design disciplines, it’s all well and good to have a beautiful thing, but truly good design needs to work when it’s activated.
JI: That’s something we certainly aspire to. I also feel there’s an inherent ugliness to something that doesn’t work. The thing that struck me about Azzedine was that he not only had a clear sense of his craft and prowess, but also a clear sense of intention. His understanding of culture and historical context was extraordinary, as was his commitment to what he did, the absence of delegation, and the degree of focus.

TC: He was very much the man at the head of the atelier, always working, never detached from the studio. There’s craft, but there’s also hard graft. I think it’s something you share.
JI: Absolutely. I’m happiest, most useful and most productive when I am designing, and that hasn’t changed for 30 years. And I always got the sense that it’s what Azzedine had done, and it wasn’t going to change. 

TC: Azzedine was also notable for individually usurping the fashion calendar. He didn’t play by the normal rules. You’re in a business where there are commercial pressures and rules; do you feel the same freedom to only put out your designs when they are ready?
JI: I think it would be presumptuous of me to. I don’t properly comprehend the structures and frameworks of his industry, but I think what defines and informs your work is that pursuit of excellence. It drives you to reject received wisdom and turn your back on commonly held dogma. 

TC: While fashion designers are increasingly embracing design and art, Azzedine’s fascination with industrial design was uncommon. His particular interest and taste is really illustrated by the list of talents used in the new London store – a crop of very modern industrial designers and architects like Naoto Fukasawa, Piero Lissoni, Marc Newson and Renzo Piano, rather than more art-leaning designers one would expect. Where would you say this comes from?
JI: Given Azzedine’s sense of culture, his sense of the future and of astute perception, I think it would be utterly bizarre if he didn’t have fascinations ranging from fine art through to industrial design. As a designer you need to participate in the world with your eyes open, and have obsessions and interests that span the creative disciplines.

Maison Alaïa's first London flagship boutique
 
TC: His all-encompassing curiosity and knowledge in all areas, and his particularly acute knowledge of design does come through clearly in his collections. 
JI: It certainly does. I was in awe of his capabilities, his craft, his insight and his sense of culture. 

TC: And his general working process, thinking process and design process.
JI: But also his support, kindness and generosity, which I was incredibly fortunate to be a beneficiary of. It means far more than I can possibly express with words.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Alaïa website and the Apple website 

In December our thoughts turn to entertaining, and we offer up an enticing menu of design, architecture, art, fashion and, of course, food. For us, creativity really is at the heart of life-enhancing entertaining. For starters, we love the pairing of artists and cuisine; and in this issue we serve up Gillian Wearing’s lentil, potato and leek soup, as well as Liz Swig’s innovative oatmeal offerings, with extra ingredients by the Campana brothers.

We also talk to Jony Ive and get the very first sitting at Apple Park’s super-sized staff restaurant, Naoto Fukasawa-designed chairs and all. (Good food is so central to Apple’s working culture that the company operates its own fishing boat.) Apple Park spaces, cooked up by Foster + Partners and Ive’s industrial design studio, encourage the social aspect of working, with the restaurant being the hub of a network of collaborative spaces, places for chance encounters and off-the-cuff creativity.

We’ve nourishment for the eyes courtesy of Ive’s limited-edition cover, using Apple’s original colour spectrum and, naturally, generous white space. We also prepare heart-warming, spirit-calming recipes in a John Pawson-designed Welsh retreat.

We’ll always champion great photography, but this issue celebrates illustration, too, as a fresh way of looking at interiors, adding a dash of personal interpretation and history to the visual narrative. I have a long-held appreciation of illustration, from my formative days as a graphic design student and, later, commissioning works by the likes of Ian Wright, Ralph Steadman, Noma Bar and George Hardie – true mark makers. The first in our new series of occasional illustrated Space stories is a Wallpaper* debut for Dutch artist Leonie Bos (her work also appears on our newsstand cover). A play, and sure hand, with texture and colour are central to Bos’ approach and she brings a unique warmth and vigour to our pages.

The illustrator’s practice, the conjuring of imagined worlds, is a fascination for us. Once we had selected key design pieces to feature, Bos went away and created her fantastical Wallpaper* entertaining space. Her early sketch, above, is an insight into the creative process. Illustrations can be literal, abstract, decorative, conceptual. And so much more. Properly served up, they are a true celebration of print, its tactility and devourability.

