Originators by MATTE presents Kristen de la Vallière

MATTE
You studied graphic design and photography, and worked in photo, events, and visual merchandising, how does your skills and previous experiences are helping you today as a curator and creative consultant?

KdlV
I actually do not have a bachelor's degree, so I'm a double dropout. I went to university twice. One time for photography and anthropology, a second time for graphic design. I was never able to graduate unfortunately, because in the States, university is quite expensive and I had parents that were not willing to support me in that. But nevertheless, I mean, I think that I'm an incredibly ambitious woman. I never really see anything as impossible. I just figured out how to do it. Which is probably how I ended up later becoming a producer.

My first job, I was a Visual merchandiser. I think I was 20 years old. And I was given an obscene amount of responsibility for such a young age, which I'm so thankful for because I guess it's one of those cliches, this amount of responsibility and pressure either breaks you or makes you into a diamond. So I'd like to think I became a bit of a diamond.

I think this was so important for me to kind of learn how to work with teams. What it's like working for a huge company, working your way up the ladder, paying your dues, management, being creative, but also like this business side of things, which then led me to production. My father is a television producer, so it was kind of a no brainer that I eventually would do production.

I grew up on set in New York, experiencing that and being an unpaid runner for my father for many years.

I feel like everyone should have to do production if you want to work in a creative industry or have your own creative business, consultancy agency. You learn absolutely everything you need to in a very short amount of time because there's so much pressure and such long hours. You can't really afford to make mistakes or you can't do it. It's not the most difficult job, but it's certainly very challenging and very stressful.

It's a job where you need to not only learn how to work with huge teams and budgets, sometimes difficult personalities, last minute changes and everything at the fastest pace you could ever imagine. I think it will never get more stressful than being on a high fashion production and working 17 hours per day for a week straight - in my personal opinion - life can only get easier after that.

I think this absolutely made me. After that I finally had the tools to be able to step more into the creative role because I had the business tools and once you have them, you can kind of do everything. I'm actually really happy that I did not finish university, because I would have gone straight into my creative path and I think I would have been too naive. Everything that I learned in production in my first visuals management job, it was absolutely necessary to thrive as an adult professional woman with her own business.

At the end of it, I decided to keep track. I was discovering so many incredible furniture designers, and I had no exposure before this to the world of functional art or collectible design. I had only ever really known about mass produced furniture.

I started a tumbler at the very beginning and then Instagram soon after, at a time when nobody was using Instagram for anything other than showing their friends and their pets and whatever. I was one of the first to use it in a tumblersque type of way or in a blog type of way, and I started just archiving all of the furniture designers I was interested in that I was discovering during this research phase where I wanted to change my career. At the end of those three months of research, it really just came to me - this is something I'm interested in.

I had a beautiful apartment in Berlin. I wanted to acquire these pieces for my home and not have this kind of flat, pack, ikea, sterile apartment. And I thought, wow, if I don't know about this, and I work in creative fields, I'm sure there's so many people like me that also want their home to be filled with these kind of incredible bespoke furniture art pieces. So, I said, okay, I think this is a niche I could get into, and there's a business there.

There wasn't much support or exposure for these designers, and it was such a new domain in design. Of Course there were Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand and all of these designers from 100 years ago - it's not like it didn't exist - but I think there is this collectible design movement that has really opened up and expanded and evolved in the past ten years. So I wanted to get involved. I said, okay, let's do it.

KdlV
Not only do I get to hang out with incredible creatives all over the world and see where they work, how they work, and really get to know them in more of an informal way, but I think when you get to see someone's space, you get to learn a lot about them, their context, and their culture. It's such a privilege, because these are spaces that are normally inaccessible to the public.

To have the trust and the invitation from a designer or an artist to kind of enter their world, it's the most exciting part of my entire job.

When you go to a designer studio, you'll see indicative things that will lead you to questions that you may not have otherwise asked, which then gives me insight into how this designer works.

If, for instance, I have a brand that comes to me, or I have, let's say, a hotel, and they want to commission 200 lamps from a collectible designer for their hotel, since, I'm doing studio visits with these designers, I understand the size of their team, the size of their workspace, their capabilities, what materials they work with, how long it takes to build and make things.

All of those things are extremely important for me to know. Maybe we can say that both these two designers make amazing lamps. But if I didn't do the studio visit, I wouldn't know which one of those two designers would be most capable to handle specific jobs.

I think that this is one of the most important factors of how studio visits inform my practice as a curator and also as a consultant, making matches between designers and brands and or hotels, etc.

Also just building relationships. When I meet someone in their studio, it's all automatically going to be more intimate between both of us. And I think with a lot of the designers that I've done studio visits with, we've actually kind of built real friendships and professional relationships afterwards.

I can't say enough how this is the best part of my job.

I think that there are endless things to learn about and to uncover. And there's just so many layers to this culture, especially creatively.

There's history that's steeped in a kind of a lot of mystery. A lot of things are not obvious and are kind of inaccessible to everyone, including many people that live here, like many hidden worlds within hidden worlds within hidden worlds. And then also so much ritual, which I think it's extremely beautiful, and it's so detached from the reality that I live in my context at home, where the only ritual I have is probably my skincare rituals at the end of the day.

