Didier

The Didier Design Studio has long intuited a world where art meets design, craft blends with engineering and utilitarianism embraces luxury.

Didier’s creative furniture design and production practice has always been open to boundless manufacturing techniques, materials, and ways of thinking.

Designer Ross Didier begins with a creative concept that can be inspired by simple folk tales (the 2010 Fable Collection), functional pets (Vue de Monde seating Range), the Rise-and-Fall of Empires (the 2016 First Bite Collection) or the iconic Puffalo Lounging collection inspired by the exotic travels through Africa and Asia.

“Art and design are very different, and I feel very aware of sliding the bar between them,” says Didier. ” Design is Shaolin kung Fu where Art is bare knuckle fist fighting.

I mean artists can do whatever they want for their art and this liberation is the point of what they do. Design on the other hand has disciplines with givens, and to ignore these misses the point of designing. Good art communicates ideas – good design serves function, and the story this creates is inspiring.”

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Didier always saw furniture design as the closest commercial connection to sculpture.

“Furniture always needs to adapt to the human body and the human body needs to be ultimately understood to create good furniture design,” he says.

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The studio experiments and make prototypes by hand and then opens the door to explore manufacturing techniques to develop these pieces including experimental industry skills, traditional production lines and complex 3D tooling. Didier then collaborates with a very wide range of other skilled craftspeople and factories to take the concept into reality.

The result is one of Australia’s most eclectic and exciting design studios with a 30-year oeuvre of work that continually blurs lines between sculptural aesthetics and designed function.