French architect Odile Decq has designed a stainless steel tray called “Alice” for Italian design powerhouse Alessi. Her first collaboration with Alessi, the tray measures 51 x 36 centimetres and offered in either a polished or matte black finish. It is but one in a seemingly endless line of beautifully designed products for the home produced by the company.
Odile Decq is the principal of Studio Odile Decq in Paris, and has been the Director of the l’École spéciale d’architecture in Paris since 2007. She studied architecture at the Universities of Rennes and Paris, and is one of the few female architects to have received some of the most prestigious awards in her profession, from the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1996 to the recent Designer of the Year at the Salon Maison & Objet 2013. Her firm is responsible for the design of the high-profile Phantom Restaurant at the Opera Garnier in Paris, the MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome), Pavilion 8 in Lyon, and FRAC Bretagne, a museum for contemporary art in Rennes.
She is internationally known for always having fought to express her sensorial and protean vision that continues to redefine the boundaries of her profession and which she has called “hypertension”, by which she means that a space should make us move; in other words, it should put us “in tension.”
On her idea of design, she explains: “I am interested in some aspects of design: I do not like design when it is simply associated with an idea or ‘concept’ and that you should believe in it just because it’s a concept. I like it when an object that is offered to me is both a super-idea, very simple and at the same time nice to look at. For me, design is this: reinvention heading towards something essential. ‘Alice’ is a tray that is as simple as a rectangle, as complex as a diagonal, flat so you can look at the world through a mirror.”