Who would’ve thought that Tomorrowland, one of the biggest electronic music festivals in the world, would get into design? When you think about it, it’s not that odd; the Belgian festival is known for its crazy stage designs and overall setting. So why not bring that into their offices and, ultimately, into people’s homes? Together with architect and designer Dieter Vander Velpen, they created Great Library Design Studio, through which they’re launching furniture, planters, and even taps.
Based in Antwerp, a city with a vibrant and forward-thinking creative scene, Vander Velpen has been at the helm of his architecture studio for ten years now, which focuses mainly on homes and hospitality projects. He met someone from Tomorrowland for a personal project, and from there, their relationship started to flourish. So much so, that the architect is now in charge of their joint project, a design studio working on Art Nouveau-inspired furniture pieces and spaces. Their new collection, Morpho, is about to be presented worldwide during the Design Week in Milan. Today, we speak with the Belgian designer about the relationship between music and architecture, flora and fauna, and his relationship with the festival.
Hello Dieter, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. How are you today, and where do you answer us from?
Hi Arnau, nice to meet you. I’m good, I’m great. I’m in Antwerp today. We were in London last week, in Milan next week, and in New York after that, but now we’re in Antwerp in our office.
Precisely. You’re based in Antwerp, a city known for its original, unconventional, daring approach to design — be it industrial, fashion, interior, etc. How do you think this environment influences your work?
Yeah, I think in Belgium, Antwerp is our favourite city to live. Even though I wasn’t born here, I moved to study and fell in love with the city. I think it has a great combination of historical and new buildings. There’s so much history, so many beautiful, inspiring buildings and streets, and somehow I think over the centuries it attracted a lot of interesting and creative people. It has this mix of a rich history and innovative, creative people (designers and artists) that creates a good atmosphere. Even though most of our work is not in Antwerp, I think it’s a wonderful base camp to get inspired and live and work with the team. But then, travel from here to other places to work abroad or wherever projects bring us.
In 2013, you founded your own architecture studio. After all these years, the team has grown and your portfolio isn’t short of impressive. How do you remember the first years, and how do you evaluate the evolution over the past decade?
So we typically say it was in 2015; before that, I was kind of a one-man show for a bit more than a year. But then in the summer of 2015, I made the jump to expand the studio, rent an office, and hired the first people full-time. Since then, the team has grown indeed. Now we’re fourteen people.
Looking back at the first years, I think it was really exciting and it all went super fast. We always had the ambition or the dream to work internationally, and while you can’t really expect to do that in the first years, we actually did. Immediately after starting, people found our work on social media and we started doing a lot of projects abroad. It wasn’t a slow growth, it was quite aggressive in the beginning. We worked day and night but we enjoyed it.
That’s normal, it’s the excitement of the beginning, when you see a dream project is finally becoming real.
We were lucky to find great designers who were also very passionate and driven. We were thrown into the deep, did everything ourselves and we had to figure out a lot of things along the way. Just creating extraordinary, beautiful work — that was the singular goal, and I think that brought us here.
You’ve specialised in high-end residential and hospitality projects. Were you always attracted to these?
Yes, it has always been my main passion. I think there’s something very personal in doing a home for a person, or a couple, or a family. You can create something very tailored, which is very much at the core of our work. We always refer to the idea of couture architecture, meaning you design something unique for each client. This gives every project a unique individuality, but also, it’s inspiring because every person is unique, has different tastes, personality aspects, passions, and collections. It’s always a combination between ourselves (our signature), the person (the client), and the location. It could be an existing building, it could be a plot, it could be a beautiful location. These three things together always result in a new, unique combo.
Also, I think in a personal home you can go the furthest into details. Our preference is to do total projects where we go from the architecture to the interior design, to the small details, the furniture, and the fabrics, and make it all come together. You can rarely do this in other projects like hotels or offices. You can go far but it’s different. We didn’t look for hospitality projects in the beginning, but we ended up getting these requests because people having these places also want to bring a residential touch.
Do you see yourself delving into other areas of design like retail, ephemeral architecture, etc.?
Speaking for Dieter Vander Velpen Architects, not for a Great Library Design Studio, we want to keep the focus on residential, but we always keep a small portion of our time open for special projects — that could be anything. But the main focus for now remains on homes.
What are three elements you’d say are ‘a must’ in someone’s home? Or at least, in your projects?
