You may not be familiar with the name Marc Berthier, but you’ll know his work. The multi-award-winning French product designer has been creating sleek modernist furniture and consumer electronics for more than 50 years, bringing elegance and fun to industrial design.
His Tykho silicon radio, which looks like a colourful rubberised brick, featured on the cover of Time magazine in March 2000, leading a feature on ‘The Rebirth of Design’. A bright orange first edition of the radio was acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection of design icons.
Berthier, who continues to design at the grand age of 83, made his breakthrough in 1967 with the Ozoo range for children – bright, lightweight furniture in polyester and fibreglass.It revolutionised the French classroom when the Parisian suburb of Créteil furnished its nursery classes with a monolithic version of the Ozoo that combined a table and a chair, and was light and safe enough to be easily stacked by very young children.
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A decade later, he introduced a modular system of furniture designed to be assembled by infant-school children in the manner of Meccano. Such is the enduring appeal of Ozoo that the line’s original manufacturer, Roche Bobois, has just re-released Berthier’s iconic desk in its five original colours, along with its matching chair.
Berthier’s child-centric designs account for just a drop of his prolific output. Derivatives of his Aviva chair, introduced in 1979 with Italian design brand Magis, are so ubiquitous today that we tend to forget the ingenuity of its design – simple, made in beech wood, and collapsable thanks to small but robust metal joints – which came as a direct response to the mobility of the urban lifestyle. His other designs include silicon calculators, aerodynamic binoculars, futuristic kitchen taps, rubber-bladed cooling fans and innumerable chairs, from ones that rock to those that recline; not forgetting his aluminium Captain Hook model, a contemporary take on the director’s chair.
Berthier has collaborated with a number of brands throughout his career, though only one true luxury house in the world of fashion: Hermès. In 2010, this union saw the release the men’s limited-edition Carré H watch, a square-faced timepiece noted for its eye-catching gunmetal colour and elegant geometric design. The model now returns in an entirely new style and as a non-limited edition.
“The new version has more references to watchmaking than the first, since the idea was to create a more distinctive, resolutely different interpretation. The first Carré H is a classic, chic, masculine Hermès exuding elegance, while the second is more dynamic with heightened energy and seductive appeal,” explains Berthier, who, along with his agency Eliumstudio in Paris, is dedicated to concepts of lightness and equilibrium in design.
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“Our creations draw upon cutting-edge technologies while remaining enduringly timeless and beyond fashion,” he says. “These were fundamental prerequisites for a square watch that might naturally not hug the curve of the wrist so smoothly. Wearer comfort is essential in the evolution of the Carré H, and the curvature is even more pronounced.”
The new model has been upsized to 38mm x 38mm (from 36.5mm x 36.5mm) and features Arabic numerals instead of markers, as well as a colourful anchor-like second hand for an overall look that “references measuring instruments like a compass or pendulum”.
Whereas the movement in the 2010 original was outsourced, the 2018 Carré H is supported by the Hermès Manufacture self-winding H1912 movement enclosed in a new steel case and sporting a dark grey or black guilloché dial.
As for his own Carré H, Berthier claims he wears it day and night. “I’ve taken it diving in the Bora Bora lagoon,” he says of his most exotic travel destination. And while it seems there are no chairs in the pipeline, the octogenarian doesn’t plan to retire any time soon. “I’d like to design a skiff, a competitive rowing boat,” says the Frenchman. Here’s hoping he trials it, along with the new Carré H, during his next Polynesian adventure.
Alexandra Zagalsky is a London-based journalist specialising in luxury, art and travel. She began her career working on a cultural guide for English-speaking expats in Paris, where her first major break was an interview with Lionel Poilâne, the late baker of Saint-Germain-des-Prés famed for his signature sourdough loaves. Returning to London in her early 20s, she went on to write for not only The Week but also The Art Newspaper’s Art of Luxury supplement, The Telegraph and The Times, as well as art and design platforms including 1stDibs’ Introspective Magazine and the magazines of the V&A, Sotheby’s and Christie’s. She studied fine art and art history at Goldsmiths, University of London and continues to explore travel journalism through the lens of art, craftsmanship and culture.
