Belgian furniture and product designer Stefan Schöning.
Image: Charlie De Keersmaecker
As a young design graduate in 2001, Stefan Schöning was advised to take his first design piece to trade fairs and show it to the world. It worked: the Folder chair was picked up immediately. “It’s become a sort of icon, but [back then] I never sold the chair,” explains Stefan in his Antwerp studio. “Everyone knew my work from this chair but I couldn’t sell the chair. I wanted to know what it was like to design it, produce it and sell it.”
The Whitegold series of plant pots in a variety of shapes and sizes.
It’s a familiar story and one that many designers have learnt the hard way – getting your work published is often much easier to achieve than getting work made and sold, and establishing a successful design practice. But despite a slow start, Stefan is now recognized as a leading designer in Belgium.
In 1994, he founded his multidisciplinary studio and since then has had various furniture, lighting and other household objects put into production, such as Invader, a chunky armchair named after the arcade game Space Invaders, and Crown, a hat rack made of simple steel tubing with the top forming a continuous circle of pegs. In 2008, he was awarded Designer of the Year by the Interieur Foundation.
Leading a multidisciplinary studio, Stefan doesn’t just design furniture. Works include domestic objects, kitchen grill pans, large-scale urban design, street lighting, seating and clocks for Belgian Railways and single objects auctioned for charity. A recent collaboration with Giuseppe Farris Architects means that Stefan has also worked on architectural projects. “Usually it is the architect who makes furniture,” he explains. “I wanted to prove that it could work the other way around.”
The first built result of this collaboration is an interior insert into the lobby of the Flemish Parliament. This two-level platform called De Loketten (The Counter Room) is a multifunctional space, which includes a reading area, cafe, shop and lecture or exhibition space. With Farris, Stefan has also completed an information desk in Bali and is currently working on a public park in Ghent. He also completed the exhibition design for Belgium is Design.
The advantage of the transdisciplinary approach is that each project is informed and improved by knowledge of other areas of design. Returning to object design, Stefan’s Whitegold collection for Belgian brand Domani uses a simple industrial material. Stefan has created a piece that is suitable for indoor or outdoor use, in domestic or major urban spaces. Whitegold is a series of white pots with white wire frame grilles. These can be used as plant pots in three sizes with the grille on top, and four sizes with the frame grille below the pot forming a base. The easy chair and ottoman sees the grill forming a base and seat back and there are also tables and lights with the same look. The name comes from seventeenth-century China when porcelain was so rare that it was called white gold.
According to Stefan, simplicity is key. “I believe that with a good idea – whether it’s a chair or a glass or a building or whatever – you have to be able to explain it on the phone. If you can explain an idea on the phone then it’s a good idea.”