Sarah Douglas, Editor

As originally featured in the December 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*225)

INFORMATION

The December 2017 issue of Wallpaper* is out now. Subscribe here

The unveiling of the Claridge’s Christmas tree has traditionally heralded the start of London’s festive season, not least because of the illustrious roster of designers who have headlined the Mayfair hotel’s installations. For 2016, it is designers (and long-time friends of the hotel) Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson who have taken up the challenge of reinterpreting the tree.

The pair, who collaborated with British set designer Michael Howells on the project, explain, ‘Our aim was to create an all-enveloping magical experience that celebrates our enormous respect for tradition while recognising our excitement about the future and things to come.’ This year’s installation is suitably forward-looking with nary a bauble or thread of tinsel to be seen, instead exploring the relationship between nature and technology.

See Claridge’s past Christmas tree collaborations

Transforming Claridge’s grand lobby, a series of vast four metre-high light boxes line the walls, illuminating black-and-white images of snow-capped silver birch trees. Against this immersive backdrop, towering cast models of Scots pine rise to a canopy of natural green pine.

‘There are few things more pure and beautiful than nature, so that was our starting point, layering various iterations of organic forms with technology,’ Ive and Newson say. A soundscape recalls acoustics from a forest, starting with a dawn chorus and including owls, nightingales, sparrows and foxes. Specially choreographed lighting – synced to the soundscape – creates a dappled effect in the space, continuously cycling through sunrise to a celestial night scene.

Jony Ive on Apple Park

A smaller sapling tree grows among the ‘forest’, playing with proportions – but it’s also a symbol of the future, they say. In a year as tumultuous as this one has been, Claridge’s festive installation ushers in some much needed calm and optimism.

INFORMATION

The Christmas installation is on view until 3 January 2017. For more information, visit the Claridge’s website

ADDRESS

Claridge's
Brook St
London W1K 4HR

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Many of us can remember our first encounter with an Apple product. For a rare few, it may have been the Apple 1 (1976). For some, the turning point was the iMac (1998). And who can forget the frenzy surrounding the iPod’s debut some 15 years ago, or the iPhone (2007), the iPad (2010), and most recently the Apple Watch and Apple Pencil (both 2015).

Launching today, a new book gathers Apple's most memorable projects in a visual compendium engineered with the same precision and scrupulous attention to detail as one of its products.

This is a comprehensive and objective portrait of Apple products produced over the past 20 years. ‘It is a book with very few words,’ writes Sir Jony Ive in the foreword. ‘It is about our products, their physical nature and how they were made.’ The pages that follow trace two stratospheric decades of product design with the effortlessness that’s become synonymous with the company.

It is a quiet and elegant work, a high-quality piece of book design, typography and production. It is far from a show-off vanity project. Great care, time – and money – has been spent on making it a paean to good, useful design and manufacturing. It is also of course a paean to Steve Jobs. In the five years since his death, Apple has forged on without him. Designed by Apple in California is a tribute both to him, and to the products that have shaped our future.

The tome is Apple at its purest: the products. We caught up with Ive to find out more...

Wallpaper*: The new book, quite unusually for Apple, is a look back.
Jony Ive: The biggest challenge for us was the fact that our focus and preoccupation is always on the future. So that tends to exclude much time to look back at the work we have previously done. Sometimes if we are struggling with a particular issue then that gives us reason to go back and look at the way we have solved problems in the past. But because we've been so consumed by our current and future work we came to realise we didn't have a catalogue of the physical products. So about eight years ago we felt an obligation to address this and build an objective archive. Many of the products that you see, we actually had to go out and purchase [laughs]. It's a rather shameful admission, but it's just not an area that we really invested much time or energy in, so we started to build an archive of the physical products.

W*: Objectivity seems to be the key goal?
JI: We were intrigued how we could objectively describe, define and catalogue the objects and try to give people a sense of how they were made. Not how they were designed, but how they came to be. How they were manufactured and how you can transform these often-anonymous materials into something that is valuable and useful.

W*: By looking back, did it trigger memories?
JI: You know, I've spent half my life at Apple – so many of us associate different projects with different parts of our lives. It was curious and interesting. For each project there are multiple stories.

