Philippe Starck's weather stations aim to bring the outside to your bedside. Philippe Starck owns a dozen houses worldwide. As he strolls his domains, he almost always knows the temperature outside, the atomically accurate time, the moon's current phase, and the probable incoming weather.
The data comes from microprocessors scattered among his rooms, all of them packaged in polycarbonate boxes with LCD screens. They're manufactured by a Hong Kong company called Oregon Scientific, and he's been collecting them for a decade.
"It's a drug," Starck says of his home supply of climatic information. "I am complete addict," he adds, in his inimitable English.
Starck is not only a heavy user of Oregon Scientific, but he has also become a co-developer. Two years ago the company hired him to create a line of weather stations after executives learned of his obsession when they spotted his name on order slips.
The resulting "Philippe Starck with Oregon Scientific Collection" is not a technological breakthrough-the 15-year-old company had already packed weather statistics into clock radios and even phones. Starck did, however, clarify the graphics and streamline the shells. Clark Chen, the company's marketing director for North America, acknowledges that its previous weather-tracking instruments "tended to look very industrial."