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POWER GAMES:CEE COMING TO GRIPS WITH ITS ENERGY FUTURE

Volume 14 | Issue 4 | April 2008 | www.cijjournal.com

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Discussion about superstar architects is nothing new these days, but I’venot heard of many developers going after superstar designers before.What’s the idea? Imagine that you have two buildings, one with branding and one without.Of course, the one with the brand will sell more quickly and the price willbe higher because people can organize themselves in the brand, in the styleand the design, so our goal is really to sell apartments like we sell an AstonMartin car, with the same techniques. So we don’t want to use the designsjust to make the price higher. Our goal is to give easier access to luxurydesign.

You can add 20 percent to the price of an apartment, but that must onlybe for the upper end? Obviously, we’ll target the upper end, but our ambition is to work in themiddle segment of the market as well. It’s the same if it’s a hotel, becausean operator can have his three-star hotel, but his will be more savvilydesigned than those without design.

But you’re saying you’d be as interested in working on three-star hotels asyou would for luxury ones? Absolutely, and I’m sure we’d have to put in much more of an effort on athree-star hotel than on a six-star. With six-star it’s easier; the designer canexpress his talent almost freely using limited edition furniture and rarematerials. But it will be more difficult, the challenge will be bigger, to workon a three-star hotel that must look luxurious.

Wouldn’t the hard part be convincing a developer who wants to do athree-star hotel to spend more on design? How do you convince thedeveloper? We will try to explain that our intervention will not cost more than a classicarchitect. It’s like with his Heineken campaign [Ora-Ito won a designcompetition that the brewery held for a new bottle]. He treats a bottle theway others treat jewelry: it’s luxury for the mass market. It doesn’t cost theuser of the bottle anything more. There was a great deal of press and mediacoverage, so Heineken was very happy with it as well. It was revolutionary,but the cost is still the same in the shop.

With residential developments, then, you want to enable people to extendthe expression of their lifestyle to where they live. People who spend extramoney on designer clothing shouldn’t have to go home to live in shabbyflats. Exactly. And we think that what’s happened in culture is the opposite ofthe cocooning in the 1980s, when people were living at home, watchingTV and videos but not communicating with the outside world. Now the

trend is interactivity. You still centralize life at home, but you open upto the world through Internet, and having guests and family there. It is what we call “hiving”. So more people will want somethingdifferent, more exclusive… and this does not always cost much moremoney. For us, it doesn’t matter if it’s a USD 3m (€1.9m) or a USD300,000 apartment; we want the people to feel they’re exclusivepeople to us. We’ll provide them with services, with owner clubcards, with Internet services. They’ll have the possibility to exchangefurniture, and a lot of ideas to help them feel exclusive.

This view of the modern has almost a nostalgic feel to it. It’s a bitlike looking at science fiction visions from the 1960s that predictedwhat the future world would look like. Something like retro-sciencefiction.When I saw Ora-Ito’s work for the first time I thought it was a verystrange style. I was trying to figure out if it was from my parent’sgeneration, or if it’s futuristic. It’s what he calls simplexity, which is acomplexity and simplicity. It looks something like a villa from LeCorbusier from 40 years ago, but it’s using all modern technology. Hehates TVs, so all television screens are put behind a special one-waymirror. As soon as you press the remote control, it’s immediatelytransparent and becomes a television.

A marriage of architecture an

A marriage of design,architecture and fashion

Emmanuel Touraine is the non-executive director of L’Etoile Properties, an investment group that will be launching “O”Architecture Design Lifestyle, a new line of residential developments around the world, including a push into CentralEurope. With a strong background in the fashion industry, Touraine hopes to bring marketing methods used forconsumer items to the real estate industry. This includes bringing on board one of the hottest new things in the designworld, the 30-year-old designer Ora-Ito.

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CEE CONSTRUCTION & INVESTMENT JOURNAL

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In other words, we now have the technology to fit out the visions ofyesterday. He imagines living like an iPod, which you can connect to a base, to yourTV, to your car. You have many options. Ora-Ito would like to use thispod style to imagine modular housing. So maybe you’re single right nowand you start to have the money to build a house. You buy the land, youbuy your house from Ora-Ito and then a couple years later you getengaged. You start thinking that your house is too small, so you decide toadd another room. When you have kids, you can add on more modules.With apartments, of course, it’s different, but in that case we can have amodular approach to the decoration and the designs. So like in the hautecouture business, every year, Ora-Ito will set up a collection, like in thefashion industry, and this “home couture” collection will reflect the style andtendencies and the colors of the year. So it will give the possibility to theowner to change the interior regularly. We’re very conscious that to usedesign is good, but it must be changeable at any time or moment.

As much as a vision for design, it sounds like a rather complex and cleverbusiness model. We’d also like to be able to feature other designers with Ora-Ito, so we’dgive him a building to work on and we’d ask him to choose another designer

like Florence Pucci or Jacques Garcia, and they will play together with theirstyles to make the perfect house.

But you must get complaints from classic architects who object onsomething like moral grounds; they’d say that the architecture of buildingsshould say something now but still be relevant in 10, 20 or 50 years.That what you’re talking about sounds like mere commodities from thefashion industry that literally shift with the seasons. My response to that is very simple. Of course I have a lot of respect forarchitects, even though I think some of them should go to jail. When Isee some of the new buildings that are built these days, I ask myself,‘How is it possible to disfigure cities and nature that way?’ Architectsare not from a consumer business, but that’s the general trend ofeverything today. Nine-year-old kids may not know about Napoleon,but they know Prada and Gucci. Architects now aren’t so connectedwith reality. They generally have one style and it may be beautiful but itwill be exactly the same their whole life. We don’t want architects tohave the first hand in our conception. We want a designer, a real one,someone with a vision, someone who can listen to you and then answerwith a product you will love, that will be cult for you. Something iconic.An architect can’t do that. But a good architect working with Ora-Itocould be dynamite.

So you don’t see this as a conflict between design and architecture? Not at all. It’s more about collaboration, exchange, open mindedness.Ora-Ito doesn’t have any problems working with architects or otherdesigners. He’s multifaceted: he can do cars, he can do yachts, and hecan do jewelry. That means he’s tuned in to what people like. Architectsanswer to size and numbers, to so many parameters that it sometimesstifles their creativity because they’re too focused on the constructionbook. We have architects in house and he works with them. When he didthe flagship building for Toyota, the cooperation between them wasfantastic. Working like that brings to the architect some air, some libertythat they can’t have themselves. They’re too concrete somehow.

You seem to put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that he’s so young.Does that give you a limited window of time to use him? Actually, I think the fact that he’s so young makes it a risky bet for us,because in the real estate environment when you say that he’s just 30 yearsold...

But you’re the ones making that point in your marketing materials.We make that point because we want to compete with YOO, thedevelopers from England, John Hitchcock and Philippe Starck. Theyinspire us a lot, but we’d like to do better than them. Philippe Starckasked Ora-Ito to work for him, but while he has a lot of respect forStarck, he had his own vision. It’s true when you see the styles of Ora-Ito and Starck, they’re quite different. But they’re both people thataren’t following trends, they’re creating them. Do you know the guy whodesigned the iPod?

No. Neither do I. What makes Starck and Ora-Ito different is that the brandscan use their names to help sell. I think it’s the right time to work with Ora-Ito, because he’s already made his reputation. We have a bright future withhim, while if you work with Philippe Starck, maybe he’ll be a has-beensomeday. With Ora-Ito it will be 40 years before he’s a has-been.

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