Sabine Marcelis - Across the Spectrums

Sabine Marcelis, the Dutch-New Zealand designer based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, is challenging the status quo worldwide with her works with light, water, glass, and resins. One of the most sought-after names in the collectible design scene, Sabine speaks with Yoko Choy about her exciting new projects and personal works.

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Yoko: Hello everyone. Today, we have Sabine Marcelis, one of the hottest names in the collectible design scene from the Netherlands, with us. 

Hello, Sabine. How are you today? 

Sabine: Hi Yoko. I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Yoko: Thank you for making time. I know this is a very busy time for you. Where are you today?

Sabine: I'm in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, my home, Saturday morning. 

Taking it easy today. 

Yoko: Exactly. 

I really like the painting. 

Sabine: It's a mural by a friend of ours, Thomas Trum. He did it by hand, so quite awesome to watch. 

Yoko: We last spoke in August 2020. It feels like a very long time ago. How are things going for you?

Sabine: You know, like everyone, adapting to this crazy new reality. 

Work-wise I have a lot of really exciting, fun projects, which I'm super grateful for. Obviously, many of the projects surrounding installations, stuff that would be happening during fairs, all got put on hold, but at the same time, definitely seen some kind of increase in private commissions: people with beautiful homes that want something special.

Also, a few really big projects in Asia. Super diverse, actually a lot of different things going on, more interior, big projects, and some completely not for clients, just private passion work for myself.

Yoko: We would love to hear more about the private work. That would be the interesting thing to look into. 

I noticed that your collaboration with Ikea has been a very hot topic these days. This is something very new for you as well, and it is going to be launched next week.

Sabine: It's sort of just trickling in, in a different sort of timing, for different countries.

I saw that it's already available in some countries, and in others, it's going to take a bit longer, but in general, it's from now until May, being launched in different countries. I'm really excited about it. It's definitely a very different way of working than I'm used to, but it's been a good challenge in that sense as well.

Really having to think about designing from a very different perspective.

Yoko: That's the exact question I would like to talk to you about. So, you work with some of the biggest design galleries around the world, and you also work a lot with designer brands, like Established & Sons, cc-tapis, where the audience is very targeted and high-end.

But for Ikea, this project is completely at the other end of the design market spectrum. 

How is it like for you? Are there any differences in terms of your creative process and your experience with different clients in different sectors and audiences?    

Sabine: I've been very lucky actually to always be able to just design from a fascination point of view and working with expensive materials, expensive production processes, and I've never really had a price point in mind at the end of the trip – that it's just, you know, the object or the installation becomes what it is and, we roll with that. 

Obviously, working towards an object that can be available for a much wider audience means that it really had to be a very affordable price point. So when I was first asked or first approached by Ikea, I had to think about it for a minute. Like, "Oh my God," how do I translate my way of working?

I always try to capture a moment of wonder or some magic and, how do you put that in a 30 Euro object? Obviously, I also think when you are designing something that's going to be mass-produced at this scale, the materiality is very important as well. I, for sure, didn't want it to be like a cheap commercial version of my gallery work, and in no way did I want to include any kind of resins or plastics in this lamp.   then the challenge was okay: How do we create a light object that still has this "Wow" moment? 

Just a lot of experimenting. In the beginning, it was paper. I actually wanted to make the lamp out of paper to begin with. Just a single sheet; also making it with as little resources needed to create the item.

So just one sheet. And how do you create an interesting lighting effect with that sheet? 

And then, I ended up slashing the sheets so that the light can escape through that one slash and bounce back off the wall from behind around the circle. 

That's what it ended up being.

Yoko: Right. I can't wait to see the actual object. 

Sabine: For sure, the main concept around it was to change the atmosphere of a space with just a single pressing of a button that changes the color and that this object can have much more of an effect than just be a sculptural light on the wall.

It can be dynamic in the environment as well.

Yoko: Great. You mentioned something very interesting. Sustainability is a very, very important aspect of your work, and that's also a very big topic now in the designer's creative scene. Through your project with Ikea, can we say that sustainability can also be achieved in such a big, mass-market brand or company? What is your experience?

Sabine: It's a very big part of Ikea's ethos, actually. They are really trying to create, or be responsible because they are such a big player in the design world, so everything they put out needs to be designed consciously. I very much respect that about them. They have really long-term plans and goals, and everything can be returned and reused. That's really great. And of course, there's always going to be elements that are not going to be recyclable, reusable right now, but to have that vision for the future, I think, is extremely important.

Yoko: You're right. We all have to do our little part to contribute to a better future.

Sabine: For sure. 

Yoko: You also work with many fashion brands, like, well, just to name a few: Burberry, Givenchy, Celine, and of course Fendi. And I remember I did the first interview with you exactly for the project you were working with Fendi at that time, for Design Miami.

Can you tell us about it? Because I think that's one of the best examples of how you work with colors and materials. It's also fascinating how you incorporate water into your work as a material. Can you tell us something about that project too?

Sabine: Of course. 

The way I work or what makes me tick is to really play with the interaction of lights and materials that can be transparent, opaque – all levels in between – that can have a reflection or a shadow. That's the most interesting thing to design around. All those interactions with materials that can do that. This is also why I work a lot with cast resins and glass because those are materials that can be manipulated in that manner.

I use light as a design tool. I use color as a design tool and – this should be connected when Fendi approached me to design an installation for their 10th anniversary of them collaborating with Design Miami, I 100% didn't want to create a furniture range. I thought that was just really not inspiring, not challenging, and not sort of forward-thinking in any way. 