One is natural materials. We always like to work with real, natural materials such as wood and stone, which have a timeless quality and also are calming, especially wood. The touch of wood is something you can’t replicate. That’s an essential part in our homes. I think a second item is a personal touch through objects like books or art — items that show the personality of a client or the person who lives there. As a third element, we always try to make sure in every project there’s at least a unique element. Something special, something new that we designed custom for that home. It could be a feature, a special wall, a new kitchen island, or something that we’ve never done before.
Let’s delve into Morpho, a joint project between yourself and Tomorrowland. First of all, how did this pairing come up? I wouldn’t immediately associate your work to an electronic music festival, precisely.
I think it’s important to mention the structure. We started a separate design studio together with Tomorrowland a few years ago, Great Library Design Studio. To explain how that happened, I need to go a little bit further back in history.
Alright, let’s delve into it.
One of our first projects (about ten years ago) was a house for one of the people behind Tomorrowland. After that, they invited us for a design competition for their first big office in Antwerp. We won that competition, and that’s how we started working directly with the festival. We designed their office as well as restaurants Mesa and Secreta.
They started diving into the hospitality scene and looking into projects, so we started working on case studies and feasibility studies for some of these projects. Some didn’t happen, others are still in the pipeline or on the drawing board. That’s how we started working on the question of how to translate the DNA of Tomorrowland into a real building like a hotel or a restaurant.
Did you find an answer to that translation you mention?
That’s how the idea to design furniture to complete those projects started — to not just design a hotel but also the bed, sofa, chairs, etc. We decided to set up a more dedicated studio so we could invest more time in this and start working on a unique architectural design style just for them. This way, we could build a second team working on those elements and have people immersed in this design language. It was very freeing aesthetically to immerse ourselves in this Art Nouveau style because it’s one of the main inspirations also for the festival, the stages, and the graphic elements.
So tell us more about this special design studio.
That was three years ago, and that new studio is called Great Library Design Studio. It’s a collab between Tomorrowland and I. The team shares office space here in our building but they’re also working very closely with the in-house creative team of the festival. So truly something in between. It’s Great Library Design Studio that has developed the Morpho furniture collection.
The first project is a collection of furniture. You’ve acted as Creative Director and worked closely with other Belgian brands (Ethnicraft, Atelier Vierkant, and RVB). What was that process like — selecting them, bouncing off ideas, crafting the pieces, etc.?
It was a very exciting process! Before finding the partners, we started working on the design concepts together with the team (we have a team of architects and product designers). We developed a few key pieces, some of which are going to be launched now, while others will probably launch in the future. But we started making sketches, developing in 3D before we were in contact with those partners and Belgian brands.
So how was working with these brands?
Tomorrowland came in contact with Ethnicraft and got together, they were on board immediately. They’re also based in Antwerp but, at the same time, have a huge atelier in Indonesia with several artisans and craftspeople. Based on our 3D renderings and drawings, they started making prototypes, we flew back and forth a couple of times to fine tune the prototypes, and from there it evolved.
Another project we are working on spurred the idea to do planters, so we reached out to Atelier Vierkant, who we had worked with in the past. Next, if you design a hotel room, you also want to do a bathroom, so you want to design taps — and we did that. I don’t even remember how how we came exactly in contact with RVB, but we were very excited again to work with the Belgian historical brand that makes the pieces in Belgium.
They’re powerful collaborations, especially because you lift up each other as Belgian companies.
I think that’s also something very typical for Tomorrowland — it’s made in Antwerp and the main festival is here, but people from all over the world come to the city. Now they’re also exporting the brand to other locations. Similarly, what we’re doing with the furniture is also something that is designed in Antwerp. Some things are made in Belgium, but it’s immediately with the goal of making it available all over the world — Mexico, Thailand… Everywhere where people want these things.
This potential audience could be people who know and love the festival or it could also be other design-minded people that think it’s a beautiful piece, or one of the furniture pieces fits perfectly in their home, or they stumble upon the taps and think, whoa, I like this, it’s something new, I want this for my home.
As the project is in partnership with Tomorrowland, I’m curious to know if during the meetings to develop the collection, you were listening to some DJ sets in the background? Maybe music played a role too?
Well, definitely! But unfortunately, I didn’t always write down which music we were listening to. I think it’s quite nice that, for example, in the central double-height atrium of the new Tomorrowland office, we included a huge bar with a built-in DJ booth with the idea that people can just, whenever they feel like it, put on music, so it’s always a different sound.
