Volker Haug is a unique character. He is not so much a successful creative-business owner as a ringleader in the three-ring-circus sense. I got the impression from speaking with Volker and his team that there are creative acrobatics going on every day at every level of this small studio.
Volker Haug Studio is a multi- dimensional melting pot. Volker is from Germany, but the team has had members from Morocco, Japan, Finland, Spain and (yes) Australia, among other diverse places, over the last 18 years. Another dimension of diversity in the studio? Credentials, skills and expertise. The practice employs a jeweller, a trained picture framer, individuals skilled in working with particular materials (brass, glass, ceramics) and, of course, formally qualified industrial designers. From within this mix, the ideas come from many directions, and all have a voice.
The face of the Glass Anton Mini (2020) holds light and reflects its surrounds. Stylist: Marsha Golemac.
Image: Morgan Hickinbotham
Volker himself? Originally a hairdresser. Okay, that’s a bit misleading. It is true that Volker’s original formal training was in styling and cutting hair, but that doesn’t really explain how deep the obsession with light and light fittings runs. In their family home, his parents taped the light switches down to stop Volker flicking them on and off when he was barely old enough to reach them. He designed and assembled his first ever light fitting – in a woodworking shed on a friend’s property in the Czech Republic, on a long-ago summer holiday – when he was aged 10. By that stage, he had been playing around with bulbs, lighting parts and fittings for some time, and had even bought himself a silver dip bulb out of his pocket money.
So, the young Volker trains as a hairdresser, working as a stylist by day, but designing and fabricating light fittings by night. Those first lighting pieces were originally for his own salon, but as time went on, they became for others in the same trade. Finally, the passion took over and Volker did a stint with the skilled lighting designer Geoffrey Mance. Lessons were learnt, inspiration blossomed and then, 18 years ago, Volker struck out on his own.
These cast aluminium lights with dichroic glass were shown at Milan Furniture Fair 2019.
Image: Mattia Iotti
Clear methodology and ethical practice figure largely in the behaviour of the studio as a team and as a business. Volker Haug Studio has successfully resisted the pressure to manufacture offshore in jurisdictions with cheaper labour, and this desire guides decision-making at every level. There is both an ethical and a practical dimension to this: ethically, to support Australian – and specifically (more often than not) Victorian – manufacturing and making; and practically, because the lush materiality of the designed product’s constitution demands an immediacy. The team and their collaborators need to get together physically to touch and work the materials, to plumb the depths of the expressive potential in these specific substances – brass, folded aluminium, cast aluminium, glass in all its forms, and so on.
It is customary, when describing a design studio’s work, to summarize the thematic commonalities, and departures, across its folio. This is not easy to do here, as the work is equally divergent and convergent: recognizable but always different, depending on the material employed and ideas explored. One thing that the fittings have in common, apart from their local manufacture and enthusiastic army of global fans, is a lush, rich, almost edible materiality. This can be seen in the und Messing collection (translating as “And Brass”), the products represented at repeated Milan events, the fittings used throughout the Bleecker Street project in New York, and countless other projects all over the world.
The Longton Sconce in Gunmetal.
Image: Morgane Le Gall
The images on these pages will themselves give you a deeper understanding of the creative milieu out of which the objects have emerged; they are so much more than simply objects. As a business, the studio collaborates on every level, working with its patrons to shape its product around feedback, and taking the opportunities for dialogue afforded by shows in Milan, Melbourne and elsewhere. Ultimately, this is a local, Brunswick-based studio that well and truly punches above its weight on the global stage. I wish them another 18 years of success – and more.
Source
People
Published online: 19 Jan 2023
Words:
Marcus Baumgart
Images:
Carmen Zammit,
Depasquale and Maffini,
Kate and Rudi,
Mattia Iotti,
Morgan Hickinbotham,
Morgane Le Gall,
Pier Carthew,
Tom Ross
Issue
Artichoke, December 2022