Interestingly, the only way we realised we would finish the project was to treat it like one of the projects in the studio. There were a few things we needed to do to accurately and objectively portray these products. Of course, many of these products are white, so the off-the-shelf printing processes really didn't do an adequate job in describing the colour and surface of those products. So, unsurprisingly we ended up developing custom forms of paper [from British papermaker James Cropper] and custom inks.

W*: Did you and the team in turn learn anything from the process of making the book?
JI: The products we're working on at the moment, and have been for a while, are the beneficiaries of all the learning we gained from the book – so of course to us they are the very best things we have ever done. Therefore the frustration, the absolute frustration, of not being able to include that work was sometimes enough to make us think this is something we're not going to be able to finish. It's around 20 years of work and it certainly isn't everything we've done – it's the things that we think were salient in our learning or that we just had an affection for. That part [the selection process] wasn't too hard or challenging – we generally all felt the same way about the same products. But certainly to draw a line and say this will be the end of this first catalogue, first book, that was exquisitely painful.

W*: Quite typically for Apple, the book comes beautifully packaged.
JI: We're so used to packaging 3D objects, so that was part of the project we really enjoyed – trying to create a very simple way of protecting the book and not having to force people to deal with a myriad of sticky labels – hopefully it helped the unwrapping and made it enjoyable. So often you can put all of your energy into the primary product that you forget that your actual experience is an aggregation of the product plus all of these peripheral objects like the packaging and shipping box. We really wanted to treat each of them with the care they deserve, or rather, the care that people [the customer] deserves, such as with the draw tab on the cardboard box and the simple tuck on the envelope.

W*: What were your key objectives for the book?
JI: We asked ourselves, 'What is the value of a book like this, when most people know these objects so intimately already?' First, to see the objects out of their functional context. Next, to see them in a context of the subsequent products and hopefully how we have learned as a team how technology shifts, moves and evolves. And the other reason was to do with the fact that many people don't really have much of a sense of how their manufactured environment came to be. Most people wouldn't understand how the chair they are sat on is made. One of the things we wanted to do was try and explain as clearly as we can – through photography – how you transform a raw material into a product that you recognise and hopefully use as a daily tool.

We decided to be fairly explicit about some of the processes we used. I guess we feel a strong sense of ownership of these processes because they really do aid our understanding and learning and transfer from one product to the next. We feel that more than ever there has been a disconnect between designing and making and really, you can't disconnect them. In the 90s, as manufacturing was outsourced, this chasm developed between where something was made and where it was designed. But designing and making are inseparable if you want the ultimate product to have integrity. Another key point is that the book is being sent to all the major design colleges in the world. We are keen to get it into the hands of young people who are studying design disciplines. It's very important that it’s an educational resource as well.

W*: I presume all the photographs (by Andrew Zuckerman) were shot specifically for the book. But there's one incredible image of a Nasa space shuttle?
JI: Yes, they were – with the exception of that Space Shuttle image (above). The first image in the book is of the very first iMac. We used the same composition as the launch shot in the 1990s. But we reshot every single product [for the book]. As the project has taken so long we actually had to go back and re-photograph some of earlier products because of how photographic technology had changed and improved. The images of the later products were superior to the earlier ones, so we had to go back to the beginning to keep that perfect consistency throughout the book. Nasa images are quite extraordinary. We were poring over these one day and noticed an iPod on the dashboard, resting up there. I thought that was so funny – it was both humbling and humorous.

INFORMATION
Designed by Apple in California, from $199. For more information, visit the Apple website

Apple’s UK flagship store on London’s Regent Street has re-opened after an extensive overhaul by Foster + Partners. The brand's inaugural European store, it's now the first on the continent to adopt Apple’s new retail format, unveiled in San Francisco in May this year. The new look will now be rolled out across all the brand's European flagships.

Apple is adamant that the new store designs will be less formulaic and more site-specific, especially when housed in historic buildings. Part of the mezzanine level of the Regent Street store has been removed to create a double height grand hall, bringing more natural light into the store and revealing the grand arches of the façade. It has also opened up enough space to introduce 12 Ficus Alii trees. The mezzanine level is now accessed by twin staircases, with handrails hand-carved into the store’s stone walls. The store will also feature what Apple says is the longest luminous ceiling panel in the world.

