Francesc Rifé

Francesc Rifé was born in 1969 in Sant Sadurní d'Anoia (Catalonia ) into a family of furniture artisans, a decisive background for his successful career in Spanish interior design. In 1994, he founded the Francesc Rifé Studio in Barcelona, which he still runs today with a team of professionals. His design method is based on his experience in the family context, his interest in natural materials (especially wood and stone) used in purity as elements of plastic expression of ideas and concepts, and his attention to order and sobriety. He has a passion for the great masters of design, and 1940s and 1950s architecture. He began collaborating with Japan from the outset of his career.

Francesc Rifé is often defined as minimalist, austere and perfectionist, tending to conceal complexity to render spaces and objects functional, eliminating the inessential and the overwritten. Aiming to meet user, Rifé specialises in architectural projects, designing workplaces, residential buildings, showrooms, hotels and restaurants. Recently, after the pandemic, he has received requests from clients to rethink and reorganise their living spaces, creating special furniture items. Rifé says that his work as a designer began by chance with a private client when a manufacturer appreciated the products he designed and put them into industrial production. Since then, product design has become integral to his work for international brands and more elite commissions. Crowning his 30-year career, he opened RI HOUSE, a gallery close to his Barcelona office where he showcases a selection of more than one hundred interior design creations, allowing the public to purchase now-iconic pieces.

Francesc Rifé has always understood architecture as a process that can be industrialised, intending to produce architecture and designs that are long-lasting rather than trendy. With his maniacal attention to detail and a concrete and linear methodology, he juggles different disciplines, laying the foundations for reinterpreting and evolving concepts expressed in a recognisable aesthetic language. Rifé has worked for such brands as Blasco&Vila, Marset, Kendo, Mobboli, Milan Illuminacion, Lebon, Estiluz, Now Carpets and José Martinez Medina. Throughout his career, he has received such awards as Contract World, Red Dot in 2016 for the Botton lamp, ICFF Editors, HiP in Chicago, FAD and several ASCER awards. Today Rifé combines his professional work with teaching in Spanish and international universities, conducting workshops around the world from Singapore to Hannover, Cologne, Tokyo, Miami, Porto, Moscow and Bogotá.

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