For designer Mark Grattan, New York City is a necessary evil. At the time of his interview with Wallpaper*, he had just signed a lease on a new apartment in Brooklyn. Not a permanent space, he insists, just somewhere to lay his head when he’s in town to meet clients and collaborators or fabricate furniture in his studio.
‘I need to be in New York for business and I was spending too much money on Airbnbs,’ he says. ‘I’m the type of person who needs things a certain way. I was pulling out all the furniture and living in these empty homes, which was actually kind of fun – but ridiculous.’ Instead, Grattan would rather be in Mexico City, where he lives in a Luis Barragán-designed apartment building. Or in São Paulo, where he plans to open a gallery to support young Brazilian designers and craftspeople. ‘Ideally, I would have this cycle of New York, Mexico and Brazil – just following the heat.’
Sitting down with Mark Grattan
Grattan may be physically hard to pin down, but for the past several years he has occupied a consistent spot on the design industry’s radar of buzzworthy talent. In 2014, he co-founded the brand Vidivixi, a design industry darling praised for its sensual forms and impeccable craftsmanship, which he shut down in 2021 to go solo. That same year, he won the reality show Ellen’s Next Great Designer, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres, where, to snag the top prize, he conceived and built a living room collection, inspired by bold 1980s interiors, in a matter of days.
In 2023, he created a luxe New York home for sports superstars Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, a richly layered apartment with mirrored surfaces and sexy built-in furniture in leather and velvet designed – and largely constructed – by Grattan himself. Around the same time, he was hired by the singer Solange to head up the product development department of her creative project, Saint Heron. Their first drop, a collection of sculptural goblets fabricated by the glassblower Jason Mcdonald, launched in June 2023.
Museums and institutions have begun to take notice of the Ohio native, too, the Smithsonian and the Brooklyn Museum recently adding Grattan’s ‘Stool’ to their collections. Originally designed in 2022 for Cristina Grajales Gallery, the soft, upholstered seat has an ovoid top and sits atop two triangle-shaped legs. ‘It incorporates a lot of the visual themes in my work: there’s always a touch of repetition, contrasting materials, rigid architectural elements and subtle rounded edges,’ Grattan says of the design.
Amid this meteoric rise, Grattan has even found the time to create new work. At this year’s Milan Design Week, he debuted his first collection for the roving Latin American design gallery, Unno. The collection, titled ‘Thick’, took the form of utilitarian-seeming office furniture whose brown lacquered forms are subtly exaggerated. Each piece sits atop a flared base, as if melting into the floor or wall.
‘It felt like one of the safer collections I’ve done. There weren’t a lot of crazy details. Usually my work is very opinionated, but this was very stripped back.’ Audiences disagreed. The collection topped many of the week’s ‘best of’ lists, introducing Grattan to a new, European fan base.
Speaking of the immediate future, Grattan’s main concern isn’t designing a new collection or landing a new interior client. Instead, it’s about ‘getting the right type of help’, he says. ‘I’ve been doing all of this myself without an assistant or a manager.’ Looking ahead, he’d like to try something new, such as collaborating with a Parisian fashion house or historic Italian design brand. ‘Maybe,’ he ponders, seemingly calculating his next move, ‘I need to spend more time in Europe.’
This article appears in the August 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available to download free when you sign up to our daily newsletter, in print on newsstands from 4 July, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today
