François Chambard, the founder of design studio UM Project, explains how his industrial furniture designs balance vintage obsessions with high tech futurism.
A Frenchman turned New Yorker buys a vintage Airstream trailer. It’s pristine on the outside, trashed on the inside, and restoring it is going to a pet project of his – or rather, one of many.
“Ultimately,” he says, “I am envisioning a compound with the trailer, one or two Quonset huts, solar panels, windmills, and other structures. An off-the-grid yet totally connected outpost somewhere on planet earth, for creativity, inspiration, resourcing, and amazing work.”
Coming from anyone but designer François Chambard, this statement might come across as grandiose and, let’s face it, a bit utopian. But the founder of design studio UM Project not only doesn’t reveal his intentions lightly, but is as much of an artist and maker as he is a dreamer.
99U jumped at the chance to visit the UM workshop, a well-outfitted space inside a massive industrial building on a desolate stretch of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Chambard took us through the evolution of the studio’s design principles via its signature breakthroughs; introduced us to the cast of characters in his most recent creative project, the Ultraframe series, which had just come back from New York’s Design Week exhibition; and shared the remarkable story of UM Project’s genesis, which has everything to do with Chambard’s realization in his late twenties that after doing what he could to ignore it, it was time to finally act on his lifelong wish to design and build things with his hands.
“Sometimes it takes a long time to find your calling, or you know your calling and it takes a long time to embrace it,” Chambard told us. “I’m glad I found it and embraced it.”
How did you, a Frenchman, end up establishing your business in Brooklyn rather than, say, Paris?
Well, there’s a very simple answer. It’s because of my then girlfriend, now wife: I moved to the States 23 years ago because I had met Kathleen in Germany, when we were both exchange students in Germany. We lived two or three years in Germany and in Paris. And she had to move back to the U.S., so we had a long-distance relationship for one or two years. Then I moved here; that’s it. I moved out of passion, you know: out of love. I wasn’t really thinking about it at the time, only I’m still here, with kids and family.
And you moved to New York straight away?
Yes. I hated it.
Do you still?
No. I love it. When I moved here, I spoke English like a French high school student, which is not much. I knew nobody but my wife. I had $1,500 in my pocket, so I had to make money. I was actually a bike messenger for almost a year to make a living, which was fun. It was a rough learning curve. It was more the learning curve that I didn’t like than New York City. It seemed that the city made it harder to get my bearings, grow a network, get a job. But at the same time, maybe it made it easier, too, because I found a good-paying job after eight months.
How did UM Project come into being?
When I was 13 or 14, I already wanted to be a furniture maker. I told my parents and they were not too crazy about the idea. In my family, everybody has a proper, classical education. Everybody’s like an engineer or a doctor. They convinced me it maybe wasn’t the right choice. You have to put things in context; it was in the early 80s. Design wasn’t what it is today. Now it’s much more a part of popular culture. At the time, it was not.
So I just followed the more traditional path. I went to business school. The way for me to reconcile my creative aspirations and my business background for 10 years was by working for so-called strategic design firms, brand constructing companies, more on the corporate design side of things. I learned a lot, but I was a consultant. I was doing nothing with my hands. And in my late 20s, early 30s, I decided to finally commit to what I wanted to do, which was work with my hands: make things. Design and make things.
I went to RISD (the Rhode Island School of Design), and it is a wonderful school. But I went there when I was 31, not 18 or 19. I was with much younger people, and it felt like that wasn’t the right place and time for me. I had thought about design for like 16 or 17 years, and I just I had to do it my own way. I was eager and impatient. I left on really good terms, and after that I apprenticed one year with a very old-school, classic furniture maker, Hank Gilpin. Because what I really needed was a transition period between being a consultant and being a designer-maker; a way to embrace what I had been wanting to do for a long time. Being an apprentice, doing work with hand tools on the bench, a very humbling task, was a centering experience to the transition phase. From there, I just started doing projects.
We sketch a lot. The work by hand is very important – let the hand imagine and think for you. When you start to draw, things happen which you don’t necessarily expect or know how to explain. Some kind of sixth sense. So I always steer clear of computer work, at least in the early phase of the work. I don’t go straight into computer rendering or 3-D modeling. When you see a hand sketch, it’s really about a more personal process. When we have an idea, we do a beautiful hand rendering and color it. Then the design is…
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