Our latest Faces of Design Spotlight: an interview with Markus Müller, designer and inspiration for our Report "Sex Toy Design - Market Size Matters".

Danish by birth and world citizen by adoption, Johannes Torpe is a volcano of ideas. Creative and cheerful, he leaves much to improvisation and good taste. His nightclubs and restaurants are an immediate success and thanks to a fruitful series of collaborations with food and furniture industry business patrons he has recently opened a new Beijing studio in the heart of the Chinese dragon.

Asisi Visual Culture GmbH from Berlin is a cultural enterprise that stands for the creation of illusional spaces, both on a national and on an international level. Its founder, the artist Yadegar Asisi, has created the world’s largest 360° panoramas and is committed to the idea that the act of “seeing” and “understanding” is an essential factor in the development of the individual, and society as a whole. It is Asisi’s aim, with the aid of his exhibitions and educational programmes, to promote a lasting concept of visual culture.

Although the furnaces at the Holmegaard Glassworks were shut down in 2008, the Holmegaard brand still lives on. LOFT has met the creative director and two designers, and talked to them about the changes of the last few years and the future of the Holmegaard brand which has just celebrated its 185th anniversary.

It is Patrizia Moroso speaking, from one of the Italian family-business companies representing the country’s excellence in design throughout the world. Renowned for its fresh and always up-dated creative direction, Moroso is now gearing up for the Milan Design Week where Patrizia, Creative Director and daughter of the founder of the company, will surprise visitors to her show room on Via Pontaccio, in the heart of historical Milan, as happens every year.

Kenneth Kvarnström, one of Scandinavia’s top choreographers, is now back in the region after working with the Sydney Dance Company. He is currently setting up a dance work, YOUMAKEME, at Helsinki City Theatre in Finland. He previously ran one of Scandinavia’s largest venues for international contemporary dance – the House of Dance in Stockholm – where he was the director and hosted his dancer and choreographer colleagues from around the world. Now his audience is expectantly waiting to once again see his sensual dynamic movements on stage.

Swiss architect Mario Botta recently founded the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio based on a humanistic approach to the discipline. An autobiographical exhibition of work from his long career was recently shown at the MART – the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto in northern Italy – a building that he personally designed.

I managed to catch Monica Förster between the Stockholm Furniture Fair and a trip to Paris. Now regarded as one of the top names in Swedish design, Monica is based in Stockholm but works with many international companies such as Cappellini, Poltrona Frau, De Padova, Tacchini, Modus etc. She even finds time to teach design in Sweden as well as abroad.

At Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, you can watch capitalism unfold through breathtakingly beautiful art. The paintings at Holland’s national museum depict, amongst other things, the rise of the Dutch East India Company; the first multinational corporation and inducement for the world’s first modern stock exchange. Through the Dutch Masters’ artfulness, grim Puritan patrons of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie seem hauntingly alive. It is hard to grasp how these alien beings could be, however accidentally, the architects and first subjects of globalization.

This is a marvellous dynasty. The Astori family’s enormous passion for art and design translated into one of the best innovative companies stating its own style on the international scene of past, present and future excellence.