Philippe Starck: His Furniture, Biography and Designs

During his youth, Starck spent many hours underneath the drawings boards of his father. There he watched him creating and dismantling various objects such as bicycles, motor bikes and a wide range of other objects. Starck's life, from this early experience in his father's workshop would lead to a career in remodelling the world around him. A philosophy that has since made his name famous across the globe.

After his secondary education in Paris under the guidance of Jesuits at École Nissim de Camondo, Philippe Starck went into the world of entrepreneurial design. Just before his 20th birthday, he established an inflatable objects business, which was to be the first step in a long and lucrative career. Once his talent was spotted and word got around, many new design offers were to appear.

Starck's remarkable career has been ubiquitous in its scope. He is widely considered as a product designer, an interior designer, an architect and even an ecologist. The latter earned him commissions to design a Bordeaux airport control tower, a Parisian recycling plant and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (an artistic school of decorative arts) in the French capital, Paris.

In 1982, one of his most famous commissions involved re-designing the private quarters at the Elysée Palace. President Mitterand was a great admirer of the charismatic French designer. Soon after this remarkable period he went on to re-decorate the Paramount and Royalton hotels in New York leading to a massive flurry of further accolades. Japan too saw Starck's trademark expressionist architecture with a serious of innovative buildings across the island nation.

Philippe Starck is very much driven by a strong sense of duty, even some might say, fate, in the typical Gallic fashion. His desire and view for a world bettered through design and innovation is as strong as it has ever been. The mundane aspects of life are changed under his gaze, to exciting and unique visions that are uniquely his but which capture people's imaginations.

Ordinary every day objects such as door handles, knives, ash-trays, scooters, lemon squeezers, vases, bikes, taps and toilets have been taken apart, revamped, re-designed, changed sometimes beyond comprehension by the imaginative hands of Starck. Nothing is free from analytical study and then evolution when he is near. His life is fascinating and indeed, he finds the world around him to be outstandingly interesting as well.

Recently Philippe Starck has moved into a new sector of design, that of fashion. He has designed clothing ranges, toilet items, spectacles and most successfully and famously of all, watches.

Although a global brand and a hugely successful individual, Philippe Starck has retained an almost childlike quality to his personality. Maybe that is not hard if you own 19 homes like he does. However, his boyishly industriousness mixed with his distracted "French intellectual" style hint at the amazing talent and mind that lie behind some of the greatest visual designs of the 20th Century.