Job Smeets, Maarten Baas, Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders, Tord Boontje: These are the big Dutch (and Belgian) names with whom Moss is in close association. He works with them personally, both in their industrially manufactured pieces as well as their limited edition studio pieces. “I’m not interested in who’s hot or not,” he says. “I’m interested in what goes on in a designer’s mind.”

His relationship with Maarten Baas exemplifies this point. Several years ago he debuted Baas’s “When There’s Smoke” collection in New York and brought the Dutch designer to U.S. renown. The series, in which Baas literally sets fire to a classic piece of furniture—a chair, piano, or credenza—produces a haunting transformation of the surface that leaves the form intact but exposes its fragility.

Their next collaboration ups the ante to a fantastic level that signals either the end of Western civilization or the broken relationship between design and function. They plan to burn a 1940s sailing vessel, currently docked in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, because “we though  the biggest fear of fire was at sea.” First they have to figure out how to burn it, and then how to transport and show it. “We don’t even know,” says Moss, “if it will fit in any venue.”

Click on the photo gallery to the left to see Moss’s current favorites. 

Moss: 150 Greene St., New York; 212/204-7100; mossonline.com

"Murray Moss" originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's Fall 2008 Table of Contents.