BassamFellows

"Luxury has to be comfortable and has to be easy," says Scott Fellows, half of the superstar design team BassamFellows. Fellows, a Harvard MBA and creative director, is credited with the complete makeover of Swiss fashion house Bally. His business partner, Craig Bassam, is an architect and designer whose career started with Bruce Eeles, the Australian architect who worked with Marcel Breuer. From Eeles, Bassam learned to emphasize nature's relationship to design. Together Bassam and Fellows have created Craftsman Modern, a new design movement that focuses traditional modernist principles – honest materials, solid construction, utility, beauty without elaboration – alongside warmth and natural materials, believing that nature is a key part of luxury living. "My work," says Bassam, "is all about merging the rationality and clarity of modernism with the warmth and texture of nature." Wood, brass and leather are the principle materials that inform Bassam's furniture pieces, which are mostly hand assembled and hand finished. "Modern classics are too often criticized for being a little bit too cold or a little bit too industrial or commercial like," says Fellows. BassamFellows is responding to this criticism, redefining modernism for the new millennium.