Is expensive designer furniture worth it?

High prices are not unusual at Salone del Mobile. Among the thousands of products being exhibited this year is a wooden dining chair designed by award-winning Danish studio Norm Architects in collaboration with Japanese designer and architect Keiji Ashizawa. It looks much like any other chair: it’s made of wood and has a back, a woven seat, four legs and armrests. Yet this chair sells for €1,330 (plus VAT), more than 10 times the price of a similar design by high-street retailer Habitat.

Elsewhere at the fair, Molteni&C, a leading Italian furnishing company and one of the founders of the Salone back in 1961, is launching a marble and lacquered wooden table by Belgian architect Vincent Van Duysen for €8,500. Sofa specialist Edra’s exhibits include Pack and On The Rocks, which sell for north of £20,000. Edra made headlines in 2016 when its Boa sofa was reportedly bought by Kendall Jenner for $52,000, roughly the average deposit needed by a first-time homebuyer in the UK.

Many designers have tried to make good design affordable. In the 1970s, Italian designer Enzo Mari published Autoprogettazione (Self-designed), a book with detailed instructions on how to make 19 pieces of furniture with easily sourced materials. The Italian designer Mari hoped that the act of construction would help people understand how furniture was made and galvanise them into demanding well-designed furniture at lower prices. But despite the success of his project, measured in the number of responses he received from those who followed his instructions, high-quality furniture remains largely the preserve of top-end design brands and independent makers and comes with steep prices.

Ask the CEOs of design companies whether their prices can really be justified, and their answer will be that it has nothing to do with excessively high profit margins. “If you look at the margins for companies in our industry, they are about 10 to 20 per cent,” says Molteni’s CEO Marco Piscitelli, who argues that this is reasonable compared to high fashion, where margins can be 35 per cent.

Piscitelli says the most significant factor — about 30 to 40 per cent of a product’s retail price — is the full cost of production, a large proportion of which comprises labour costs. “Everything we do, we do in Italy, specifically in Brianza,” he says, referring to the area north of Milan where Angelo Molteni founded the company in 1934 and which is still home to a high concentration of prestigious Italian design companies. “The labour here is some of the most expensive in Italy because it is one of the few places where you can find the expertise to produce high-quality products,” he explains.

Manufacturing both locally and in-house is, ­Piscitelli adds, a necessary expense to ensure that the required attention to detail is applied throughout the production process. On top of that, the company invests “no less than 5 per cent” of its revenues per year in research and development, including prototyping and the construction of moulds for manufacture. Then there are the fees for contemporary designers and the creative director, the royalties for producing products by top designers such as Gio Ponti and Aldo Rossi, and the cost of marketing, communications and events. Finally, Molteni maintains a network of 79 flagship stores from Paris to Cape Town to Hyderabad.

For British designer Edward Barber, who together with Jay Osgerby has worked with design companies such as B&B Italia, Knoll and Vitra, the disparity between low-cost and high-end design can be explained partly by the scale. “A normal-sized company might be producing 40,000 or 50,000 chairs a year. When you compare that to millions [for a company like Ikea], you’re not amortising the R&D, the tooling costs, over nearly as many chairs,” he says.

Given their complexity and the length of time involved, the development costs for top-end products are also often much higher than those for high-street brands. Barber points to the plastic Tipton chair that Barber Osgerby designed for the Swiss company Vitra. “It probably took three years to develop, we probably made 100 prototypes,” he explains. “[Then there’s] the cost of getting Jay and me and our studio to Switzerland, the hotels we stayed in and the time spent by their team on the project. The cost of tooling [on that project] was also incredibly expensive because the chair needed a very complex mould that required 20 tonnes of steel and seven moving parts.”

Barber says that when he and Osgerby set up their studio in the mid-1990s, the budgets and deadlines that brands gave designers were far more flexible than they are now. Yet even then designers did not have complete freedom. “There is a lot of cost engineering that goes on,” he says. “This can mean designing constituent parts of a product to interlock [to save] on storage and shipping, something that has nothing to do with the function of the end-product, or arriving at a final prototype only for the project manager to say that it’s too expensive. Then you are into a redesign.”

The skill of the designer, Barber adds, is to ­identify what makes the product special, which then allows it to command a higher price. “It’s a little bit of alchemy,” he says. “It’s not all about cost and durability.”

For those interested in buying well-made and thoughtfully designed products, independent makers are an alternative to companies like Molteni and Vitra. While they might not be able to scale production, many such makers prefer the more personal approach of working directly with the designer. Salem Charabi, an Egyptian-Danish architect who has a studio just outside Copenhagen, says that working on a smaller scale enables him and his team of three cabinetmakers to take their time, to choose the direction of the wood grain on every piece they produce and to work with materials that are sourced just a few hours drive away.

This may insulate Charabi from supply chain issues — he says his costs have only increased by 10 to 15 per cent despite a recent doubling in the price of some raw materials — but the more careful and considered approach to production means prices remain on a par with those of large, high-end design brands. “There’s a different kind of relationship to time,” he says. “In the commodified design world, you have to develop a piece to fit a set production process. Here, we’re taking the time that is needed to produce something that has both a story and a perfect, finished result. I don’t know how you can sell a chair for €100. I can’t even get the basic supplies I need to oil and sand a piece for that price.”

British designer Sebastian Cox is at the forefront of the industry’s push towards sustainability. His studio manages woodland in Kent and works with it in the way a chef approaches seasonal produce, using only what is ready. “Everything we do starts with the goal of nature recovery in the UK,” he says. “The only way you can approach creating objects within this framework is to work with the by-products of creating habitats for biodiversity.” Cox adds that increasing production would mean working with a factory overseas, making it difficult to use British wood, “because we export almost zero”.

Like Charabi and Molteni, the majority of his cost is labour, about 75 per cent of a product’s price, he estimates. Materials and overheads make up about 15 per cent and just 2 per cent is marketing spend. “Taking the raw material, flattening it, squaring it up and then using it in a way that will last a long time takes a very, very long time,” he says. “And I’m very unapologetic about that.”

In many ways, both Cox and Charabi are returning to the way furniture used to be produced — local, sustainable, responsible — before the arrival of ­globalised supply chains and complex industrial processes. From this perspective, the cost of high-end design is unavoidable.

“There’s no easy way to make high-end design cheaper or to make independent makers more accessible,” says Linde Freya Tangelder, a Dutch designer who works in limited editions for specialist design galleries and for the Italian brand Cassina. She thinks that if people had a better awareness of the processes by which products are manufactured or the origins of different materials — “foam in a pouffe is really difficult to make in a biodegradable way” — they would be able to understand the value of high-end design products and be more likely to invest in them.

The design industry is so focused on the newest pieces, the latest trends,” says Tangelder, who feels that this encourages an unsustainable approach to consumption. This is particularly true with design fairs such as the Salone, where brands put a lot of money and resources into promoting their latest products.

The answer is not to replace this with a cheaper, digital-only presentation of work. Tangelder believes that there will always be a need to see and touch a product at such events. But she has concerns that the glitz and polish of big fairs may obscure some of the specialised and considered work that goes into the products on show there. “Of course it’s all about luxury,” she says. “But I always wonder if it could be a little more intimate, if you could see inside a designer’s atelier. Maybe next time the Salone could be held in a factory!”

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