Sometimes it's supposed little things that make a designer grow.

In the case of Matteo Thun, it was an espresso cup that the native of South Tyrol designed in 1990 on behalf of Ernesto Illy.

The thick-walled vessel with its circular handle, which stands on a saucer with no ordinary indentation but “a hump”, has become a design icon.

It is just one of many successful products that Matteo Thun has designed with his Milan studio since the mid-1980s.

Peter Philipp Schmitt

Editor in the department "Germany and the World".

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Shortly before, he had belonged to a group of designers who didn't want to stick to the rules that the market, the industry and the customer dictated to them.

Matthäus Antonius Maria Graf von Thun und Hohenstein comes from a Bolzano family of entrepreneurs. His brother Peter Thun – meanwhile with his son Simon – took over his parents' company, Thun AG, which was founded in 1950 as a ceramics workshop.

Matteo Thun actually wanted to be a pilot, and later a painter.

A second Emil Nolde, as he tells it.

So he studied painting – with Oskar Kokoschka.

Through him he found his way to architecture.

He studied and received his doctorate at the University of Florence.

As his thesis, he submitted the design of a kite, which he had drawn from a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci.

Thun only gave up aviation when he began working for Ettore Sottsass in Milan in the late 1970s.

There, too, he achieved great things, even if only as an assistant to the famous master.

"From Spoon to City"

Sottsass had him design metal objects for a company that was still largely unknown at the time: Alessi.

This resulted in the brand's successful stainless steel range.

Sottsass and Thun were also two of the key protagonists of the Milan design group Memphis, who opposed their potential clients with their work.

The members, including Michele de Lucchi, Barbara Radice, Andrea Branzi and Aldo Cibic, did not want to be dictated how a product they designed should look just so that it would be easier to sell because of its apparent functionality.

Thun was involved in this "frenzy" for almost four years, then he left the group and set up his own business as a designer and architect in Milan.

Since then, the maxim “from the spoon to the city” (Ernesto Nathan Rogers) has shaped him.

For Thun, whose Studio Matteo Thun & Partners now has 80 employees, this means thinking holistically, both on a small and large scale.

And so he designs everything “from the coffee cup to the restaurant and from the mountain hotel to the cookware” that is needed at the moment, but only what is necessary.

Thun still opposes design for design's sake, against ever-more he sets the idea of ​​no-design.

He is not interested in lifestyle products, and yet as an architect he builds wellness oases such as the Hotel Vigilius Mountain Resort on the Vigiljoch above Lana near Meran, which lies in the landscape like a tree trunk.

It is a "wooden house of modernity" at an altitude of 1500 meters, to which there is no road but only a cable car.

Of course, there is no WiFi either.

Thun, who will be 70 next Friday, also has a principle for this: "Eco instead of ego".

Because he, the designer, is the least important thing in all of this.