This article is a preview from Fast Company’s October issue, on newsstands September 18.
Yves Béhar is marveling at his electronic trapdoor. We’re in the fourth-floor master bedroom of his modern San Francisco home, a stack of loftlike boxes with floor-to-ceiling glass windows, which he spent five years meticulously crafting. It’s a hazy Sunday evening in late June, and Béhar, who is wearing jeans and a “Stinson Beach” T-shirt, has just returned with his family from their weekend surfing retreat in Marin County. Two of his four children (named Sky, Sylver, Soleyl, and Saylor) somersault on the Ubald Klug sofa set in the living room, as his wife, the art consultant Sabrina Buell, wraps up dinner.
“When I look at my projects, I’m like, oh my god! These are all firsts!” [Photo: Chloe Aftel]
As Miles Davis’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud purrs on vinyl, Béhar expounds on his unique approach to design after giving me the house tour. He calls the place “a living experiment,” one that treats technology like fabric and values “the things you love” over gaudy gadgetry. Yet the house, while a stunning exercise in minimalism, is also full of gizmos, a reflection of his two decades of work at his design firm, Fuseproject. “I can control the whole house with an app,” he beams. The front doors are wired with August Home, the smart-lock company he cofounded. In the kitchen, a television is attached to a motor, so at the click of a button from Béhar’s iPhone X, it lowers and disappears into a stylish dividing wall that separates the kitchen from the stairs to the basement, like a casket sinking into a grave. (He’ll soon replace it with a Samsung Frame, the new monitor he fashioned for the electronics giant to resemble a gallery portrait.) Upstairs, he’s lined part of the ceiling with what he describes as a deconstructed disco ball, a strip of LED lights he is working to connect to sound sensors so that the colored lights will automatically adjust to the music. “Technology [can be used] in creating and hiding surprise . . . it’s about learning technique and intent and limitations,” Béhar explains. “That’s the product designer in me.”
Then there’s the electronic trapdoor. Grinning, he picks up a remote control, taps it with his thumb, and a thick slab of wood—standing upright next to the end of the stairs—begins to fold down to hide the opening in the floor. The slab descends painfully slowly . . . then the wood starts to snap as the trapdoor bends.
Béhar’s smile turns to a grimace. “It cracks a little, but it’s still pretty solid,” he says.
The breaking sounds grow louder, like the crackle of a bonfire. A long splinter lands near my feet. “Uh-oh,” Béhar says. “That’s not so good.”
When Béhar launched his studio almost 20 years ago, he was trying to get the business world to understand the value of design. He advocated that enterprises should empower designers to be involved in every aspect of their operations. Indeed, design has since been embraced by all corners of the corporate world, so much so that global strategy firms are gobbling up design shops, including Fuse, as Béhar and his employees call the firm: The Chinese conglomerate BlueFocus bought 75% of Fuse in 2014 for a reported $46.7 million and as of December 2017 owns it outright. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has gestated a generation of user-experience-focused unicorns. Airbnb (two cofounders attended RISD), Pinterest, and WeWork, to name just a few, are on the verge of going public, proving that design has become a crucial component in creating status quo–shattering private enterprises. Béhar, despite both his evangelism and his fame—he’s arguably the best-known working designer with the exception of Apple’s Jony Ive—has been associated with few success stories with this kind of cultural oomph. There’s August, which was acquired for an estimated $150 million last year, and 3-D printer Desktop Metal, which has been valued at $1 billion. Fuse has also done notable corporate work for SodaStream, Movado, Nivea, and Western Digital. He touts his work on the Snoo, a bassinet using AI and robotics. But Béhar has also contributed to some of tech’s notorious flops, from Juicero to Jawbone; he even designed the sheet-metal casing of Theranos’s Edison.
Business fully embraces design in the way that Béhar had long espoused, but Béhar has become an increasingly controversial figure in the design community. His detractors are tired of the glossy press profiles (Béhar is too, joking that “they’re all the same”), and criticize him as a celebrity willing to slap his name on anything: robots, smart turntables, body sensors—products that look sexy but rarely live up to the hype. “Yves certainly has raised the profile of design in San Francisco, but when I look at his body of work, I don’t see anything that’s moved the needle,” says one rival big-name designer, who is friendly with Béhar and asked not to be named so as not to offend him. This person stresses that design firms “have to go beyond helping [startups] develop, brand, and package [products], and get into, What the fuck is this thing and why do people need it?” The same critique, naturally, could be leveled at much of what comes out of Silicon Valley: so-called disruptive products, which, like a number that Béhar is known for, are marketed as innovations but more often than not prove to be nothing more than overwrought conveniences.