Unlike more elitist designers, Rashid likes the idea of mass production, and is renowned for championing new materials and technology. For those unfamiliar with his work, think neo-organic, cartoon-like ‘blobist’ designs that are morphed into their shapes on his computer. “I made it my mission to do what I want in this life,” he says, “and that is what I’ve done. I’ve designed clothing, buildings, specs, watches, shoes, kettles, lamps, televisions. In a sense, it’s all part of the built environment.”
His New York office is a hive of activity, with products and prototypes strewn all around. Upstairs is the apartment he shares with his wife, the digital artist Megan Lang. Like a laboratory loft, it is dressed in Rashid’s designs and experiments, ranging from an ergonomic fibreglass turntable deck to the shocking-pink Omni multipiece sofa.
In 2000, the couple agreed to ditch all possessions that had been bought more than five years earlier, including Rashid’s record collection and his books, and focus on the here and now. And for every addition, something has to go, thereby retaining a flavour of fluid minimalism.
Rashid wanted a blank canvas to work with, and found it in the form of a 100-year-old derelict building. The ground floor had been a stable, with the floor above used for storage; buckets and ropes for bringing alcohol in and out during Prohibition were still hanging in place.
“It was great to get into a raw space. The worst thing is having to gut somebody else’s work,” says the designer, who was born in Egypt and grew up in Canada before heading to America. “We wanted to keep it open, because it helps to bring in light. One of the hardest things to get in New York is good light.”
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The bulk of the apartment is one large, long space, running from the front to the back of the building. In the middle, the kitchen and dining table separate two living rooms, one lighter and edgier, with a white epoxy floor, the other softer and more textured, with a pink carpet and a large pink oval sofa with a glass coffee table at its centre. Only the bathroom and bedroom are sectioned off.
Nearly everything in the apartment — with the exception of a desk, designed by the film director David Lynch, and a sprinkling of ceramics and lamps by Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis group — was designed by Rashid, including the wallpaper on one section of the front living room and the laminates in the kitchen, which cover the dining table and units.
Not that it will look this way for long.
“Every month, the apartment looks different,” says Rashid. “Each Sunday, my father used to move around all the furniture in our house in Montreal, and he was always rearranging the living room. I’ve picked up that habit.”
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American Designers at Home by Dominic Bradbury and Mark Luscombe-Whyte (Pavilion Books £25) is published in October