This extreme attention to detail especially within the context that I work. I'm interested in craft and architecture and a lot of artisan crafts are being lost with the older generations especially in Japan, not so many people interested in learning a lot of these ancient crafts, which are hundreds of years of material knowledge. I think I just desperately wanted to see it while I could and get involved and experience it and talk to people that were practicing these things.

There's also the obvious aesthetic pursuits. I think that I'm personally very interested and touched by Japanese interior aesthetics and wabi-sabi concepts and just the delineation of space, how space is used or how the lack of space is used.

Note from Editor  {Wabi-sabi is a concept that motions us to constantly search for the beauty in imperfection and accept the more natural cycle of life}

There have been many great architects, artists. Frank Lloyd Wright {NfE - American Architect} came and did a period of time here because he couldn't get enough of Japan.

Yves Klein {NfE - French Artist} also came here and could not get enough, and it influenced his practice. I mean, we could go on forever of different notable artists and architects who have come here and had this country and culture make a huge impact on their work. So I guess I felt that pool myself, and I wanted to see how it would influence my practice and my perspective.

I wanted to create a useful tool - that's the first aspect of it.

Simultaneously, we are going to have architectural gems in this directory as well that you can go and visit. This is going to take a long time to archive everything, but I'm trying to archive notable contemporary architecture as well as.

Some very interesting traditional architectural spaces from around the world. This is going to take a long time, but I'm in it for the long run, and I think that it's something I've always wanted I'm interested in. You can sort with these different filters from a list, and you can also do map view, and you can see the entire platform as an interactive map, where you can zoom in on, let's say, Tokyo, and you can see all of the designer studios that are in Tokyo.

You can also zoom out, if you are going to Kanazawa, same thing.

I wanted to kind of make that tool because it was something that I very much wanted and needed and I thought other people could use as well.

We will have different features depending on the country. So we've been working right now on the Korean and Japanese features. In the directory you can find your furniture designers - that's what we've always featured in the past - but now we will also have an interview series.

For instance, in Japan, we've interviewed like a love hotel interior design expert or an ikebana architect, a wig artist that draws from traditional geisha hairstyles and takes inspiration from Japanese terrarium and sea life to create these insane incredible wig art pieces.  These are objects and reflective of a kind of contemporary culture and maybe a more interesting size of it that we haven't seen before. That's where we're at.

We will have many things that are going to roll out, we're going to have a subscription club where you can sign up, there will be master classes and meet ups, consulting sessions for emerging and established designers on how to run their business. It'll be something that everybody can afford.

We also put more spotlight on crafts, tell a little bit of the history behind and all together, I think it will paint a picture of contemporary culture as well as history of design and architecture worldwide. I'm very excited about it. I've never seen anything like this before, and I think it's really needed. So why not?

MATTE
Can you share with us some designers that you like, maybe that you recently discovered and that you are willing to share?

KdlV
There are two designers that, for me, are kind of the most important figures in contemporary design right now. In my subjective opinion. Kwangho Lee in Seoul, South Korea and Jeju Island and Fernando La Paz, who is in Mexico City / Tonalá, Mexico.

Both of these gentlemen have created very impressive careers in different ways. Fernando creates collectional pieces which you may have seen at Design Miami or at Friedman Benda in New York. He is based out of Mexico City. You really need to dive into his work and see all of the social aspects that are behind what he's doing. His work is about regenerative design, which is a step further. It's like circular design, a step further than sustainability.

He's also reinvigorated the local economy of a small village in Pueblo, Mexico, where he works alongside he's employed a large percentage of the village and he has created this thriving economy with them, alongside them, not above them, which I think is very important.

He's a great example of a man who has structured his creative practice in a way that is very honorable and still made a profit for himself and gave himself the freedom to create, to express himself creatively. I think it kind of hits three very important aspects.

Kwangho Lee is a designer from Seoul, South Korea. What I love about Kwangho Lee is that he's mastered something that I see most designers fail at, and they don't understand that when they're creating work.

If you want longevity in this industry, there's a lot of one-hit wonders.

Not that there's anything wrong with that - I don't want to shame anyone for doing anything the way they want to - but I think that if we are talking about the type of career trajectory that most of the designers come to me and want to emulate or to have for themselves, I think that Kwangho Lee is an excellent example of who did that in a fantastic way. I think that he's extremely creative, but he's also not reinventing the wheel. He's not going to extremes just to go to extremes.

I think that he takes things like simply knitting or weaving, something that he saw his grandmother doing forever, and then applies that to a new context, using something like PVC and creating furniture out of it rather than sweaters out of yarn. He's working with copper and enamel, a Korean lacquer enamel. He has innovated traditional Korean craft in such a beautiful way and completely re-contextualized it in contemporary design.

A lot of emerging designers want this type of career trajectory, like Kwangho Lee or Max Lamb, so on and so forth and I always tell them: Do you want to know what makes Max Lamb a Max Lamb and Kwangho Lee a Kwangho Lee?

No matter what material they touch, you can always tell that it is them, it's always exceptional.

Especially for Max Lamb, a lot of his work is quite simple, but it makes a huge impact on you.

You don't have to do the craziest thing. A lot of the collectible designers want to push the boundaries of functionality, and that's great, we love to see it, but I think that designers need to pay attention to finding their voice and their vision so that it can kind of transcend any material.

I think with that tool, you would be able to kind of take on any brief.