There’s no question that Madame Dorner has been around the world. After graduating with honors from the École Camondo in Paris in 1984, the Strasbourg-born interior architect and designer was immediately drawn far away at the age of 25. In Tokyo, she not only absorbed the culture of the foreign country, but also promptly designed her first furniture collection for the Japanese interior design brand Idée.
Back in France, she opened her first office in Paris in 1987 and the following year helped the metropolis on the Seine to create its first entirely contemporary hotel, La Villa in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. She then settled in London in 1996 and began teaching at the Royal College of Art in parallel with her design work. In 2008, she returned to Paris, where the creative business is now run under her own company, Dorner Design.
Her life as a globetrotter has naturally also influenced her work. And so her projects are characterized by an extraordinary diversity: As an interior designer, she furnishes hotels, apartments, restaurants and boutiques, and even sets up ambassadorial residences for the French Foreign Ministry. As a designer, she creates furniture, tableware, jewelry, and lighting, and has worked with companies as diverse as Montis, Zeus, Bernardaud, and Baccarat.
But it is her designs for Ligne Roset in particular that perfectly embody her signature combination of French elegance and multicultural sophistication. She always follows her motto “Matière matters”, which means that the first priority is the careful elaboration of the material used, reminiscent of craftsmanship.
