Highlights from a Low Country
CreditAdrian Gaut
On Sept. 24, in an avant-garde condo tower that butts up against the High Line, an unusual gallery called Chamber will open in Chelsea. Like a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities, it will be filled with the eclectic treasures of intrepid explorers.
Chamber will sell objects like a wall lamp mounted with a pair of nerdy black spectacles and a sound-diffusing cabinet that looks like a chaotic pile of raw wood. (The piece has functional drawers, but how many and where they are takes some guessing.) There will even be a limited-edition perfume distilled exclusively for the gallery, its scent “based on the experience of a Louis Kahn structure.” (That’s the news release talking.)
Chamber’s contents may seem offbeat, but they will not be random. They have been selected by Studio Job, an atelier based in Belgium and the Netherlands that is itself sprinkled with the dust of the Wunderkammer. Founded in 2000 by Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel, a married couple, Studio Job has produced furniture dense with Bavarian-folk-themed marquetry, a lamp shaped like a construction crane and bronze cat sculptures with eyes that literally glow. For Chamber, it acquired, designed or collaborated with other artists in the production of 100 objects. These will be sold at the gallery over the next two years. After that, a new curator will step in with a different collection.
Not unexpectedly, given Studio Job’s Low Countries provenance, many of the designers contributing to Chamber are Dutch. Some, like Mr. Smeets, were members of Droog, the influential Dutch collaborative known for high-concept objects. Gijs Bakker, for instance, a jewelry designer who founded Droog in 1993 with Renny Ramakers, a writer, has produced a stippled titanium brooch for the gallery that represents the moon as it was first photographed in 1968 from outer space.
Others whose work will be on display are graduates of the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, which remains a training ground for designers in the Droog mold. (Mr. Smeets and Ms. Tynagel met there as students.)
Maarten Baas, for example, made a sensation with his 2002 Eindhoven thesis project: traditional furniture pieces blackened with a blowtorch. He has returned to his Smoke series many times since. For Chamber, he crisped a workbench produced by Manufactum, a German company that is a favorite of the gallery’s 26-year-old Argentine founder, Juan Garcia Mosqueda.
It has been a while since so many thought-provoking Netherlandish designs congregated in a single New York venue. In the mid-1990s, at the SoHo gallery Moss, you could catch your first glimpse of work by Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Jurgen Bey, Droog designers who grew into superstars. In 1995, the curator Paola Antonelli installed pieces by Tejo Remy, Joep van Lieshout and other contemporary Dutch artists in the Museum of Modern Art’s cafe. (Mr. Garcia Mosqueda later did internships at Moss and with Ms. Antonelli.)
In 2009, Droog itself created a SoHo shop. It lasted less than two years, a casualty of an awkward duplex space and a global economic crisis. Mr. Bakker and Ms. Ramakers ended their partnership soon after it opened.
But Chamber is only one token of a new Dutch design invasion here. Three hundred and fifty years after the Dutch surrendered New Amsterdam to the British, several of their more creative descendants are reclaiming this turf.
In March, the first American branch of the Dutch hotel chain CitizenM opened in Times Square. Like its European siblings, it has tiny guest rooms, streamlined services and vibrant public spaces exploding with color. The design template is by Concrete, an architecture and branding company based in Amsterdam that is now working on a three-tower residential project on the New Jersey waterfront as well as affordable housing on Staten Island.
This month, finishing touches are being put on Huys, an office building at Park Avenue and 28th Street that has been converted into a 58-unit luxury condo. Huys (which is pronounced, and means, “house”) is an all-Dutch affair: The developer is Kroonenberg Groep, based in Amsterdam, and the designer is Piet Boon, who practices a lush, restrained international style. Karin Meyn, Mr. Boon’s wife, styled the cream-colored décor and selected the art, much of it by her compatriots. Piet Oudolf, the landscape designer probably best known to New Yorkers for planting feathery perennials on the High Line, is in charge of the rooftop garden. And at press time, workers were preparing to hoist Frederik Molenschot’s biomorphic cast-bronze chandelier in the lobby. (Mr. Molenschot, an Amsterdam artist, also supplied all of the room numbers, which are solid brass.)
With Huys getting ready to open in October, Mr. Boon has moved on — to Brooklyn. He designed Oosten (Dutch for “east”), a condominium to be built on the two-acre site of a former brewery at 429 Kent Avenue in South Williamsburg. Scheduled for completion in 2016, the complex, the first ground-up American project of the Chinese XIN Development Group International, will have 216 units, including 15 townhouses, and a 55-foot-long swimming pool.
