Holidays Get Surreal At Target

Boontje Supplants Santa With 'A Magical World'

When modernist designer Tord Boontje set out to remake Target, he trained the store's trademark bull's-eye on the back of one man.

Santa.

Yes, in the retail chain's decorations, you can come upon Dancer and Dasher, upon Prancer and Vixen, but there's not a Kris Kringle in sight.

For the holidays, Boontje gave Claus the heave-ho-ho.

"I wanted to get rid of the old cliches," Boontje, the 38-year-old Dutch-born product designer, says by phone from his studio in Bourg-Argental, France. "This is a much more contemporary way, a fresh look."

So when Target hired Boontje 18 months ago, he was determined to push the nation's biggest design boutique in new aesthetic directions.

That meant forsaking the holiday season's holly and ivy for New Age, fairy-tale imagery. In his meticulous dreamscapes, antlers become trailing blossoms that converge with looping, bird-filled tree branches.

Target is introducing the eye-catching collaboration in a bold, slightly surreal television commercial, for which Boontje designed the sets. After the camera swoops from a winter picnic into a tree trunk, the gray suit-clad designer, surrounded by an ice-scape, says invitingly: "I have created a magical world for you."

Boontje's brand of magic also can be found on Target's shelves. His budget designs, mostly tableware, include a 35-piece collection that has a red acrylic candelabrum, red stoneware dishes, frosted candleholders, mugs, trays and a "Tord Holiday Bundle Pack" of paper plates, cups and napkins, all in the designer's motif.

"If I can do things that are really mass-produced and affordable for a very large audience, that's really the heart of good design," the soft-spoken Boontje says.

Boontje is not listed on Target's roster of "home designers" -- which includes Michael Graves, Isaac Mizrahi, Thomas O'Brien and Victoria Hagan -- but as one of the most imaginative minds on the contemporary scene, he's in the same class. His work is favored in fashion and design circles, and the "Tord touch" can be found at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and London's Victoria & Albert Museum.

Boontje has made a name for himself by breaking from generations of modernists to bury cold, spare interiors in romantic garlands of cut-out flowers. His alternative aesthetic has taken only about four years to jet-set from Milan, the capital of contemporary design, to Main Street.