Discussion about superstar architects is nothing new these days, but I’ve not 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 will be higher because people can organize themselves in the brand, in the style and the design, so our goal is really to sell apartments like we sell an Aston Martin car, with the same techniques. So we don’t want to use the designs just to make the price higher. Our goal is to give easier access to luxury design.

You can add 20 percent to the price of an apartment, but that must only be for the upper end?

Obviously, we’ll target the upper end, but our ambition is to work in the middle segment of the market as well. It’s the same if it’s a hotel, because an operator can have his three-star hotel, but his will be more savvily designed than those without design.

But you’re saying you’d be as interested in working on three-star hotels as you would for luxury ones?

Absolutely, and I’m sure we’d have to put in much more of an effort on a three-star hotel than on a six-star. With six-star it’s easier; the designer can express his talent almost freely using limited edition furniture and rare materials. But it will be more difficult, the challenge will be bigger, to work on a three-star hotel that must look luxurious.

Wouldn’t the hard part be convincing a developer who wants to do a three-star hotel to spend more on design? How do you convince the developer?

We will try to explain that our intervention will not cost more than a classic architect. It’s like with his Heineken campaign [Ora-Ito won a design competition that the brewery held for a new bottle]. He treats a bottle the way others treat jewelry: it’s luxury for the mass market. It doesn’t cost the user of the bottle anything more. There was a great deal of press and media coverage, 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 extend the expression of their lifestyle to where they live. People who spend extra money on designer clothing shouldn’t have to go home to live in shabby flats.

Exactly. And we think that what’s happened in culture is the opposite of the cocooning in the 1980s, when people were living at home, watching TV and videos but not communicating with the outside world. Now the trend is interactivity. You still centralize life at home, but you open up to the world through Internet, and having guests and family there.

It is what we call “hiving”. So more people will want something different, more exclusive… and this does not always cost much more money. For us, it doesn’t matter if it’s a USD 3m (€1.9m) or a USD 300,000 apartment; we want the people to feel they’re exclusive people to us. We’ll provide them with services, with owner club cards, with Internet services. They’ll have the possibility to exchange furniture, 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 bit like looking at science fiction visions from the 1960s that predicted what the future world would look like. Something like retro-science fiction.

When I saw Ora-Ito’s work for the first time I thought it was a very strange style. I was trying to figure out if it was from my parent’s generation, or if it’s futuristic. It’s what he calls simplexity, which is a complexity and simplicity. It looks something like a villa from Le Corbusier from 40 years ago, but it’s using all modern technology. He hates TVs, so all television screens are put behind a special one-way mirror. As soon as you press the remote control, it’s immediately transparent and becomes a television.

In other words, we now have the technology to fit out the visions of yesterday.

He imagines living like an iPod, which you can connect to a base, to your TV, to your car. You have many options. Ora-Ito would like to use this pod style to imagine modular housing. So maybe you’re single right now and you start to have the money to build a house. You buy the land, you buy your house from Ora-Ito and then a couple years later you get engaged. You start thinking that your house is too small, so you decide to add 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 a modular approach to the decoration and the designs. So like in the haute couture business, every year, Ora-Ito will set up a collection, like in the fashion industry, and this “home couture” collection will reflect the style and tendencies and the colors of the year. So it will give the possibility to the owner to change the interior regularly. We’re very conscious that to use design 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 clever business model.

We’d also like to be able to feature other designers with Ora-Ito, so we’d give 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 their styles to make the perfect house.

But you must get complaints from classic architects who object on something like moral grounds; they’d say that the architecture of buildings should say something now but still be relevant in 10, 20 or 50 years. That what you’re talking about sounds like mere commodities from the fashion industry that literally shift with the seasons.

My response to that is very simple. Of course I have a lot of respect for architects, even though I think some of them should go to jail. When I see some of the new buildings that are built these days, I ask myself, ‘How is it possible to disfigure cities and nature that way?’ Architects are not from a consumer business, but that’s the general trend of everything today. Nine-year-old kids may not know about Napoleon, but they know Prada and Gucci. Architects now aren’t so connected with reality. They generally have one style and it may be beautiful but it will be exactly the same their whole life. We don’t want architects to have 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 answer with 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-Ito could 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 other designers. He’s multifaceted: he can do cars, he can do yachts, and he can do jewelry. That means he’s tuned in to what people like. Architects answer to size and numbers, to so many parameters that it sometimes stifles their creativity because they’re too focused on the construction book. We have architects in house and he works with them. When he did the flagship building for Toyota, the cooperation between them was fantastic. Working like that brings to the architect some air, some liberty that 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 years old...

But you’re the ones making that point in your marketing materials.

We make that point because we want to compete with YOO, the developers from England, John Hitchcock and Philippe Starck. They inspire us a lot, but we’d like to do better than them. Philippe Starck asked Ora-Ito to work for him, but while he has a lot of respect for Starck, 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 that aren’t following trends, they’re creating them. Do you know the guy who designed the iPod?

No.

Neither do I. What makes Starck and Ora-Ito different is that the brands can 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 with him, while if you work with Philippe Starck, maybe he’ll be a has-been someday. With Ora-Ito it will be 40 years before he’s a has-been.