Dutch designer Maarten Baas experimented with various creative disciplines before he found his calling in furniture design. His pieces are all far from ordinary, and the ideas behind his most radical works are fuelled by his intuition. ‘You don't really understand your own intuition, but that's totally the point of it,’ he says, ‘It’s a kind of a subconscious process, but it's very wise.’

 

It’s this intuition that led to him scorch furniture for his Smoke collection (his graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven), reinventing the grandfather clock in abstract forms and conceptualising a Surrealist indoor circus fairground. Known for his boundary-pushing designs, Baas has proved that he is not afraid to challenge norms and innovate when it comes to crafting pieces from scratch.

 

Baas’s work has been widely recognised. In 2009, he was named Design Miami’s Designer of the Year, the prestigious award first won by Zaha Hadid in 2005. Baas was honoured again in 2017 with a Milano Design Award. But despite being a household name in design today, Baas didn’t initially plan for a career in the industry. ‘I actually didn’t know much about the existence of design… or that it was a profession — and even more, that it was a profession where you could be expressive and take an artistic approach,’ he says. Growing up, he dabbled in music, amateur theatre and the visual arts and looked up to designers like Philippe Starck, video artist Bill Viola, and the European avant-garde movement CoBrA from the mid-20^th century.

 

Baas took an interest in design when he realised he could test the perimeters of functionality and expressive freedom in something as seemingly simple as a chair. He set off to study at the world-renowned Design Academy Eindhoven, the interdisciplinary educational institute often credited for incubating some of the century’s foremost designers. But it was not easy for Baas to adapt to the academy at first. ‘I really couldn’t find my place,’ he says. It was thanks to his high school best friend, who also studied at Eindhoven, and his father’s advice, that Baas chose to stay. ‘I always had a love-hate relationship with the way I dealt with my teachers and the things that were expected,’ he shares.

 

Despite his initial struggles, Baas’s aptitude for design led him to early success when he graduated. This was largely thanks to his Smoke project in 2002, which involved burning second-hand furniture in a bid to question our perceptions of beauty and the value we place on objects. It is this unconventional stance on thought-provoking pieces that has arguably made him a star.

 

In Real Time, Baas explored the concept of time, merging his knowledge of theatre, art, film and design to create unique clock designs. Launched in 2009 at Salone del Mobile in Milan, the series included the Sweepers, Analog Digital and Grandfather clocks. In 2016, Baas was tasked with turning Real Time into a clock for Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, which featured a video of a man behind the translucent clock face. ‘I don’t have a fascination with clocks or with time,’ he says, ‘but in a way everybody has a certain fascination with time and the passing of time, everybody is in the middle of it — your life is an amount of time and as human beings, and we know we have a limited amount of time.’ However, Baas notes that it is a ‘very nice subject to play with’ and that in this series, the various disciplines he is interested in come together: performance, film, installation and photography.

 

Baas currently has a studio in the Netherlands where he works with a team of 10 to 15 designers and freelancers. He explains that his process begins with an idea that he jots down with a simple sketch, sometimes even on the back of an envelope. Step by step, the team works out how to develop it and which materials — from metal and wood to glass and ceramics — and techniques are required to execute the vision. Specialists are brought in when there is a new technique, material or medium that the team is not familiar with.

 

Baas admits that handmade objects are a niche market but he is thankful that there is a demand for quality from customers willing to pay a premium for labour and materials. As he says, handmade objects ‘have a certain soul and a certain quality’.

 

Baas’s work is a testament to his belief that design can be expressive and artistic, pushing the limits of what is expected of a designer. And all these years later, the designer continues to be guided by intuition. ‘Intuition is a very important tool, and you can trust that even the unknown can guide you into better places.’

 

 

For details about Maarten Baas and his work, please visit: https://maartenbaas.com

 

This podcast series is produced in partnership with Design Anthology, a luxury interiors, design, architecture and urban living magazine.