The London designer who opened a shop next to his studio: Jasper Morrison

Walk down Kingsland Road and the studio and the shop sit side by side. Jasper Morrison, born in London in 1959 and trained at Kingston Polytechnic, the Royal College of Art and the HdK in Berlin, set up his Office for Design in the city in 1986 and has never moved its base. Two London firms, Aram and SCP, were among the first to put his work into production; Cappellini in Milan and FSB in Brakel followed, then Vitra, Flos and Emeco, and later Magis, Maruni, Muji and Alessi. In 2009 he added the Jasper Morrison Shop beside the studio, where his own designs stand next to ordinary objects gathered from around the world, the same argument he had made three years earlier in the Super Normal exhibition with Naoto Fukasawa. Britain answered with a CBE and a place among the Royal Designers for Industry; the pieces themselves stay quiet.

For UK projects La Mercanti supplies two of the houses that produce him: Emeco, with the Alfi chairs and the 1 Inch collection, and Cappellini, where the Thinking Man's Chair is still in production.