Great Design

THE GALLERY “Made in” means nothing anymore. Overdesigned products desperately aim to simultaneously comply with and bypass the standards by which they are defined while the pretended success of a product is a sad count of online likes and retweets. On the contrary, “made for” is a label that matters and has been a driving force of Margherita Ratti’s Great Design Gallery since its opening in September 2014. Based in the Parisian Haut Marais, the space is located between the tectonic plates of heavy gentrification and the Parisian daily grind. This precise location has certainly contributed to the establishment of the gallery as a place where design is not only presented, but is also, above all, generated as a result of its discussion by customers with different averages, needs and wants. Great Design exhibits and produces limited editions of an almost sculptural quality. Artifacts are shaped after the qualities of their raw materials and are thus able to complement the clean form language of the most iconic furniture pieces. The gallery focuses concurrently on emerging talents and established designers selected on the basis of their respective design thinking. This has resulted in a rapidly growing collection of unique, precisely construed items of pure and calibrated forms. A lamp, a chair, a hook….each time a new piece is added to the collection, an environment for everyday life regenerates itself. A carefully assembled room based on Margherita Ratti’s curatorial choices. At once personal and cultural, sophisticated and ironic, made for exigent people who look for a grand synthesis of design, craft and architecture. Weltgebraus (Andreas Kofler & Marcello Tavone), March 2015