What is the most significant recent change or shift in your life or career?
At some point, we grew increasingly frustrated with working with external craftsmen. It was draining, time consuming, long and expensive and we felt limited in terms of what we could achieve. And we also wanted to distance ourselves from a trend that seemed to focus on expensive materials and opulent craftsmanship, sometimes at the expense of the intellectual or aesthetical value of the design itself. And we believe there is a particular, and maybe higher, form of elegance that lies in the ability to express or evoke emotions with restraint and with purposely limited means.
For all these reasons, we decided to free ourselves from reliance on external know-hows and heavy machinery, and instead focus on finding ways to turn humble materials into considered objects and structures. Upon moving to Lisbon we opened a large scale workshop where we can handle the design, the prototyping and the manufacturing in the same space. We can go from an idea to a finished piece in a matter of weeks instead of having to wait months for a first prototype. And we now have a lot more freedom to experiment with materials, processes and finishes.
How did you two meet?
Sophie was on a flight to China where she was going to work for a year, and she happened to be seated next to my sister, who was going to study in Hong Kong. They talked the whole trip, met again in Paris, Sophie came to my sister's birthday party, et voilà.
What was the first project you worked on together?
We wanted to do something together, but not necessarily design. We actually spent a year or two tinkering with photography, which led us to conduct a couple of personal projects together in Paris, across France and in the north of India.
Where do you find inspiration?
I would say mostly from houses we visit. But finding inspiration is not the issue, we are bombarded with inspirations. The challenge is to shield oneself from that overload of trends and information while able to develop or distinguish what’s actually great from the rest. The complexity lies in learning from visually and conceptually strong works, while providing a personal, original, and contemporary point of view.