The Union Square design put more emphasis on the Apple store as public space and what Foster + Partners calls 'civic generosity'. Regent Street includes many of the same innovations including an area tagged the Forum, anchored by a large video wall, which offers talks and classes on photography, music and art, while the Boardroom offers advice from app developers and entrepreneurs to budding startups.

The Regent Street store has served 60 million customers since it opened 12 years ago and helped spur a regeneration of what was a tired run of tourist-centric retail. Foster + Partners collaborated with Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, and Angela Ahrendts, VP of retail and online stores, on the new store concept. 'Like many great cities, London’s historic architecture has great significance to the community,' Ive says. 'On Regent Street we preserved the incredible exterior façade while opening up the interior of the store to enhance the transparency and flood the space with natural light. By choosing materials sympathetic to the historic nature of the building, we’re able to modernise the space while remaining authentic to its surrounds.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Apple website

ADDRESS

Apple
235 Regent Street
London, W1B 2EL

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Last Saturday, the newest store by Apple opened its doors to the public – literally and symbolically. The facade's 20.5 ft by 42 ft doors slide open, erasing the boundary between the retail space and the iconic Union Square in the heart of San Francisco, where it is located. Designed by Stefan Behling of Foster + Partners together with Apple’s chief design officer Jony Ive, this two-story space affirms the Silicon Valley giant’s effort to go beyond merely showcasing its products and become integrated into the urban landscape.

‘This is just a teaser,” says Stefan Behling, senior executive partner of Foster + Partners who has worked closely with Apple’s chief design officer Jony Ive on the store and the tech giant’s new headquarters that will open in 2017. ‘It’s next year that the world will see what our collaboration has accomplished.’

The stainless steel landmark includes photovoltaic panels on the roof and radiant floors and a LED-illuminated fabric ceiling inside. ‘This is the next generation of Apple retail,’ says Angela Ahrendts, Apple's senior vice president of retail and online stores, citing openness and transparency as the vision of the future of Apple’s retail. ‘We will know we've done really great if it feels more like a town square,’ she adds.

The store translates the town centre metaphor into ‘The Avenue’, staffed by new creative pros with expertise in music, photography and other arts, tasked with aiding customers with Apple products and select third-party accessories.

The revolutionary Union Square outlet also dedicates nearly a quarter of its footprint to 'The Forum', dotted with whimsical leather boxes and wooden cubes around a video wall where photographers, gamers and developers will give demonstrations and instructions.

The help desk is now replaced by the ‘Genius Grove’ of actual trees in sleek round pots, each topped with leather seating. Another new feature is a boardroom set aside for small business customers.

Keeping with its announcement of offering public plazas at its prominent locations, Apple is also unveiling a communal space behind the Union Square location. It will offer free 24/7 WiFi and live music performances, while retaining the original 1973 fountain by local artist Ruth Asawa for a sense of continuity.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Apple's website

Photography: Nigel Young for Foster + Partners

ADDRESS

Apple
300 Post Street
San Francisco, CA 94108

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To raise money for their relocation to Kensington, the Design Museum has partnered with Phillips to stage the 'Time for Design' auction in Berkeley Square.

In aid of the good cause, the Museum has been inundated with generous donations from globally renowned designers and collectors. For example, the Zaha Hadid Foundation has donated three 'Mercuric' collection tables; Ron Arad has contributed his striking 'D-Sofa' in stainless steel; and pop-philanthropist Bono has parted with his Gretsch 'Irish Falcon' guitar.fp

Keen to get in on the action, Apple's chief design officer Sir Jony Ive has created something new: a one-of-a-kind accessory collection for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Ive has a long history with the Design Museum, which is due to close its Shad Thames location in May, and reopen in Kensington at the end of November. He won their inaugural Designer of the Year award in 2003 for the iMac, and he also showed a prototype of a mobile phone at the museum way back in 1990.

• Read our exclusive behind-the-scenes feature on the Apple Park HQ

His new accessory collection includes an iPad Pro housing, which has been anodised with a custom dye; a blue, suede-lined 'Smart Cover', crafted from supple French leather; and an orange cover for the Apple Pencil, created from fine grain Italian calf leather.

