A Furniture Designer Who Learned Under Raf Simons
newyorktimes_Michaël Verheyden, who combines simple shapes with rich textures, will show a new collection at Design Miami.
By Samuel Rutter
As a student at Belgium’s LUCA School of Arts in the late ’90s, Michaël Verheyden counted the fashion designer Raf Simons as a mentor — he even modeled for Simons before launching his own line of handbags. Yet he graduated with a degree in industrial design, which he put to use when he and his wife, the designer Saartje Vereecke, bought their first home, in Genk, in 2009. After failing to find the sort of furniture they’d envisioned for the space, they started making their own pieces, and have been experimenting with clean-lined forms ever since. Verheyden’s latest collection, Archetypes, a 20-piece range that the Belgian gallerist Pierre Marie Giraud is showing at Design Miami, includes brass lamps, marble tables and a classic oak screen. It was inspired by the work of Donald Judd and Jean-Michel Frank, and, like them, Verheyden is interested in simple structures, but also in rich textures. “If I design a chair, I want people to recognize its basic shape — but then I like to play with the materials,” he says. Indeed, the collection’s benchlike sofa is strung with Manila cord and sits atop gouged oak legs evoking snakeskin, while a decorative brass bowl is polished smooth in parts but left rough and unfinished at its base. With his Tabula Runda writing desk, though, Verheyden plays with form as well: It contains two hidden drawers and legs that have been moved from the edges to the center, challenging our notions of just what an ideal table might be. As Verheyden says, “The answer is always to look at something long enough to see how I might change it.”