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Maison & Objet Designer of the Year 2018: Danish Designer Cecilie Manz
Each year Maison & Objet Paris honors an outstanding talent in the industrial and interior design world. This year the biannual fair has chosen the Danish designer Cecilie Manz to receive the coveted Designer of the Year Award January 2018.
If you are headed to Paris for the show (January 19-23) be sure to stop by Cecilie Manz’s exhibit in Hall 7 where she will be presenting some of her most recent creations. Cecilie’s designs are both unique and inspiring. They evoke warmth and minimalism simultaneously, a feat few can accomplish with such finesse.
Born in Denmark to ceramicist parents, creating beautiful objects with her hands was something she learned to love as a young child. After completing her studies in object and furniture design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1997, Cecilie founded her own studio in downtown Copenhagen in 1998.
In her studio, Cecilie designs furniture, glass, lamps and other home products. In addition to her furniture and industrial designs, her experimental prototypes and more sculptural one-offs make up an important part of her work and approach, she explains:
“I view all my works as fragments of one big, ongoing story where the projects are often linked or related in terms of their idea, materials and aesthetics, across time and function. Some objects remain experiments or sculpted ideas, others are made more concrete and turn into functional tools.
The task or project itself often holds the key to inspiration; ideas don’t come from waiting but from leg-work, drafting and trials. My work goes from the inside out, and a project has to possess a sound, strong and relevant idea or functional justification before I address the actual physical design. My work has always revolved around simplicity, the process of working toward a pure, aesthetic and narrative object.”
Beginning each new design with countless sketches and models, Cecilie experiments and explores materials and original functions as she grows her creations. She then works closely with the manufacturers to refine her designs to match the necessary production techniques while maintaining the perfect balance of function and beauty for the end result.
Color is an essential element in her creative process and one she develops very early on in all of her designs as a way to assert the product’s identity. Her designs also distinctly emanate her innate Scandinavian style as she strips away any and all superfluous elements.
The prototype of her first project, entitled The Ladder – a ladder that doubles as a chair –, was spotted by German designer Nils Holger Moormann in an interior design magazine who quickly picked it up for production in 1999. The other design that jumpstarted her career was the Caravaggio lamp which she created in 2005 with Lightyears.
Since then Cecilie has worked with top names such as Fritz Hansen, Bang & Olufsen, George Jensen Damask, Actus and many others. Today she is considered one of the leading Danish furniture designers of her generation, and in addition to being awarded Designer of the Year by Maison & Objet, in 2014 she won the Crown Prince Couple’s Culture Award for her contribution to design (a moment she notes as a highpoint of her 20-year career). She has also received numerous other awards and grants in recognition of her amazing talent.
All images courtesy of Cecilie Manz unless otherwise noted.