Ive's new products are in single editions, designed exclusively for the Design Museum event. To prove it, 'Edition 1 of 1' has been laser etched on the back surface of the iPad and the interior surface of the 'Smart Cover'.

'We are extremely grateful to the friends of the museum who had donated such outstanding pieces to help us fulfill our ambition of creating one of London’s most important new cultural sites,’ says Design Museum curator (and auction co-curator) Deyan Sudjic.

INFORMATION

The ’Time For Design’ live auction will take place on 28 April, with an online auction running from 7 April – 2 May. For more information, visit the Design Museum’s website

Photography courtesy Phillips / Phillips.com

ADDRESS

Phillips
30 Berkeley Square
London, W1J 6EX

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Sir Jony Ive was in London last week and was keen to catch up. There was something he wanted to show me, as he was pretty sure it was right up my street. The Apple Pencil. Yes – a pencil. Could we meet at a favourite haunt – Claridge’s, Mayfair? It sounded perfect. But as fate would have it, I was in San Francisco – an Uber ride away from Ive and Apple’s HQ in Cupertino, California while he was a mere black taxi fare away from Wallpaper* HQ on the River Thames. We had to settle for a trans-Atlantic chat, via iPhone 6s, on Monday 4:30pm GMT, 8:30am… Apple time.

Tony Chambers: I had a great demonstration this morning of the iPad Pro, and more importantly for me, the Pencil. It’s the thing that I do miss when working with screens. Is this something that’s been on your mind for some time, that perhaps we still need this funny little oblong to make things complete?
Sir Jony Ive: It’s a curious thing. It was fundamentally important originally not to develop a user interface that required another instrument. It was important that we develop the UI based upon multi-touch, based on our fingers. The reasons are obvious. I think it is equally obvious that you’re just not as dexterous as you are with a pen or a pencil for certain things.

What we found is that there’s clearly a group of people that would value an instrument that would enable them to paint or draw in ways that you just can’t with your finger. And I suspect that this isn’t a small group of people. I don’t think it’s confined to those of us who went to art school.

Often, when we develop a product in the hope of solving a specific problem, we end up having to try to solve multiple problems not confined to a single area. This is a classic case. This was a problem that wouldn’t be solved by just developing the very sophisticated technology that eventually became the Apple Pencil. We had to develop new technologies for the actual iPad Pro too.

You saw just how low the latency was, how quickly we can draw and how quickly we can render video. There was some substantial, deep technology to develop to make the pencil work as intuitively and naturally as hopefully you saw.

That was the thing that really, genuinely impressed and warmed me the most. It felt so close to the experience of using a traditional pencil. Is that why you used the word ‘Pencil’ rather than ‘Pen’ or stylus? Is it because the sensation is more HB than ballpoint?
I like the name Pencil much more than stylus because stylus seems a product that’s about technology. Pencil, to me, seems very analogue in its association. But what is challenging is that it will become many things. There’s an incredible painting app and very powerful drawing apps. For some people it will be a graphic instrument and to others it will be a fountain pen. One of the technologies within the Pencil means that as well as detecting pressure, we are also detecting the angle of the pencil. All of which is particularly relevant for being able to create a very natural experience. As an object it needed to be relatively neutral as it can take on the identity of a pencil or ink pen or paintbrush or charcoal...

A pencil drawing suggests sketching as well, which is something that’s important. You use a pencil when you are sketching ideas, when you are thinking. There is an impermanence too, which I suppose relates to the advantages of this – that you can erase. It’s also an emotive thing. I always feel that the marriage of technology and the hand is the future, and this is the closest I’ve come to experiencing it. It’s an authentic and honest marrying of the two worlds. Would you agree with that?
Yes, and not surprisingly we had a great deal of analysis to do of our traditional experience of the analogue world to begin to understand the problem. Before we even got into thinking about how we could create a natural experience, it took a long time to really understand the fundamentals that were at play, that ultimately define your experience of writing or drawing naturally with a pencil. And I think that process feels to me like a very good discipline for technology groups to understand, because that process leads you to observe the tiniest details in terms of what we do and how we do it, and why we do it.

I think this is certainly one of those occasions where at the end of this design and product development exercise, it really did yield two things. One was the Apple Pencil. But the other was a more significant understanding of how we do everyday things. We’ve learned a lot, which is actually useful beyond this project.

