Ana Kraš

Ana Kraš Does It All

By Bonnie Langedijk

Ana Kraš is a woman of many talents. “I’ve never understood why traditionally there’s this belief that you need to dedicate yourself to one field to succeed,” said the Serbian-born, Paris-based polymath. From the outset of her career, Kraš has defied convention, crafting a portfolio that sits at the heart of contemporary culture. Her creative endeavors—spanning furniture design, photography, drawing, set design, graphic design, and fashion—are both modern and timeless, sophisticated yet hands-on, always unapologetically reflecting her unique worldview.

Kraš's collaborations with leading cultural brands such as HAY, Maryam Nassir Zadeh, Apartamento, and Saks Potts have cemented her reputation. But the polymath longed for a singular platform to develop and express her work across art, design, fashion, and photography without compromise. Enter object brand Teget—‘navy blue’ in Serbian. Together with her partner Ruben Moreira, Kraš launched a brand that encapsulates all her multifaceted interests under one distinctive aesthetic umbrella.

In an era where creative boundaries are increasingly fluid, few dare to build companies beyond established paradigms. With Teget, Kraš is pioneering one of the few truly adaptable brands. The inaugural collection, Static Noise, presents a curated selection of lighting, furniture, and homeware, alongside collaborations with eyewear brand Retrosuperfuture, Danish fashion house Saks Potts, and textile company Unspun. But we’ll let Ana take it from here.

Bonnie: How do you relate to the concept of taste and aesthetics?

Ana: I do think there's good and bad taste, but only when it comes to behavior, not when it comes to aesthetics. I don't allow myself to judge something as subjective as taste. I also hate the idea of the uniformed taste. Imagine a world all in one style — even if it was the world that matches my taste — how uninteresting it would be without the diversity. Aesthetics, to me, is a spectrum of things that one person finds visually stimulating and satisfying. Some people have this spectrum very narrow and some wide. Mine is very wide. My taste goes from one extreme to the other and expands every day, so it's hard to define my style. 

What are the things that have defined or influenced your taste?

Ana: I never really thought about it until recently, but I think my parents' taste defined mine. When I think about the apartment I was born in, it has fundamental elements of my taste today.

“I do think there's good and bad taste, but only when it comes to BEHAVIOR, not when it comes to aesthetics. I don't allow myself to judge something as subjective as taste.”

What did it look like?

Ana: What I find beautiful is that it wasn't a very thoughtful interior. The idea of interior decoration didn’t exist. They loved textiles and there was always some really interesting upholstery fabric on the couch. It wasn't something that everyone had, but I also wouldn't say it was eccentric. It was always simple and elegant. The kitchen was covered in cork and our bathroom was covered in chocolate brown tiles with a chocolate brown toilet seat, sink, and bathtub. I love the color brown and I use it a lot in my work. Maybe it was influenced by this bathroom. Even the doors and all the window frames were painted in this very particular color, which was similar to the color of coffee with a lot of milk. It's something I've never seen to this day. It was a unique-looking household. It looked like the clothes my parents were wearing — translated to furniture — comfortable and simple, with interesting textures and fabrics.

Today, how would you describe your design philosophy?

Ana: As a designer, you always design for yourself in a way unless it's a very particular commission project. In my work, shapes are always simple and recognizable. I like sculpture on its own, but when it comes to furniture, I prefer it when a furniture piece looks like what it is instead of something very camouflaged – like how a child would draw a chair or a table. I'm also more curious about designing a system rather than a one-off piece. Each design becomes part of an alphabet that you can use to write more words or sentences continuously. One of the first things I ever designed as a student was the Bonbon lamp. The interesting thing for me about this project was the fact that you could design it in a million different ways – from super minimal to crazy, just by changing the shape and the color of the yarn.

It's a functional approach. Speaking of the Bonbon lamp, as a designer there are these products that become synonymous with who you represent as a designer. What’s your relationship to objects like the Bonbon lamp that reach people at such a scale?

Ana: I designed the Bonbon lamp as a student back in 2008 or 2009. Nowadays it's produced by HAY, so it's a product that’s out there and doing amazing. I took part in a competition and some of my projects won, and I got to show them at Salone Satellite, which is a part of Milan Design Week that features new and young designers. The Bonbon lamp received extraordinary attention. Everyone wanted to order hundreds for their shops. So many different brands wanted to produce it, and I was speechless, shocked, and overwhelmed and had no idea what to do. I made five pieces by hand to show them at the fair and it took me three days to create each piece. All this international press and interest, opened a door for me to have the kind of career that was difficult to imagine as a student in Belgrade.

What do you think made so many connect with this design?

Ana: I think people had a gut reaction to this lamp because you could see that it was made by hand, so there was warmth to it, while it didn't look crafty but clean and contemporary. I think this combination was something that made a lot of people gain interest in this lamp, and still does. Not a week goes by that I don't receive a picture from someone of how they're enjoying the lamp or they saw one somewhere. It's very touching to me that thousands of people around the world chose to have this lamp at home and spend their evenings in this light. It’s the most commercial product I've ever designed. A good commercial product has a long-lasting life and many variations, and the Bonbon lamp has it all. It has many copies as well. It might be one of the most copied lamps nowadays. I always hope no one thinks the copies are my designs because they don’t look great. I’ve never seen a good copy so far. Colors are always off and the wool looks crafty. 

I get that. What led to wanting to launch a brand of your own? You can’t box Teget into one category.

