Launched in 1994, the AXOR Starck collection forever changed the market for design in the bathroom, the company said. With its radical simplicity and deep respect for water as the source of life, AXOR Starck is as relevant and successful today as ever, it noted.

“Our product developers, our engineers and the entire design team could only guess the kind of relevance this collection would have for AXOR — the fact this collection is an icon of bathroom design to this day, is due to its archetypical form and its uncompromising function,” commented Anke Sohn, head of AXOR, Hansgrohe SE.

Five AXOR collections later and in celebration of AXOR Starck’s 25th anniversary, Philippe Starck sat down with AXOR to discuss the birth of an icon.

“It is a great honor for me to speak about water, because I love water,” Starck said. I live on water. I’m always close to water. Water is so beautiful that when you add materiality around it, the less beautiful it becomes. My idea was — and still is — simple: Make a design that is deeply and structurally respectful of water.

“I am not intelligent. I am not able nor am I interested to think about complicated things. But I have an instinct that tells me how to find the heart of the subject — the bone, the spine, the center. The AXOR Starck collection is all about that, all about the miracle and magic of water.

"That’s why it is perhaps one of the best examples of a useful work with AXOR, where we shared the same clear vision of making a model and collection absolutely timeless—based on the right quality, right intelligence, right vision, right ergonomics,” Starck said.

Read the full interview with Philippe Starck for AXOR here: www.axor-design.com/en-us/axor-storybook/interview-starck.html.