PROFILES

When we first interviewed designer Mauro Canfori it was barely two years since he had set up business in Nice. We meet him again in the Riviera’s capital, but this time in a brand new 180m² showroom – although that isn’t quite the right word as it isn’t open to the public, this is his storage space and design office. Canfori has worked in a variety of materials and genres, notably contributing to a collection of decorative, architectural, terracotta plant pots designed by international names (Bouroullec, Grcic, Campana), but it is with 3mm sheet steel that he excels. His TEEbooks invisible shelving is the perfect expression of his take on design. “The goal of our profession is to provide useful things, either by improving an existing function or offering a new one. If a designer doesn’t manage to do that, they’ll just create one more useless object.That’s the real ecological mindset, not the materials used in the manufacturing.” It’s a view that’s catching on fast, as proved by the fact his turnover doubled from 2015 to 2016 and again over the first four months of 2017. Plus the star presenter Stéphane Thebaut of La Maison France 5 TV show featured him in an episode screened last May. Since TEEbooks launched seven years ago, Canfori has of course grown the catalogue; the shelving for books (art to paperback), DVDs and CDs still sells best but other iterations have also found favour with the public: kitchen, wall and corner shelves, even shelving for bottles and vinyl records plus an ultra-simple lamp. “I continue doing what I know how to do, practising design with humility and discretion. I like it when design takes a step back and puts function before style.”