Ana: I had been considering starting some sort of a brand for some years now, but I don't like the idea of selling anything, so I kept delaying these thoughts. I started missing this place where I could express myself fully from design to creative direction, photography, and even communication. When you work for other brands, you're hired for one thing and they do the rest. It's never exactly how I wanted it, and very often it didn’t represent me. The feeling of having something where I can be fully me pushed me into this step. I didn’t know how to create a brand that encompassed all these different disciplines as it’s still unconventional. Industries are made to be very divided. Even though the word lifestyle is a terrible word — I hope someone comes up with a better term — I believe all these unnecessary things that can make life more beautiful or enjoyable should exist in one universe.

I agree. And let’s start a petition for alternatives for the word lifestyle.

Ana: I felt like over the last couple of years, the environment opened up or I just gained more confidence to try to do something my way. The most important ingredient was my partner Ruben. Even though Teget is 100 percent me, meaning every single thing is designed by me, he's 50 percent of that, because none of this would have existed if it wasn’t for him. He was the one to gently push me into making steps towards Teget, and he came along with me as my partner.

It’s refreshing to see someone choose to not adhere to those boundaries. We live in a world where so much starts to look the same, and Teget does live in its unique aesthetical world.

Ana: Teget is my taste. It doesn't belong to a trend. It captures a certain sensibility, which is a niche, but I think this niche is not tiny, globally speaking. If my goal was to maximize commercial success, I would have designed different things and objects that are more on trend. But, for me, the point of having this brand was to do things that I like and want to experiment with. Having your platform, self-funded, is the only place to do this a hundred percent. It's like a fun playground.

When creating across these disciplines, does your process change as your medium changes?

Ana: I’ve always done all these different things simultaneously because the difference in processes is what I find complimentary in my life. Furniture is a long process. I have to make a lot of technical drawings. It's working with manufacturers, carpenters, and production facilities. Photography – my documentary-style photography — needs no preparation. It's capturing what I find beautiful, which is everything around me. It never feels like work. And art is just really relaxing, free, and spontaneous. It's like writing a letter, you just start and end somewhere.

What about commissioned work?

Ana: I have this deep interest in diving into a client’s weaknesses and strengths, and what I could contribute that brings something new to the table. It's almost a bit of a psychological strategy, but then it involves design. It's both liberal and technical. Creative direction is interesting as well. I thought it would be much easier for me to do the creative direction for my brand than for a client, but it turned out to be much harder.

Why is that?

Ana: I'm not quite sure why. It's harder to see yourself than to see someone else. When you look inward, you see way too much. It's hard to edit. And at the same time, it's hard to pick something that truly represents you.

That’s true. What was that like when designing the branding for Teget?

Ana: When I started figuring out how I wanted it all to look — I designed everything from the tag and website to the logo and everything else — it didn't come to me naturally. I realized there were a million things that I thought could look beautiful, but it didn’t represent Teget. It was beautiful, but was it me? I had to ask myself more questions and it became a bit more mathematical. For the logo, I knew that I wanted Italics because I've been intuitively using them since I was a student. I think of Teget as something quite delicate and not aggressive, and I felt like very thin letters would make sense. I wanted something quite technical because my favorite thing in the world is technical architecture drawings. When it came to the website and everything else, I knew I didn't want to have a white e-commerce shop, it just didn't feel like me. Teget means navy blue in Serbian, but it doesn’t define the brand at all. If there was one word to describe Teget, I would say contemporary. And if I was going to assign the color to contemporary, it would be gray. Gray has both an association with the classic and technical, but it also has a modern feeling. It pairs great with both colors and non-colors, which are both things that I like to use. It's also the color that changes the most depending on the light. It can change with a new perspective. It’s an accumulation of all the things I felt about the brand. The branding wasn't about trying to make it pretty, it was about making sense of it all.

What is it that you love about architecture so much?

Ana: My mother and father ran a copy shop, and I spent a lot of time there. Many of their clients were architects. This was back in the late eighties and nineties, and they would print huge copies of their projects. It was printed on this transparent paper and everything was done by hand. My parents would fold them in this beautiful, almost origami way. I was always interested in buildings and houses. It's something I inherited from my father who wasn’t an architect by profession, he was an engineer for mechanisms of big machines. He was a single father to his first child at 18, and he didn't have the luxury to study what he desired, but he was an extremely talented architect. He was one of those people who could make anything. He built a small house in Montenegro all by himself. He made every piece of furniture too. He even designed specific wooden window frames that are good for the kinds of winds that blow from the Adriatic seat over the cottage. He made it all by hand. He also made a bunch of furniture pieces for me. At the time, I didn't see it as furniture design or architecture, I just thought my father made things. Now I realize that he was a genius. In his free time, he would sketch and design the houses he would like to make. He was really into Japanese design. He studied Japanese wood joints and roof construction. I grew up in Belgrade and when I was very little the war started and the borders were blocked for many years, which meant my father didn't get to travel. For the last 35 years of his life, he couldn't leave the country because he couldn't get a passport or visa. He is a great example of someone whose mind and knowledge are so wide that they know no borders, that it doesn't matter if he travels. He passed away about eight years ago. My biggest dream was for us to build a house together, but while he was still alive, I couldn't afford it, and he couldn't either because of the situation in our country.

I lost my dad just over two years ago, and I have quite a similar relationship. My dad was an art director and he worked in advertising. He’s taught me everything I know about design, branding, and creativity in general. Some of the drawings on HURS are drawings he made. I completely understand how doing those things can make you feel so close to someone, but at the same time, sad that they can’t be a part of it.

Ana: My passion for architecture came from him and the fact that we didn't get to make a piece of architecture together. Teget, and everything I do, feels a bit like an extension of him. By me doing these things, I feel like he gets to do them with me in a way. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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