Design Creators: designers, interior architects and artisans

Designers, interior architects, decorators, master artisans: HART Design Selection portrays the creators whose work carries a singular vision of design and craftsmanship. From the great masters of the twentieth century to today’s studios and workshops, meet the people who shape our interiors.

Design begins with those who shape it

A creator, as HART sees it, is someone who conceives a form, a space or an object and carries that vision all the way from drawing to material. Product designer, architect, decorator or artisan, each answers the same question in their own way: how to give an idea a body.

This section brings together portraits, interviews and studio visits. It tells what is made, but above all how and why. Established or emerging, the creators we publish share the same standards. They don’t follow trends: they build a language.

The masters of twentieth-century design

The twentieth-century masters are the designers and architects who invented modern furniture, between the Bauhaus and the 1970s. Their pieces are still produced, copied and collected today.

It all begins at the Bauhaus, where Marcel Breuer bends steel tube into the Wassily chair, and with Le Corbusier, who thinks of furniture as equipment for the home. In the North, Alvar Aalto curves birch and Arne Jacobsen draws the Egg chair. In the United States, Charles and Ray Eames tame moulded plywood, while Eero Saarinen frees the chair from its four legs with the Tulip.

Italy and Germany then take up the torch of daring. Joe Colombo imagines the home of the future in the plastic revolution of the 1960s, Gaetano Pesce turns an armchair into a manifesto, Ingo Maurer treats light like a poet. In France, Madeleine Castaing invents a way of decorating that belongs to her alone. Find them all in our portraits of twentieth-century masters and in the HART dictionary of design icons.

Contemporary designers

Contemporary designers are the creators working today who renew furniture and objects, often in small series and in close dialogue with the artisans who make them.

Some pursue absolute lightness, like Jérôme Bugara with his Uvola chair. Others work on presence and volume, as in the EXO collection by Grégoire de Lafforest. With Adrien des Rues, wood becomes a language. matali crasset, for her part, shakes up the way we live through modularity. All their portraits are gathered in our contemporary designers section.

Architects and interior designers

An interior architect designs a place as a whole: volumes, circulation, materials, light and furniture. Their work cannot be reduced to an object; it is something you live in.

We visited the Parisian cocoon imagined by Atelier Portalis, discovered the sustainable refinement of AKB Design and Audrée Kemp-Bélanger, and immersed ourselves in the wave architecture of Diango Hernández. On another scale, Maxime d’Angeac is reinventing the Orient Express. More projects await in our architects and interior designers section.

Artisans and exceptional workshops

A master artisan commands a craft of material, often handed down over generations, and puts it at the service of a unique piece or an exceptional project.

Without them, no drawing would ever stand up. The cabinetmaker shapes wood, the stonemason cuts marble, the metalworker forges iron and bronze, the ceramicist models clay. The upholsterer dresses seats and walls, and fabric walling specialists such as Stephen Franklin keep the most demanding techniques alive. Our guide to luxury craftspeople and art trades maps these skills and the workshops behind them, and every portrait is listed in the artisans and workshops section.

Artists and multidisciplinary creators

Some creators refuse to choose between art and design. Their pieces are looked at as much as they are used, and that ambiguity is precisely what interests us. They have their own section: artists.

Latest portraits

Ingo Maurer, Light poet

Ingo Maurer, Light poet

Ingo Maurer (1932–2019) was a visionary German lighting designer often referred to as a poet of light. He transformed illumination into an art form, blending function, fantasy, and emotion in…

Suggest a creator to the editors

HART publishes creators, studios and houses whose work carries a vision, high standards and a story. If your world resonates with our editorial line, send us a concise presentation. Discover our approach.

Five ways into the world of HART

01 SpacesSpaces & materials → 02 CreatorsDesigners & creators → 03 CraftsmanshipArtisans & fine crafts → 04 FurnitureFurniture & interiors → 05 HeritageDesign history →