Johan Brunel is a Finish-French designer, born in 1977. Alongside the public and private-sector work he has been carrying out since 2003 through his design and production studio, he seeks out ways to explore and express his northern cultural heritage.
In 2014, he won 1st prize for the Prix Emile Hermès for La Capsule ventilée (The Ventilated Capsule), a bioclimatic relaxation cabin. In 2015 he was awarded a residency at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici where he worked on a project on the topic of water and thermal bath traditions. In 2018, he continued this line of research in Japan as a resident of the Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto.
Johan Brunel creates unique objects and has made installations and designs for iconic cultural sites such as the MC93 (Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint Denis in Bobigny), Cité Internationale des Arts, and the restaurant of the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. He has designed various ranges of furniture such as Usinage & Sentiments, a series designed and made in his studio, and Hand in Hand, a bamboo collection created in partnership with highly skilled artisans in Taiwan.
Today Johan Brunel seeks, through his projects, to accompany the birth or the rebirth of places with a human dimension, to find the right equations of scales, economy, materials and postures, to gather the conditions and tools that could encourage meeting, conviviality and work between users, helping them to live those places better.