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You won't find it on the Internet. You won't find it in the Museum of Modern Art - yet - but you'll find it in all the coolest homes and offices in Manhattan this fall. What is it? It is a Gaston. Opening mid-November at 125 Grand Street between Broadway and Crosby Street, Gaston is the outlet for the prolific and talented young Manhattan-based designer Gaston Marticorena. Walk into the stark white interior of the shop, step past the sleek modern products displayed sparsely within and you'll feel your pocketbook recoil in involuntary horror. It's the sort of place where you daren't even look at the price tags in case your shock shows on your face. How can you stop color draining from your cheeks after all? But you should ditch your fear and take a look at those price tags. Visitors to this temple of design kneel to a different god. Style is the faith here, mammon gets stopped at the door.
Where and why
The shop's eponymous creator is a 31-year-old of no particular design pedigree who has but the tiniest respect for the design establishment. Slight and unpretentious, he is totally convincing when he says making money is not his ambition - he just has these designs inside him and he has to get them out somehow. Hence the shop. Not quite in Soho, not quite in Little Italy and not quite in the Chinatown, the new shop's location says it all about the inspired young designer behind it. The key is the word 'convertible'. Everything Gaston does has at least two purposes and the shop is no exception. Set in a landmark building the new design showroom is part gallery, part studio space and part shop. The lighting can be changed to suit the changing mood of the products on display. Flux will be the key characteristic with the design, layout and content of the store changing whenever Gaston gets tired of it. The retail space is basic - a simple, cement floor with two clean side walls about 70 feet long. Where the roof pitches upwards at the rear and becomes a skylight the floor ends abruptly. Here, Gaston plans to arrange plants and place different furniture beneath the skylight to create a totally different feel from the rest of the shop. Over the space at the back of the floor a catwalk rises to the office behind, set about two feet above the level of the rest of the ground floor.
Waving his arm abstractly, Gaston says: "I wanted that to be a whole different plane." Downstairs is where the real work takes place in the designer's studio, while light manufacturing can be carried out in the small workshop. Gaston leans forward: "This is not a gallery, it's just a clean space. I can do anything with this space, though. I can clear everything out and just show a single chair for a week or so if that's what I want to do." Gaston's intention was to bypass the standard process of selling products: "The wholesalers or reps take only one or two products and a lot of my products relate to each other. So I want it to be more like the fashion industry where designers have their own store or catwalk show to display their whole range." But this is not just space representing ego. Gaston has a relationship with this idea: "I like it for what it's going to do. It's a landmark building, kind of masculine with a really simple stainless steel façade. I can get a message across in the windows." If the shop had been open in mid-October there would have been work in the window commenting on Giuliani's attack on the Sensation exhibition at Brooklyn Art Museum. Instead, it will open its doors to the first customers in mid-November.
Gaston-style
It's tempting to try to pigeonhole Gaston's style. His work is reminiscent of Alessi (www.alessi.com); Philippe Starck (www.philippestarck.com) comes to mind; form and function combined and given a spritzing of fun. The humor is similar to Michael Graves' when he took time off designing structures such as the temporary shelter for the Washington Monument to knock out toasters and can openers for the formerly-downmarket-some-time-online retailer Target. (www.princetonol.com/patron/mgraves.html) But a closer look shows this designer is not derivative. He's beating his own path with an idiosyncratic and essentially selfish mantra as his guide: "If I like it and my friends like it then someone else will probably like it as well." He is offering designer pieces without the designer price tag. Of course, if you want to spend a lot of money Gaston can certainly help. A simple, solid hardwood chair will set you back $2,200. But you can get the same design in corrugated cardboard for around $120 per foot length. A couch will set you back about $500 while a chair wide enough for your average supermodel will come in at less than $100. And it'll probably impress your guests more than the pricey alternative. Again, fun is fundamental.
The products
The 31-year-old designer's unconventional background lends a refreshing twist to his work. It functions as a collection but the thread that links the different pieces is not aesthetic but pragmatic. Gaston wants his pieces to be used, not set on a shelf to be admired for a while and then to gather dust. His products are not so numerous but they work. The cd racks crafted from sensual, gummy resin are so simple they are both exquisite and fascinating. The trouble is they feel so good to hold that you want to keep touching them. He has votive candleholders in clean white ceramic, photo frames with steel and magnets to hold the pictures, umbrellas with bulbous handles which stop you losing your grip when the wind tries to lift it out of your hand. Not content with that innovation, Gaston added a flat side to the handle so the umbrella will stand securely against a wall. He offers ashtrays with the words "for lung cancer" and "heart disease" cast into them. Apparently national anti-smoking charities are interested in endorsing the ashtrays - something that draws a wicked smile from Gaston. His pure white ceramic vases are both elegant and practical. For short-stemmed plants the vase lies on its side; longer stems can be accommodated by standing the vase vertically. Again, sensuality is the key - these rectangular vases with their windows on three sides are satisfying to hold and to behold. And, although it is several years old now, the bubble chair, one of Gaston's signature designs, is still as fresh as ever. A clear, inflatable rubber ball cradled on a chrome frame, the chair invites you to play. The chair has already found its way into several nightclubs and nothing pleases Gaston more than seeing a row of wrecked clubbers bouncing contentedly on his chairs.
The influences
He is reluctant to name his influences. He mumbles a couple of names: Marc Newson (www.marc-newson.com), even Eames (www.eamesoffice.com). But he adds: "I like a lot of what he does but I have no idea what he was like as a person. Had I ever met him he may have been a total asshole," he laughs. "I prefer to draw inspiration from music. It's a product but it's weird because it's not even there." He listens mainly to dance music when he's working - something that shows through in the light-hearted rhythm of his collection. And the future? "I may get to the point where I have purged these ideas from my system. After all, nothing lasts forever - not even love." How true.
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