Top Dror (Wallpaper)
Published January 2008
Dror Benshetrit seems charmed.
He might seem charmed because he moved to New York five years ago and has already established himself as a leading force in the city's crowded design scene, or he might seem charmed because everything he designs is just such a hit. Benshetrit might seem charmed because he just seems to meet the right people – real estate magnate-to-the-hip Michael Shvo; ultra-influential MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli, an early supporter; the people who commission for Bombay, Boffi, Puma, Levi's – or he might seem charmed because everything he does is at once so completely obvious and stunningly novel.
Benshetrit's designs – which span product, architecture, graphics, and now art direction – are the kind of pieces and objects and environments that you see and think "Aha, of course, it's so simple." They aren't simple, of course, but everything he does just makes sense, as soon as you see it. It might be because his training is untraditional, or it might be because he himself just hasn't been constrained by the realities of a business that, often, make it extremely difficult to be bold, but he is, and it works.
"I'm interested in two things:" he says sitting at his studio's big wood conference table, pulling up a screen that will show projects from a complete redefinition of a shoe to the iconic smashed Rosenthal Vase of Phases, a piece inspired by his move to New York City. "Movement, and transformation." In Benshetrit's design world, one he has created in a studio that includes architects and graphic designers and interior designers, specialists who fill in the gaps while he brings the big picture, everything moves, transforms, redefines.
Benshetrit was happily – not to mention successfully – designing products when he was asked to design an interior for the Manhattan jewelry store Yigal Azrouel. "I never thought about products in context," he says, explaining how he figured out how to make the jump from small-scale design to what ended up amounting to proto-architecture. "But they're just components of an overall interior." The store was a success, and helped evolved his practice into architecture, and then again into communications design, then graphic design, and then art direction.
Every project is recognizably Studio Dror. How to spot a Benshetrit? Chances are it'll be mutable – the Pick Chair (say it fast) transforms from a flat wall hanging to a minimal folded seat; the BBB Folding Table turns from a dining table into a work surface; and the Lily Lace chair is, depending on if you get it in black or white, either the sexiest thing around or the very definition of purity – and just a little cheeky. The designer is an investigator as much as he is a creator, and it is his obvious curiosity and engagement with everything good and exciting that makes his work so compelling.
"All of the ideas start out as toys, as mechanisms," he says, showing plans for a building so contingent on various realities that he can't do any more than show a sketch. It's got a breathtaking element, a literal twist, an unscrewing of interior out of exterior, and it's such a brilliant but completely original move that maybe Benshetrit is not so charmed after all. Maybe this kind of work is about much more than just luck.