At the same time, this week, instead of having the DJ there, they brought in a grand piano, put it in the lobby, and then hired a professional piano player to play music to inspire the team. So it’s really varying.
Nature was a main source of inspiration, from dragonflies to roots, trees, and the botanical world. Highly inspired by Art Nouveau, this collection is organic, intricate, detailed, and so pleasant to look at. Were you clear on following that path from the beginning, or did it evolve?
Thank you! We wanted to go back to the inspiration of the festival, which is similar to that of Art Nouveau — fauna and flora. One of the first sketches I made was for the back of the chair, where I wanted to have this dragonfly wing pattern opening. For other pieces we looked at trees, branches — all kinds of elements. We tried to integrate this in an understated way, but still with a level of detail. What I really love in Art Nouveau is that it’s all intertwined: the stone, the wood, the metal — it all comes together. That’s something we try to bring in a furniture piece, which is not easy because it’s quite complex to make. It can also be really expensive to make, so we try to make sure that it’s still in a good price point. The chairs are not collectible design pieces; we try to make a very beautiful piece that is still possible to produce on a larger scale.
You’ve talked already about the new Tomorrowland offices, and I caught a glimpse of the space on Instagram — an Art Nouveau-inspired staircase. Do you expect to expand the project a lot?
It’s a little bit of a case study or a showcase. We developed a few different elements that we can then use in future projects as well. It was a good playground to bring together an amazing team of craftspeople to develop unique elements like this staircase, but also the details above the bar counter and other details that will then become part of the language that we can use for other projects. Once you see these different projects together, you’re going to find the connection between them.
Even in the office, we are still waiting for a couple of pieces, like the chairs we designed for Morpho. Once these come together, you’re going feel the magic: a brass detail in the back of the chair that comes back on a larger scale in the canopy above the bar, as well as other similar crossovers.
You’re premiering this project at Milan’s Salone del Mobile, one of the most important events in the world. In a place where so much is happening, how do you ensure you stand out?
We’re not a screaming kind of brand or studio but we did want to have a beautiful booth, so we designed something special. It’s quite a large booth as well — it’s five metres high. The goal was to create a connection with the photoshoot we did in Indonesia of the furniture pieces in the jungle. So we’ll have the tropical aspect in the plants, and for the booth itself, the design will be more brutalist inspired. It’s sculptural and architectural, but we want to let the pieces speak for themselves and catch all the attention.
In a society based on success and fame, I’d like to talk about the other side of the coin, which is just as important. Could you share a time you made a mistake, how did you solve it, and what did you learn from it?
I think in the past, one of the mistakes sometimes made was taking on too much work. There have been periods in time, also around Covid, where we got a lot of work, which is hard sometimes, especially when you grow the team and you hire more people. Finding a perfect balance between having the right workload so everybody can handle it, while also keeping in mind the realities of running a business. We try to be more careful and take great care of our team, be very selective of what projects we make because they demand so much energy and passion.We get many exciting opportunities that it remains a challenge.
I’m always curious to know about architects’ and designers’ own homes. Would you say yours reflects your work? Or do you separate the Dieter architect from the Dieter private person?
Well, of course, my house is a combination of Patricia (my wife) and I, so there are different influences. It’s maybe more colourful than some of our work with the studio, even though we’re evolving in that direction. Also, we just moved and our new home is much closer to our work than our previous home, but still, we didn’t start with the idea of making a project like we do for our clients.
I think it’s unavoidable to have many signature touches in that home, but it’s also very personal. We didn’t design it as a showcase; we were not planning on having meetings there. Two years ago, we bought our office space and that’s much more a sort of showcase, a public space, while our home is very private.
If you could be invited into someone’s home, whose would it be and why?
So many. I think one of the homes that I truly want to visit someday is the Scheats-Goldstein residence in Los Angeles. It would be especially nice to be invited to such a house when it’s used and lived in, like at a dinner party or so, when you see how it’s designed to be used, not when it’s empty or a museum.
To finish, you’re presenting the new collection in Milan, so what are the next steps?
In Milan, we have the main global launch, and in May, we will have a US launch at ICFF in New York. We’ll have an installation booth that we designed and that is now being shipped by container. We’re already working on pieces to launch next year in Milan and the year after. There’s so much already on the drawing board and in the pipeline that is just very exciting. We have a lot of ideas, and slowly but steady, we want to be able to create a complete interior design world where you have all the pieces and elements to design a home or hotel.
