Celebrating its 30th anniversary is the famous “Barrel”, designed by Philippe Stark for Duravit. With its simple, timeless design, Starck’s Barrel stood out from ephemeral bathroom trends, set new standards and became one of Duravit’s best-selling pieces of furniture.
This year, the elegant cone celebrates the milestone with an upgrade: a wide choice of colours for basin, furniture and handles, it brings the c-bonded version of the icon into the present and offers individual, modern design options.
“Starck’s Barrel is minimalist and natural because it harks back to the origin of water in our homes: water flows vertically from the pipes of a well and is collected in a simple bucket. Vision and honesty guarantee the extraordinary longevity of Starck’s Barrel. Thirty years ago it was an appropriate and contemporary product and it still is today, because it is not based on trends but on humanity“, says Philippe Starck himself.
We caught up with the designer to find out more about the secret behind this product’s great success.
This year the product marks the 30th birthday. I was curious about what’s the secret of this longevity of the product and above all what makes it still so relevant?
It’s finally simple to say, less simple to do. The idea was born from the desire to make a new product, which can help people to have a better life. That means that must be based on real honest help, to give something good for our community, not just to put money in your pocket, that’s the first parameter. And the second one is to design the product at the bone, that means at the minimum of everything.
And for a product like that, but it’s not very complicated, you need something concave to fill with the water, you need something flat to put your toothbrush on, you need something to put your maintenance products, and because you are not flat and you are fit, you do it conique, because like that you don’t hurt yourself. That’s all. And after you do it with a very serious company, very honest company, which is proud to make high longevity product and that make a timeless icon. It’s very, very simple. That means at the end, there is always intuition, but after it’s mainly a work about honesty, because we live in a society where it’s very easy to be dishonest. And we are in a society where it’s very easy to lie to yourself. That’s why, finally, the biggest work is to fight you to not lie to yourself. To say, “well, it’s good”, and you know it’s not good. You have to make it simple because maybe the whole shape is timeless, but perhaps the handle in 10 years, in 15 years, will be over designed, out of trend. And all the product will go to garbage just because a piece of metal like that? It’s stupid. It’s toxic, we can say.
Your collaboration with Duravit brand is long and fruitful. How do you manage to always renew yourself and continue to create beautiful, innovative products that often, as in this case, they become design icons?
Because it’s my nature, because I have a very special mental sickness it’s called hyper creativity, and my natural state is just to have ideas. That means I never work to have ideas, I just work to control the ideas, to control the process of honesty of the ideas. I have nothing else to do after.
Sometimes when journalists ask me what my job is, I say my job to have ideas, it’s my DNA, but after my real job is to clean. To clean what I do, my production and with the goal to clean the life of my community to give them less but better. I don’t say I succeed, but it’s what I target.
Most of the time the most genius one is the simplest at the end. There is something beautiful called in mathematics the square roots. Remember at school? You divide, you divide…I work like that. I make something and I divide. At one time I find the first number, that cannot be divided. When I reach it, I said it’s done, it’s okay, I’ve made my job, this equation is perfect, now it’s for human.
For further information please visit www.duravit.it.
Cover Photo by Alberto Zanetti