Yes, learning, relearning how you do everyday things, is a good discipline sometimes – or just thinking about it.
I think it really is. We do this a lot when we are working on things like the trackpad or new keyboard on the MacBook. To develop those sorts of devices requires an incredible amount of observation and measurement and it means that you need to ask the right questions and know what to focus on. This is part of the value of being a design team that’s been together for many years. We’ve been working on these problems for 20-plus years, so it’s an interesting area. And I think we are gaining experience, we are learning.

• Inside Apple Park: first look at the design team shaping the future of tech

The ability to continually evolve is something that the company is renowned for, but this is quite a big step – and it’s a brave step. To have the confidence to do something that is perhaps not what one would expect. Having the confidence to say, 'hang on a minute, maybe we do need this extra tool'. Perhaps this seemingly ancient tool will be, with the right skill and technology behind it – and the right designers using it –a positive addition. Because there’s bound to be some criticism that it’s anachronistic, or it’s something that Apple said they’d never do. I think a ‘stylus’ does seem wrong, yet the Apple Pencil seems so right.
I think there’s a potential to confuse the role of the Pencil with the role of your finger in iOS, and I actually think it’s very clear the Pencil is for making marks, and the finger is a fundamental point of interface for everything within the operating system. And those are two very different activities with two very different goals.

So we are very clear in our own minds that this will absolutely not replace the finger as a point of interface. But it is, and I don’t think anybody would argue, a far better tool than your finger when your focus becomes exclusively making marks. The traditional pencil could have been replaced by a dish of powdered charcoal, which you dipped your finger into to make marks with. And that didn’t happen. 

This is core to good design. It’s adding or changing something to make it better, so it’s not just a thing that does another job in a different way. It’s actually adding something to the whole repertoire of what you have. It’s mark making, whether that be a drawing or painting or making notes. I think it will be a great addition to proofreading, for our kind of business, for instance – just scribbling over things.
I was excited that you got to see it, and I thought you would like it.

You have young children. Did their pen-to-paper, finger-to-screen interaction prove useful during the development of the Apple Pencil?
So far, anecdotally – you know we don’t do focus groups – but anecdotally, certainly from what I’ve seen, with my children and friends’ children, they are captivated. And they don’t for one second see them (multi-touch and Pencil) as mutually exclusive directions of technologies. It’s quite refreshing actually.

They embrace both. It is extraordinary. Children will just pick up an iPhone or iPad, and they know what to do. Flick flick flick. But likewise, they are still using pens and pencils and they love reading books. There’s no problem, they don’t see any kind of dichotomy there, they just get on with stuff…
I really like that. I really like how simple that is. I think a lot of these objects live very happily together and are very complimentary alongside each other.

And it’s $99! A beautiful piece of Jony Ive Apple kit in your pocket for less than a hundred dollars. Is that something that was in your mind? Or is it a more a natural consequence of Apple’s ‘do things well and people will like it’ policy?
I think you’re right. It was a consequence of trying to make the very best thing we can. And I think it is surprising how sophisticated the technology and the sensors in the Pencil actually needed to be. When we started, we didn’t think that it would need to be quite so powerful and sophisticated as a product. Certainly that’s not something that’s communicated in its design.

No, it looks the simplest and most basic, primitive oblong. But there is a lot going on inside there, I presume, to make it work as well as it does.
There certainly is. And one thing that I was excited about is the ease of charging. If you are in the middle of drawing something, you can easily just plug it into the iPad Pro and it recharges extremely fast. Just that alone, having the very fast recharge, was an important attribute so that you could work with confidence and not feel that you would have to manage a number of battery lives. I think you relax knowing whatever happens, you can very quickly recharge it.

Fifteen seconds for 30 minutes, I think? Which is fantastic. Then again the charger on the Apple Watch is beautiful. It’s a pleasure to charge the watch at night – that gorgeous sculptural disc with the satisfying magnetic connection.
It is an area we are working really hard on.

Was there a particular pencil in the back of your mind that you had? To me it feels a little like a chinagraph – used for marking up transparencies – just in terms of the width and it being white. Did you use a chinagraph?
I have done but we didn’t want to be overly specific because it will assume the identity of so many different instruments. So I think one of the challenges we often have – and is actually one of the powers of the products we make – is that they have multiple functions. If you’re too specific in your references, I think you can do a disservice to the breadth of capability that the product has, if that makes sense. We wanted it to be developed as very much an analogue tool, but not so specific that it couldn’t comfortably represent a metallic ink pen or a paintbrush.

