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Dutch designer Tord Boontje believes that there's nothing wrong with making the world a little prettier.

With products such as his now-iconic Garland Light, a stylized metal vine that wraps around a bare light bulb, Boontje has played a major role in bringing a decorative edge back to contemporary design.

Whether drawing inspiration from forests, flowers or animals, he is also unapologetic about injecting a little fantasy into everyday objects.

At the same time that he designs for high-end furniture and fabric companies, Boontje has undertaken projects in partnership with artisans in developing countries. Working with the Los Angeles home-accessories company Artecnica and its Design with Conscience program, he has developed lamps in Brazil and vases in Guatemala to help local artisans earn better wages.

During this week's 2008 Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, Boontje presented his latest - and largest - collection produced under the program: a ghoulish set of black ceramic cookware, wooden utensils, aprons and oven mitts that are collectively known as the Witches' Kitchen.

Many people think of you as the guy who brought ornament back to modern design. Why is decoration important?

When I started getting interested in decoration, the whole minimalist thing was so incredibly big. For me, it was a completely useless style, even though I consider pure, early modernist architects like Le Corbusier heroes. These architects said: 'Let's make really affordable housing that's light and airy.' It was a good idea, and healthy for people. But then the idea got hijacked, and it just became a cheap way of building instead of a human way of building. And it got obsessive.

Things now are built as cheaply as possible, not as beautifully as possible. It's just cold, empty, inhuman. In Victorian times, it wasn't like that. I think: 'No, I don't want to live in that world.' I want exactly the opposite, something that's human and emotional.

So where do you find inspiration?

I like watching Alfred Hitchcock and Tim Burton films because they excite me. Our lives in the city should be like that. You have to wonder: Why is everything so banal? I was trained in this very Bauhausian tradition of industrial design, and automatically we didn't decorate. It's forbidden territory. But if you start to look at design back before the Industrial Revolution, you realize that a lot of it was floral. It's fundamentally deep in our culture, so that became a really interesting topic for me to work with. It felt natural.

With a product like the Garland Light, it's pretty but there's nothing nostalgic about it. It's looking forward to the future.

How did you develop the Witches' Kitchen collection?

The cooking pots are made in Colombia. For hundreds of years, people have been making cooking pots with clay they find in the river there. The traditional pots have upturned handles with a hole in them, so you can hang them with a chain above a fire. Because we cook on a stove, we didn't need the chain any more, so I turned the handles down to make them much more solid to hold.

The lids and pots stack to keep things warm. The lids also work as serving bowls or even as trivets so you can put your hot pans on the table.

Because this village is in the middle of the jungle, we picked leaves and put them in the raw clay.

When a pot is fired, the leaves burn away and these sort of fossil marks remain. It took us two or three months to develop this technique and make it perfect. Now, it's a beautiful product and they're so proud of it.

What about the utensils?

In Guatemala, they do really fantastic wood carving. We did these spoons - stirring spoons with tasters and other combinations. They look like really ancient tools. You have the knife to see if the potatoes are done - or to have a good fight in the kitchen! The salad servers are called Extra Hands because they look like hands. It's all made of mahogany, which is a sustainable wood. A women's collective in Brazil made the gloves and aprons.

How is the project good for those artisans?

Our aim was to make something better, something special, that could sell for a higher price than their previous things. These people are really concentrating on making a higher-quality product and developing their community. It's using design as a powerful tool. This is really the beginning of the collection, and we're going to keep expanding it.

What's the most important role of design today?

Design is a big area to work in and there are many different sides, but I think there's definitely a cultural value to what we do. It's really important that design remembers how to put value into daily life. That's our goal. It's not just to make it more efficient or to make products that you can sell more of.

Consumerism is not interesting. That's not the role of design. Design means thinking about sustainability and culture. We should be much more intelligent about how we build our world. I think too much of design is too dumb.