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e a s t
July 2001
e a s t, July 2001 > LIFE PERSONALITIES (Page 56-57)
Flying Solo
Accountancy and Anoushka Hempel have one thing in common: they led
Indonesian interior designer Jaya Ibrahim to his destiny.
TEXT BY JANE LEE PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALBERT HO
THERE ARE CERTAIN professions that require one to hit the books before joining the practice. Medicine, law, architecture, and interior design. Yet Jaya Ibrahim Pratomo excels at the latter so well his success belies the absence of farmed degrees and certificates. He obviously has no use for them.
That Ibrahim is arguably Indonesia's most respected and renowned interior and furniture designer is reaffirmed by renowned English photographer Tim Street-Porter in his home tribute to handsome mansions in the tropics. Cinere and Cipicong, two of Java's most famous abodes (the former Ibrahim carved for his parents in Jakarta; the latter for himself at Bogor, south Jakarta), were the only ones from Indonesia to grace the pages of Tropical Houses (Thames & Hudson).
"I strongly believe in a sense of place. I wouldn't design a house in Indonesia in such a way it becomes an English house," asserts Ibrahim, who is in Singapore to oversee a show case of his pieces.
"I don't believe in the way the English design. When they design (in) a Georgian period, everything is Georgian. (Instead), I will use contrasting elements to emphasize the Georgian."
No
wonder Ibrahim's blend of European precision and attitude (largely Dutch
with traces of Portuguese influence) and eastern inflection come across
so seamless that his pieces simply defy cultural categorization, yet inexplicably
retain the spirit and flavor of whichever region they have been created
for.
The ambience of residence, however, is secondary
to its spatial sequence. "Interior design is (about) organizing the
inside of a building in a logical way for the purpose of what it is going
to be used for. First, you have to get the flow of the building right.
How you go from the dining room to the living to the kitchen has to be
correct," he explains.
Each furniture piece is affectionately named after the concept from which
it was birthed (behold the Numing ottoman, Suchow armchair, and Berlin
bed). The key to Ibrahim's creations in their feet-subtle curvatures or
stepped patterns that soften otherwise linear silhouettes. Handmade materials
like rattan, cushions and pillow covers "take away the rationality
of the west."
Like the Javanese builders of old, Ibrahim melds east and west by studying pictures of western design and furnishing, closing the book, and reinterpreting them through an innate sensitivity to the local culture. For Cinere and The Dharmawangsa, the legendary boutique hotel in Jakarta, Ibrahim drew inspiration from 16th century French country furniture and the Imperial Russian school, respectively.
Ibrahim's lessons in design were taken entirely outside the classroom. After completing high school in Jakarta, Ibrahim enrolled in England's York University in the mid-1970s (when asked his age, he coyly described himself as "very old in experience but so young I am ready to learn anything!"). He majored in Economics and Sociology at the request of his banker father, and the youngster did join a London film as an accountant trainee for a year upon graduation. He hated every minute of it. Before leaving for work every morning, Ibrahim would develop a rash so nasty he had to pop antihistamines.
Desperate for a career change, he gamely took up a friend's suggestion to wash pots and pans at London's ultra-chic Blakes Hotel, created by British design doyen Anoushka Hempel. The rash miraculously disappeared on his first day there, and a happy Ibrahim industriously worked his way up the hotel hierarchy, from a luggage porter to a room service waiter to a restaurant maitre d' in the early 1980s.
Only when he coolly replaced the lass who sewed up curtains and cushions did Hempel spy the makings of a designer in Ibrahim and take him under her wings. "She taught me to be disciplined and consistent in carrying a design through in a meticulous way," says Ibrahim.
But by the early '90s, his learning curve had hit a plateau and he yearned to strike out on his own. " I was dissatisfied at not being able to do my own designs. I was an expert in Anoushka Hempel's style," recalls Ibrahim. "We'd mix purple and yellow, and hangs crimps and pictures upside down because it gave a better effect!"
Ibrahim eventually re-settled in Indonesia in 1993 and handled high-profile public and private projects such as the Amandari and Oberoi resorts in Bali. Not to mention the string of dwellings throughout China, Burma, Britain, Spain and Mexico that bore his signature-Ibrahim even worked on a monastery in Italy! Five years later, Ibrahim, together with fellow designer John Saunders and Yusti Suhendy, founded the furniture company PT Mangala Adhigaya Perdana that carries their flagship brand-name, Solo.
Currently at the final stages of designing the Fuchun Resort Hotel, Golf Club House and Villas out-side Hangzhou, China, Ibrahim also fashions Asian furniture and home accessories for East Lifestyle Corporation, the parent company of e a s t.
The smooth transition from interior to furniture design was supposedly a matter of common sense. "It's all about proportions and asking the carpenter to carry out the silly ideas in your head," chuckles Ibrahim nonchalantly with a dismissive wave of his hand.
Yet the most valuable lesson no textbook could possible teach took this self-professed perfectionist decades to learn: "A good design is one that can take all the mistakes that come into the process of being creative. If the design is good, the imperfections do not matter."
Courtesy of e a s t