Little by little, and over a career that has now spanned almost 40 years, the French designer Philippe Starck has been refashioning almost every object in the world. Or that’s how it seems.

He has made sexy taps and “Juicy Salif”, a long-legged lemon squeezer that looks very like one of Louise Bourgeois’ giant mother-spiders and is said to spill lemon juice all over the fingers. He has transformed the toothbrush into an almost beddable object, with sensually yielding curves.

He has turned the humdrum lavatory brush and holder into something that resembles the quick zip of sword and scabbard. He has designed shoes with Puma, clothing that clings like a second skin, mineral-water bottles, noodles and curvaceous door knobs. He has made a whole range of objects for mother and baby. He has feminised the macho world of the motorcycle.

He has recreated the interiors of the entire Schrager hotel chain. In the current issue of Wallpaper you will find a full page ad for “Visionary Condos” in the East Village in New York. Beside a picture of the man himself, looking every inch the chic and cerebral Frenchman with enormous sexual possibilities, runs the caption: “The World of Philippe Starck . . . Discover Yourself.”

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Now, in The Temptation of Space, an exhibition at the Espace Louis Vuitton on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, he has made an installation for a show that celebrates the idea of space as Man’s latest frontier for luxury travel.

The installation is in a smallish circular space – a little like a mini-planetarium. You sit in a circle, heads tilted up to a grey dome that simulates the night sky. A sudden deafening rush brings the craft itself hurtling back to Earth, towards you. But as it approaches, you see that it is not a craft at all. It is the ever-expanding iris of a human eye. This is the logo that Starck designed to promote Virgin Galactic, the company established by Sir Richard Branson to initiate brief flights into the stratosphere.

After the iris has landed with an almighty juddering, bodies – light, airy, slenderly muscular, beautiful and all dressed in clingy, iridescent grey, skin-like clothing and red Starck-Puma-range shoes – float and wheel across the night sky. Is this good art? It would be more honest to call it sleekly persuasive advertising for Virgin Galactic.

Starck himself will have quite a say in the success or failure of Branson’s project. What exactly will he do? A bit of everything, it seems. The Spaceport, to be sited in the deserts of New Mexico, is on the drawing board at the moment. He will also be bending his mind to issues of spacesuit design, the interior décor of the craft, and much else. Who knows, your complimentary baguette may come sheathed as only Starck knows how. For a deposit of $20,000, you can secure a seat for lift-off in 2009.

Starck, 58, is burly and tall, with a stomach like a Toby Jug. He looks eager, boyishly energetic, distracted. He is wearing a white T-shirt and Levi’s. His short-cropped hair is freshly ruffled. His chin is stubbly, his cheeks pockmarked with acne scars.

He talks wildly and impulsively, often staring up at the sky above the Avenue George V, in a kind of fractured English that at its best has an extraordinary, albeit bizarre, eloquence, and which at its worst seems to plunge into overblown nonsense. He is difficult to interrupt, and difficult to pin down. He is given to lofty, cloudy flights of philosophical fancy. In short, he sounds every inch the British caricature of the typical French intellectual.

We begin with his childhood and his education – in Paris, at the hands of the Jesuits. He hated it. He would escape to the Parc de Saint-Cloud to dream and to draw. He would sit in the sun – and in the rain – just thinking. Or, back home, he would sit beneath his father’s table making, unmaking, remaking. “You see, I was somewhere else. I was invisible, out of any society. I had an absolute problem about industrial society. For the most part, I was depressed . . .”

By the age of 19, he had established his first business – making inflatable objects. Then, in the 1970s, he designed nightclub interiors. A big break came in 1982 when President Mitterrand invited him to redesign the private apartments of the Elysée Palace. As every year has passed, his capacity for work, and the nature and the range of his activities, seem to have increased and diversified. When I suggest that at any time he is at work on 200 projects simultaneously, he says “more”.

And yet to hear him talk you would think that he was not so much the global brand that he has become, not so much the frenziedly energetic and successful man who at the last count owned at least 19 homes and a private plane, as a kind of anchorite, wholly set apart from the world, some spiritual master of slow time. And, what is more, a blundering, childlike innocent – something a little like Caspar Hauser, as immortalised by Werner Herzog.

“You know, the only beautiful job is creativity, and that is what I surrounded myself with when I was young, dream, invention, creativity. I am absolutely not ambitious, either to be somebody, or to make a lot of things. I am perhaps a little oversensitive . . .you see, we do not have the life we deserve. Life today is a little dirty, a little obsolete.”

When I ask what it’s like to be a global brand, Starck becomes impassioned. “You see, I don’t care. I am so out of everything. I have no mirror to see myself. To my neighbour, when I am at my oyster farm in Bordeaux, I am blowing in the wind. I am strictly nothing. I am less smart than my neighbours. I am a brand because I have worked well in 25 years. Like it or not, it is a success.”

Starck can’t really express where all his ideas come from. “Even for me, it is a mystery. In daily life, I am completely dumb. I am not fun or interesting. I would even go so far as to say that my consciousness is vulgar. But I am driven by a powerful, sophisticated subconscious. And in my subconscious I am everything. It is my magma. I am a magma-former.”

As for collaborating with others, there is no acknowledgement of other colleagues during our conversation, no reference to other designers who may have influenced him. In fact, Starck speaks with contempt about the idea of design.

“I work strictly alone. I live far from everything. There are no cocktails, no dinners. No luxurious houses. I am a modern autist . . .” A modern artist? “No, a modern autist. I have no computer. My real job is dreaming. I have the same drawing paper, the same drawing pad I have used for 25 years. I do everything entirely alone. I have worked with the same small team for 25 years. I send ideas from anywhere in the world. They check them. They return them to me.”

For Starck, designing a toothbrush and a hotel room is “the same thing. I don’t care about them. I care about an object or a place only if it gives a bit of life for my friends or my tribe. I am not interested in design for its own sake. That is a materialistic project.”

Why did he get involved with Virgin Galactic, I ask. “The only thing that interests me is the story of our animal species, our mutation,” Starck says. “It is the most beautiful poetry. It is, I think, to do with the myth of the angel. We have some intuition in our DNA that we must escape before the world explodes. It is about the freedom and the democratisation of space. My son, who is 11, will go.” (Starck has four children and reveals he is about to divorce his third wife. He introduces me to Jasmine, his fiancée.)

I end by trying to pin him down on what he is actually doing at Virgin Galactic. Starck takes a deep breath. “My job is to drive the philosophy, to keep the direction, to be the guard of the temple. These travellers will see the world is small, fragile, alone.”

— The Temptation of Space is at Espace Louis Vuitton, 101 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Paris (00 33 1 53575203; www.louisvuitton. com), until August 26

A passion for making gadgets

The Lemon Juicer
Its producer (Alessi) described the Juicy Salif as “the 20th century’s most controversial citrus-fruit squeezer”.

The Plastic Chair
No longer confined to school halls and community centres, the ubiquitous chair was given a baroque twist and the Louis Ghost Chair was born.

The Mixer Tap
The Starck Mixer Tap combined the distinctive shape of the letter Y with the functionality of a combination faucet.

SALMA CONWAY

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