Marcel Wanders, Interview With One of the Top Designers in Europe

Marcel Wanders was born in Boxtel, the Netherlands in 1963. He graduated cum laude from the Hogeschool Voor de Kunsten (ArtEZ Institute of the Arts) in Arnhem in 1988 after being expelled from Eindhoven Design Academy. In 1995 he opened his studio in the beating heart of the Dutch capital, Amsterdam, and since them, he became one of the most beloved designers on the entire planet!

Marcel Wanders

Question – Your portfolio is filled with architectural, interior, and industrial projects – what was the one project that you enjoyed being involved in the most?

Marcel Wanders – As a designer the cool thing is to do what you never did, to do the work with a client that is new or to do a typology that you never did. I am a proud designer, and interior designers are lucky because we can do every day the things we love. We really have wonderful clients, wonderful projects, I can’t complain.

Marcel Wanders

Question – What makes you happy?

Marcel Wanders – There’s this moment… Making a design is like making a puzzle, right? And so, you get the box of pieces from your client you shake as loud as sound and all ten thousand pieces in it are an opportunity to create: the materials, the colours, the technology. And then, you’re asked to do a puzzle out of that ten thousand pieces. And you’re like ok I can do that and then, you open the box, you throw the pieces on the table, you look to the box to see the image that you have to make and there’s nothing. With that, you have to do a puzzle, you have to find what’s there, what’s the beauty in it. Now, there’s a moment that the last four or five pieces are not in it when the things between the puzzle pieces just disappear into nothingness and you have to make them fit, and that’s the moment I wanna go back to, and it makes me eternally happy.

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Marcel Wanders

Question – Let’s talk about Barovier & Toso Project. When did you start working on this project!

Marcel Wanders – We have been working together for the past six or seven years. We did a fabulous show in a big palazzo, with rotating chandeliers, swinging and we made puppets out of glass that moved around. And in that show, we started to realize that some objects were nice, and we made purses. And I felt like, with all work, we could not just be making a lamp we needed to make something incredible. And then, we all agreed that we were going to do a chandelier like no other, a chandelier that should have been made a hundred years ago, and that would stay forever with us, a piece that is filled with contemporary ideas. This chandelier was made in separate parts, and you can make it yourself, it has so much variety and it’s an incredible piece, and today we celebrate its birth and it’s a pretty baby, it’s a very pretty baby.

Marcel Wanders

Question – It’s the first that you have exposed it, right?

Marcel Wanders – It’s the first time that I see it, and this blows me away. I can’t wait to see it in different surroundings. That is magic. We’ve made a modular chandelier, you see the slim version, you see the wide version. We have three shapes, and we have them in three sizes. And you can put them together. And you can play with all of them. We have different sizes, different materials, different glass. We have tulips from Amsterdam, butterflies that are sweet. But tomorrow we might use roses and cockroaches on a black chandelier, so there’s a huge amount of chandelier like this that can be custom made, and people can build a house for it. So, we are really looking forward to developing this chandelier to be an eternal icon for the world.

See also: Interior Designers Top 20 London

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