The Studio

Design has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember — not as a profession, but as a feeling.

My mother is from Zurich, Switzerland, and growing up I was surrounded by a distinctly European relationship with beauty and design. I lived with pieces by designers whose names I would only later come to understand, and through travel experienced places and architecture touched by creative minds such as Piero Lissoni, John Pawson, Tadao Ando, Alvar Aalto, Philippe Starck, and Francesco Rota.

But what stayed with me was never the name. It was the feeling.

From a very young age, I understood that a home could have a soul. I felt it in every wall, every piece, every material and every light. Money never spoke to me; the things within a home did. My eyes would take them in, somehow translating what they saw to my heart. Every object was telling part of a story.

There is a German word, Gemütlichkeit, that comes close — a sense of warmth, belonging, comfort and atmosphere with no perfect English translation. It is that inexplicable feeling when you enter a beautifully considered place and something inside you responds. You may not be able to explain why you want to stay. You simply feel it.

Even my name carries a thread of this story. My mother deeply admired the timeless elegance of Princess Caroline of Monaco, whom she considered a style icon, and the name Pierre was inspired by her son, Pierre Casiraghi. Looking back, it feels almost poetic. This European appreciation for architecture, fashion, beauty and the art of living wasn't something I discovered when I became a designer. It was woven into me from the beginning.

Perhaps that is why the façade of a home has always fascinated me. A façade can almost be a Fata Morgana — a beautiful mirage that captures the eye but doesn't necessarily reveal the soul within. For me, the true story begins when architecture, light, material and the objects we choose to live with begin speaking to one another.

I understood that language long before I knew its terminology.

Today, that is still what I search for when I design. I don't simply want to make a space beautiful, expensive or impressive. I want to give it soul. I want every wall, light, material and piece to quietly tell a story — to someone's eyes first, and ultimately, to their heart.

Because for me, great design has never been about what something costs. It is about what something makes you feel.

— Pierre Miller