And at college were you a Caran d’Ache man, or Faber-Castell, or Rotring? Do you have any favourites?
I used to use Rotring for drafting. It’s so long ago I can’t remember what pencils I used – I would guess whatever was handy.

And when you draw now, are you a 4H, or a 4B, or an HB in the middle?
Actually, you know I have been drawing a lot recently with the Hermès pen, the ink pen that Marc (Newson) designed. I really enjoy drawing with that and it comes with a range of different nib thicknesses. I am drawing with just the finest nib.

And you still start a design with a sketch or a scribble?
Yes, we all do. The whole team use sketchbooks. I think it’s a mixture of drawing either by yourself or when you’re with people flitting between conversation and drawing.

Sometimes scribbling things out and sketching is part of communicating isn’t it? It helps the conversation and aids the thought process. I find that I need to have a pen in my hand if I’m even reading, certainly when reading a proof. There’s something about the finger, to pen/pencil, to the brain, that feels inherent. It seems very natural.
I completely agree. I don’t see it as being a disconnected part of the design process, but I think in communicating ideas you’re moving very seamlessly, between words and drawing. And I think often, marks would be fairly abstract if you didn’t have the words that accompanied them. So I think sometimes, when we look in our sketchbooks, there are literal drawings of what we are working on, and there can be pages and pages of what are quite abstract details, or marks that are augmented by conversation. I think it’s all part of the process.

The London-based illustrator Patrick Vale – known for kinetic, intricate drawings of social and urban scenes – was drafted in by Apple to demonstrate the raw creative potential of the Apple Pencil, as seen in the video above

INFORMATION

Apple Pencil for iPad Pro, £79. For more information, visit Apple's website

Apple is previewing Apple Watch at this year's Salone del Mobile in Milan with a one-day view and try-on event.  It's a debut appearance at the world's major design fair for Apple and comes as excitement about the launch of its range of smart watches grows ever more fevered.

The launch takes place on 17 April at Carlo e Camilla in Segheria, which picked up the Best New Restaurant prize in February's Wallpaper* Design Awards issue. For locals, it may prove a tormenting teaser. Apple Watch will be launched in France, the UK and Germany as well as the US, Japan and China on 24 April but no launch date in Italy has been set yet.

Says Jony Ive, Apple's senior vice president of design: 'Salone del Mobile has such a deep-rooted history of embracing excellence in design so I'm particularly excited to celebrate our newest and most personal product, alongside our friends and fellow designers, at this special event.'

Observers are waiting to see if Apple Watch kick-starts stuttering demand for smart watches, just as Apple's iPod, iPhone and iPad did for MP3 players, smart phones and then tablets. It also represents the tech giant's most significant launch since it debuted the iPad five years ago and signals some seismic shifts in strategy, as mentioned in our latest May issue (W*194).

With three collections and almost infinite permutations of strap, size and case material, Apple Watch leaves behind the usual one-style-fits-all approach of past launches. And with an 18-Carat gold version of the Edition model retailing at £13,500, it also marks Apple's first explicit move into the luxury sector (prices start at £299). Price differences in Apple products have traditionally been based on under-the-bonnet boosts in speed and performance rather than the use of luxury materials. There has also been a shift in retail strategy with Apple Watch being launched through high-end concept stores such as Dover Street Market in London and Tokyo, Colette in Paris, Maxfield in LA and Corner in Berlin, as well as Apple Stores.

Ive and the Apple design team, with outside help from Marc Newson, have been working on Apple Watch for four years. And the company sees the Salone event as a way of properly introducing it to the international design community (largely loyal and long-term Apple consumers after all).

'Creating beautiful objects, respecting craftsmanship and focusing on a design process that's driven by the deepest care, utility and end use, has been our goal since the beginning,' says Ive. 'With the launch of Apple Watch, that's been more important than ever, to create a product where technology and craft, beauty and utility go hand in hand.'

ADDRESS

Carlo e Camilla in Segheria
Via Guiseppe Meda 24
Milano

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