O Brothers, Where Art Thou?

When people say the Bouroullec brothers keep a distance from the design world, they're talking not only metaphorically but also geographically. To get to the atelier of ''the hottest French designers since Philippe Starck,'' as they have been described, you take the Métro to Les Halles station in Paris, switch to a suburban line, rattle out a few stops past the periphérique, cross a canal and then wind through narrow lanes until you finally arrive at an anonymous redbrick garage. ''It's great,'' Ronan Bouroullec says, smiling slyly as he opens the door. ''People only come by if they really want to see us. Otherwise, we're left totally alone.''

Over the last year, more and more people have been beating a path to the small St.-Denis studio, where Ronan, 31, and his brother, Erwan, 27, work with a handful of assistants to concoct some of the most highly coveted consumer durables around -- designs like sleek perfume packaging for Issey Miyake, furniture for the remodeled offices of Hedi Slimane at Christian Dior and snappily pared-down work stations for Vitra that helped garner the brothers the Designer of the Year award at the Paris Salon du Meuble in January.

Erwan and Ronan emerged at a time when French fashion, architecture and design were enjoying a renaissance. But their rise from relative unknowns to having their work exhibited at august institutions like the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been fast-tracked, even by today's accelerated standards. The brothers first gained prominence in 1998, when a modular kitchen system -- designed to be customized by adding drawers, shelves and hooks -- captured the attention of the Italian design manufacturer Giulio Cappellini. (''I immediately believed in the quality of their work,'' Cappellini says.) Other pieces to gain instant celebrity include the ingenious Vase Combinatoires, an eight-piece polyurethane kit that can be combined to create dozens of container solutions; Tapis, a colorful striped carpet that is actually a clever puzzle of interlocking zippered mats; and Nuage, a modular polystyrene shelving unit that resembles a bunch of interlaced knuckle dusters (and formed the linchpin of their design of Miyake's Paris A-POC boutique).

But the innovation that captured the imagination of a design-hungry generation is without doubt the Lit Clos bed (2000), an airy boxlike structure raised on almost seven-foot stilts and reached by climbing a ladder. Made from aluminum, fabric and lacquered birch, the cozy hideaway alludes to the kind of leisurely loft lifestyle that for most of us remains unattainable but is no less appealing for the fact. Like many Bouroullec creations, it's designed to be easily disassembled and transported. ''Our generation moves from place to place, and we try to address this with practical, flexible solutions,'' Ronan says.

Just as the brothers are understatedly eloquent and deliberately self-effacing, their designs give off an aura of quiet intelligence and subtle wit. As concise and precise as haiku, their furniture employs minimal means to arrive at maximum impact. ''We strive for a certain délicatesse,'' Ronan says, ''but it has absolutely nothing to do with minimalism.''

After a quick tour of the brothers' decidedly maximalist atelier, Ronan and I head for the calm of the local cafe -- a smoky glass-and-Formica affair across from the canal, which ambles icily to the Seine. St.-Denis is an amalgam of banal gray and beige buildings, broken by the occasional colored balcony of a public housing project -- the antithesis of the sort of sophisticated spaces that one imagines the Bouroullec creations inhabit. ''I like the landscape here,'' Ronan says. ''It's a little less polished than Paris, and that suits us just fine.''