The serious business of play

Plenty of design houses do restraint. Magis also does delight — and treats it just as seriously. Joy, in this catalogue, is not a lapse in discipline but a design goal pursued with the same rigour as everything else.

That seriousness about fun is what keeps the playful pieces from ageing into kitsch. They are engineered as carefully as the sober ones; they simply aim at a smile.

The parable of the Bombo

Stefano Giovannoni's Bombo stool (1997) is a useful parable. Magis commissioned it largely to use up a surplus of gas pistons, and the bulbous little swivel seat became, by Giovannoni's own count, one of the most copied products on earth — he told Design Indaba that more than a thousand factories copy it.

Joy is not the opposite of good design. Sometimes it's the proof of it.

Imitation on that scale is its own kind of icon status. A shape copied by a thousand factories has passed a test no award can set: it became the default picture of what a swivel stool looks like.

Spin, dry, delight

Thomas Heatherwick's Spun turns a single rotated profile into a chair you can spin a full circle in, and won the Compasso d'Oro for it. Marc Newson — Australian-born, working worldwide — made a drying rack collectible with the Dish Doctor. And the Me Too collection simply hands the fun to children: Eero Aarnio's Puppy, now also sold by the MoMA Design Store, is sculpture, toy and stool at once, while Enzo Mari, Oiva Toikka and Javier Mariscal each added a piece of their own.

The children's range is the tell. A house willing to design as carefully for a four-year-old as for a collector is a house that takes delight as a genuine brief.

The most sustainable object

None of it is frivolous. A chair that makes you smile is a chair you keep — and the most sustainable object is the one nobody throws away.

That is the serious business hiding inside the play: affection is a form of longevity, and an object you love is an object that stays out of landfill.