This image was lost some time after publication.

Who

The design guru runs two companies: Michael Graves & Associates, an architecture/interior design outfit; and the Michael Graves Design Group, a product design firm. He's best known, though, for the incredibly popular line of housewares he's been designing for Target for almost a decade.

Backstory

Graves attended the University of Cincinnati and Harvard before setting up his architectural practice in 1964, gaining prominence by the end of the decade when he was famously anointed a member of the New York Five, a group of modernist architects whose other members included Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, and Peter Eisenman. Not long after founding his own practice, Graves started teaching architecture at Princeton and he spent close to four decades juggling teaching commitments with various architectural projects. He's since retired, but he's remains Princeton's Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, Emeritus at Princeton.

Of note

Graves' most recognizable architectural projects include The Swan and The Dolphin hotels in Orlando (which are filled with swan and dolphin sculptures, respectively), Disney's corporate headquarters in Burbank, Humana's headquarters in Louisville, the Houston branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati. As a product designer, he famously created the bestselling Alessi teakettle with a red bird whimsically placed on the spout. (When the water boils, the bird "sings.") And for his Target collection, he's designed just about every household product imaginable, including toasters, plungers, frying pans, and speakers. That he remains active these days is something of a miracle: Graves's prolific design career—and life—almost came to an end in 2003 when he contracted a nearly-deadly spinal infection that doctors believe was a case of bacterial meningitis. While the illness initially left him out of commission for a number of months—and rendered him a paraplegic—he later returned to work. In recent years, he's designed a line of products for the disabled called Solutions and overseen the $158 million renovation of the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

The look

Famously, many of Graves's buildings and products are cerulean blue. Many of the items in his wardrobe are that shade of blue, too.

Personal

Graves has been married and divorced twice and has adult kids with his ex-wives as well as a young son with a former girlfriend. Graves lives in a former Princeton University storage facility that he converted into a wildly-designed manse called the Warehouse. After his paralysis, he undertook a much-publicized effort to make it wheelchair accessible.