Ramón Úbeda, designer, writer and architect, is the man we have to thank for many of the fascinating pieces of furniture produced over the past 18 years by Barcelona's most revered furniture company, BD Barcelona Design– for many years BD Ediciones de Diseño.
Not that he has designed every piece himself, but he's been the spark and the enabler. 'It is a very full job for a unique company,' says Úbeda. 'It's my role to propose ideas for new projects and collections, to develop the brief, to look for the right designer, and then to team up with my technical other half, Otto Canaldo, to work out how we can make the piece – which materials to use and the most appropriate manufacturing techniques.'
It is a role of creative freedom and Úbeda welcomes the fact that bean counting isn't part of his job, nor does he have to spend his days in meetings with accountants making a financial case for every decision. And that, he says, is down to the founding ethos of BD. 'Lots of you will know the story of BD, but in case you don't...'
BD was set up in 1972 by that legendary group of designers Pep Bonet, Cristian Cirici, Lluis Clotet, Oscar Tusquets and Mireia Riera, who remain the owners. Incidentally, Úbeda, now 53, says BD didn't stand for Barcelona Design, rather Boccacio Design after the Boccacio nightclub, the city's equivalent to New York's Studio 54... Coming from an architectural background the founding fathers wanted to 'cultivate beauty' and use artisanal processes instead of mass production, so products would be more art than industrial design. Those principles remain and BD has never shied away from insisting on superior quality while experimenting and innovating. It has also become an editing house, producing the extraordinary furniture designs of Antoni Gaudí and Salvador Dalí. 'What I love about BD is that every product has a story behind it.'
Since Úbeda has been on board, BD has developed new collections each year, working with designers Úbeda feels are in sympathy with BD's ethos of making furniture that fuses design with art. Designers such as Jaime Hayón, Konstantin Grcic, Alfredo Haberli, Ross Lovegrove and more recently Doshi Levien and Cristian Zuzunaga.
Focusing on a particular product to illustrate the Úbeda/BD way, Úbeda takes the sideboard. A sideboard can be a very functional, useful and plain piece of furniture or it can be functional, useful, and completely unmissable, as is the case with, for example, Hayon's Multileg credenzas and with Zuzunaga's Dreams pixellated cabinets. So how did these products come to life?
'Well, instead of thinking in terms of 'marketing', what we practise first is a kind of sniffing the air, getting in touch with our intuition to lead us to what the market will want. But basically what we always try to do is what others are not doing... Our cabinets or sideboards are the result of this. They were a piece of furniture that from the 1960s fell into oblivion; people stopped buying them for their homes. But for us, they're perfect because they have space inside which is functional but you can let your imagination loose on the exterior, you can treat it as a piece of sculpture, you can apply many different styles to it, but it still has that functional space on the inside.’
'With sideboards we can give a lot of artistic freedom to the designer - in fact what we want from the designer is a product that reflects their personality. Hayón's work can only be by him and the same with Zuzunaga.'
Úbeda says he concurs with BD's slogan of the past few years, 'BD is not a style' because BD is the sum of its many and varied designers, who in their own way succeed in imbuing their work with that intangible essence of what BD is all about.
As to whether he gives designers very strict briefs to follow, Úbeda says at the point of commissioning a designer, he and the BD team do have a clear idea of what they want, although things will arise during the design process which may lead to a change of direction. 'My involvement in the process once a product design has been commissioned is total, firstly in the creative process, then in design development and then when things move to the production department, which is led by Otto Canalda. At the end of the development of a piece of furniture you have a roll of credits, as you have at the end of a film. So the designer is the lead actor, but without a guide, a director, a producer, a technical team, the product can't be made.' In short, making furniture, certainly the BD way, is a team effort.
Does Úbeda have firm design principles of his own and do they marry up with BD's? 'I don't have a formal style, but I do have a way of working, and I always try to bring something more to a project and if possible something new... for example, a basin made from almond shells or the charm of a table that contains goldfish (his Up In The Air side table for Viccarbe, designed with Otto Canalda). At BD we work to the same philosophy and we experiment so we can evolve.'
Interestingly, it is not always the BD that decides on the material a product will be made from, though the nature of the piece often determines what's best. 'The Monkey table by Hayón started as a drawing and we chose to make it in technical concrete. But with Grcic's Table, he expressly asked to work with extruded aluminium. In both cases the results were magnificent.'
Úbeda says an aspect of his job that he greatly enjoys is talent spotting. 'All the designers we work with have a world class reputation...but some of them weren't so well known when we started working with them. It is an important part of my job to identify new talent.'
So who should we be looking out for? 'We are starting on a project with a pair of young designers from Scandinavia, Farg & Blanche. Time will tell but I think they are stars of the future. They certainly have the artistic talent and personality we look for at BD.'