Whatever you put around yourself, you will be the mirror of it. Surround yourself with things you love.
— Marcel Wanders
We are buying stuff we know we don't need, and that is a problem we should face in design. It starts with creating an object that transports through time a valuable idea: that it can live forever.
Whether or not you like an object, it's the product of an individual person making decisions about things. That's what makes it interesting.
When I make chairs, they have legs; they can go anywhere in the world. Interiors are a different responsibility. A house is a representation of where you are, and it has to be right for the place.
When I wrote my book about Amsterdam, the main objective was to talk about the city's creativity rather than just its design.
For me, true kitsch has nothing to do with irony. It's very honest. It represents what people like, their dreams.
I have a long list of how people call me: 'The Prince of Design,' 'Beethoven of Design,' 'the Dutch Prince of Design' and the list goes on and on and on... and also the 'Lady Gaga of Design!' I am fine with it. I think she is an amazing character who has innovated the music scene and is respected by so many people; she is surprising.
I think design is the expression of its time and culture.
I have been a designer all my life, and design, for me, is to share love and trust and show the future in a beautiful way. I have worked on this principle all my life.
A good gift celebrates the relationship between the giver and the receiver. When you open that box, you feel like, 'Wow, you really understood me.' At the same time, you think this gift could come only from that person.
I don't just want to create products. I want to reach into people's hearts and minds. I want to create memories.
The things I own are sacred.
Why would you spend your life and your time doing something that's insignificant?
I collect memories. I look for opportunities to try new things, go to new places, and meet new people all the time.
Amsterdam lives and breathes creativity. One moment you walk into a building from the 17th century, and the next you find yourself in a hub of creative start-up companies.
To transfer food into a bowl from a pan that you've just cooked in, it's a loss of energy; it's wasteful. People think it's very sophisticated, I don't think it's so smart.
By training, I'm an engineer, but I don't tell anyone because it bores people.
You can go to any second-hand store and get an amazing piece - I have pieces from flea markets at home. You don't need to buy throwaway furniture.
I've always liked the idea of making things that last forever, not necessarily in the sense of being unbreakable, but more psychologically permanent. Most people throw stuff away not because it's broken but because their relationship with that object is broken.
Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn't reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow - and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.
San Francisco is a lot like Amsterdam - free, open-minded and casual - though I expected better weather.
What's special about Amsterdam is that the city is able to connect worlds that are not otherwise connected.
My parents weren't cultured people.
As humans, we are not so rationalist as we think we are. I think our biggest quality is indeed that we are human, truly human: if our biggest quality would be rationality, we would lose our soul.
There is always a reason behind things that are made, and if there isn't, there will be one when they travel through the world. The objects of beauty are used to impress, seduce, overwhelm, make money, support identities, and show power or style, among other things.
We should make things that people don't want to throw away.
If something is functional, you no longer think about it. I care about how meaningful things are.
In tech, people want an object for what's inside it, what it does. You need to make a defensive design that people won't walk away from. A chair is aggressive - you want a customer to choose it from many others.
So much in design is presented as a big miracle when it's just a repetition of what's been happening for 80 years.
I listen to a variety of music. I like everything from old Arabic music to Portuguese fados.
When I was a student, my first luxury purchase was a drafting table. It may not seem like a major purchase, but for me, it was the most important thing I could think of to spend my money on.
If we want a world that is truly sustainable, we have to realize that something old can also be perfect. Otherwise, we'll just throw away our yesterday.
There is no one I'd like to exclude when I design. It's not like I'm trying to design for everyone. Probably can't do that. Yet I try not to exclude anyone.
Nothing grows old faster than the new.
Ambition is a beautiful thing.
Function is fundamental to design, of course. If something doesn't work, it's a bad product, and I certainly get frustrated by things that aren't functional. But there has to be more than function. A house has to function, but if that's all it does, you don't love it.
The need to express yourself in Los Angeles makes the city so vibrant. If I lived here, it would be lovely to be in a cool new high-rise looking out over a city that is exploding.
The fundamental dogma of Modernism - that, if the past is irrelevant to the future, then today is irrelevant to tomorrow - has created a throwaway society of disposable objects. That is sick.
I like swimming. I like the beach. I like fast cars. I like speedboats.
Designers have been uncreative and very arrogant. They need to listen to people. People have always wanted more exciting, interesting design, but we designers didn't see it.
I want to create a world with objects and surroundings that are human, more romantic, and less sterile.
Inspiration has become this word that people tend to talk about as something from the outside. The truth is that... it is inside, like a burning fire: it is the feeling of certainty that your life has a meaning and you'll do something important.
My mom and dad had a store, and sometimes people would return broken stuff. I'd take it apart and reassemble it. At 16, I really understood the architecture of things.
I can't be boring. If people like my designs, then meet me and find out that I'm boring, they won't want my stuff.
Opulence doesn't cost more than boring.
Nobody's interested in something that could've been done before.
Being open to the unexpected allows me to bring so much to my craft.
Amsterdam is a breeding ground for new creative pursuits in many areas fueled by a tolerance and openness to ideas unlike any world city I've been to. There is something for everyone here, especially when you dare to go off the beaten path.
The one thing we should address is how design can play a role in the psychological durability of objects, to think of how objects can be engineered in a way that they will be good over time.
To me, relaxing doesn't mean that we play ding-dong songs and look at a wall of bamboo. It's just completely unoriginal.