And then there’s Moooi (“beautiful” in Dutch, with an extra “o” for emphasis). The design company, founded 14 years ago by Marcel Wanders, is known for selling eccentricities like Studio Job’s massive, stripped-down furniture made of paper. Early next year, it will open its first American showroom on East 31st Street and Madison Avenue.
Why New York? Why now? Like a chorus of old vaudevillians, the people who were asked to explain the recent influx of Dutch design all used the same word: timing. The American economy has bounced back faster than Europe’s, they said, and New York remains a cultural capital, with an international assortment of big spenders.
Lesley Bamberger, chief executive of Kroonenberg Groep, Huys’s developer, said he bought the building at 404 Park Avenue South 14 years ago as an investment. Then the New York real estate market heated up, and there is no one like the Dutch to seize a commercial opportunity. “The Dutch have always been tradesmen,” he said, adding that Huys is 90 percent sold. All that remains available (and only because they haven’t been listed) are five of the six penthouses, priced from $6.75 million.
“There are lots of business reasons and lots of emotional reasons” for the decision to open in New York, said Casper Vissers, Moooi’s co-founder and chief executive. Over the last four years, the company’s American sales have doubled every year and now represent 25 percent of its business.
On top of that, he added, New York is filled with architects and designers who are Moooi’s primary customers, although they may not realize that the company produces furniture. (Eighty percent of what Americans buy from Moooi is lighting, Mr. Vissers said, including a wiry LED-studded sphere called Raimond that is currently the company’s biggest seller in the States.) Moooi is also looking to expand to the West Coast and Chicago.
Robert Kloos, director for visual arts, architecture and design at the Netherlands Consulate General in New York, said that the recession did some Dutch designers a backhanded favor by causing the generous government subsidies awarded to the Dutch cultural sector to be cut by 20 percent.
As a result, designers diversified their practices and sought markets abroad. Compared with 2008, Mr. Kloos said, “I’m pleasantly surprised that these days not only are there 40 to 50 percent more projects by Dutch artists and designers in the U.S., but the quality has also accelerated.”
Yet it was precisely those subsidies that allowed Dutch designers to braise in the juices of their creativity without worrying about paying the rent. Piet Boon’s sleek, creamy neutrality makes him an easy sell. But how will the quirky creations associated with the phrase “Dutch design” fare today in the land of Ethan Allen?
Ghislaine Van Loosbroek Viñas, a New York interior designer born in the Netherlands and raised in South Africa, likes to sprinkle Moooi designs into her projects. One of her litmus tests with clients is a table the company developed in 2006 with the Swedish design collective Front, a life-size black pig balancing a tray on its head. “I love, love, love that table,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many people I showed it to before I found one who liked it.”
Ms. Viñas first balked at making generalizations about Dutch design, but soon identified some hallmarks. There is the abundant and adroit use of color, she said, and a playfulness that Americans might consider childish but is merely contemporary. “I think that what the American audience may not be ready for,” she added, “and what they don’t get automatically, is the irony and wit that so much Dutch design has.”
Will Moooi’s witty offerings be culled for an American market? Mr. Vissers said that what you see in Amsterdam you will get in New York, in an environment whose mise-en-scène resembles that of the flagship showroom.
But over all, the company has been toning things down. “For sure, in the past our collection was not fit to complete a house with,” said Mr. Wanders, the company’s creative director. “It was more you’d add a few Moooi pieces to give a place some extra character.” That is changing, he said, with the addition of quieter pieces that are not intended to start conversations, but simply furnish a room. “More and more, you see the collection of Moooi as a collection you can build interiors with.”
Speaking of the early years of Droog and the work that set so many tongues wagging, the avant-garde design purveyor Murray Moss made a distinction: “It wasn’t clever, it was smart,” he said.
Mr. Moss believes that the “wow factor” of curios like Mr. Wanders’s porcelain bud vase created from a burned-away sponge or Peter van der Jagt’s doorbell that rang a pair of wineglasses overwhelmed their ingenuity and depth. “There was humor, and there was hubris, and it resulted in a redefinition of what beauty was,” he said.
The passage of time has allowed such pieces to be viewed without the stigma of novelty, he said. They can be appreciated alongside the designs of other influential movements. And with Studio Job’s assemblage for Chamber, which brings new artists into the mix, one can also see how the Dutch design DNA is being passed down.
“I love that work,” Mr. Moss said. “I was the first to look at it. Now it’s going on to a new generation.”