It would be more of repeating what's already been done in the past years. I always want to be pushing forward and creating something that surprises people and, there is definitely a design language I use, but I do hope, with each new project, I create something that people are not expecting.

So with Fendi, I dug into the brand history, and this theme of water kept popping up. So then I was like, "Oh my God," I need to design with water, because if you think about it, water is just like glass and resin: it's transparent, you can also tint it, it reflects, it ripples. There's so much going on with water, depending on how it's used, how it's moving. And this element of motion was super exciting for me because that adds a new tool to design with. 

How does water flow, and how do you shape water? 

That's also the name of the installation in the end, "The Shapes of Water." So then the challenge was to create 10 fountains, which would deal with water in a different way. So they all shape water in a very different way, and the water interacts with the fountain itself, which is also made from resin in various tints. The colors I used were very much taken from the Fendi world too.

The collaboration was really an example of how a brand and a designer can come together and create something bigger than separately. 

I sometimes think that a design collaboration with brands can become a watered-down version of a designer's vision, but it can also really become something more. I really feel that that's what happened with the Fendi project.

I don't think I would have done it in that way at all if I was just to design a fountain myself, so it was really two worlds meeting.

Yoko: It was really beautiful. I really like it when you walk around all the fountains and the experience and the relationship you develop with the flow and everything. It was just so beautiful.

Sabine: Good to hear.

Yoko: And I noticed that you recently also did a fountain installation in Shanghai, too. Is that right?

Sabine: It's not unveiled yet. So this is a project in the making. We are currently still working on it and expecting it to be finished within 2021. But it's a big project. They're very, very big fountains.

Yaka:  And this would be like a permanent installation.

Sabine: Exactly. So really different: different scale, different country, different scenario. I'm very humbled that they commissioned me to do this project there, but I will tell you more about it when there's more available. 

Yaka: Yes, please do. I really want to see that. 

Also, I noticed that you have been doing quite a lot of architectural interventions this year. For example, the one that I liked very much is the Barcelona Pavilion. Can you tell us something about the project too? Because it was kind of a challenging scenario.

Sabine: Absolutely. There was also a fountain in there, actually. Everything can be a fountain. 

To be honest, I spoke with my gallerist in Barcelona, Louis Sandino from Side Gallery, and he asked me what my dream project would be. It was almost a joke, you know, "a solo show in the Barcelona Pavilion." And then he made it happen.

Yoko: Wow, amazing

Sabine: Well, I was like, "Oh my God." Really, they would like me to take on this insanely iconic architectural gem, which is it's completely perfect as it is?!

I feel like touching it is already doing an injustice to the architecture. It took a long time to really be able to define exactly how and what should be placed in this installation. And in the end, it became a very limited amount of pieces that I designed for the installation: there were two chaise lounge, a light, and a fountain, and that was it. 

I wanted to keep it really minimal, it wasn't going to be overbearing on the pavilion itself, but really also celebrating the materiality of the pavilion. The project was called "No fear of glass," and all the design pieces were made from glass, and this was kind of a nod to the brief that (Ludwing) Mies van der Rohe originally got, which was not to use too much glass. The project really celebrates the architectural planes, and how do you translate that into furniture pieces? 

So the chaise long is really as if the travertine floor is almost being pulled up, and then the colors of the marble have almost been stretched out of the wall and into intersecting with the travertine. And that becomes the chaise long. 

For the fountain, there are these two big pools in the pavilion, which are very much part of the architecture., I also wanted to treat the water as a material in this project. And again, it's about pulling the water up and letting it overflow, extruding the architecture, making it into a functional element.

Yoko: It's beautiful. It's really beautiful. 

And how about the Study Center (Het Nieuwe Instituut) in the Netherlands?

Sabine:  Ah yes! Here in the Netherlands, the national archive of architecture and design is housed in Het Nieuwe Instituut, a building "just over there." 

They have this really amazing archive that anyone can access to get to this big archive of architecture. But the space itself was very dated, very heavy, a lot of this black heavy USM furniture, and I was asked to update it, to make it a more pleasant space to study in, to give it a bit of a facelift. 

I completely didn't want to wipe everything that's there away and plopped down my design. There's always a sense of respect that you need to have for what's already there and the original architect's vision, and also for a sustainability sense; actually, I don't want to just throw away everything that's there that still functions fine. 

All this really, in my opinion, USM furniture it's genius. It's such an amazing system. Just in that space, because it was not so much natural light coming in, the black surfaces on the USM furniture made it look very heavy. Instead of getting rid of all of that, I simply change the material into this transparent glass, with a color wash going through it. That brings so much light back into the space, but it can still be used essentially the same way as before but optimized. That was my intervention in this space and adding some new, more casual areas with couches to study and sit in a bit more of a casual manner than only behind tables.

Yoko: When you approach a space, it's very important for you to have the correct lighting and the flow of energy or space or movement. 

How do you approach a space?

Sabine: That's what makes a space pleasant to be in or not: the way that the light hits it or the way that it evolves during the day or the temperature of artificial lights used. These can really have such an impact on your mental and emotional state when you're in space. 

It wasn't part of the brief at all, but we ended up ripping out part of the facade and replacing it with glass so that more natural light could come in as well. And even just that was already 90% of the job done. Just letting the light come in and making it pleasant in that sense.

Yoko: Especially for times like this, we really need that positive energy flowing in these spaces. And the light is really important.

Sabine: 100% 

Yoko: I remember you told me you're experiencing with some new materials that you haven't been using so far.

What's the development there? Will we see something new from you soon?

Sabine: I mean, I'm always developing different experiments within materials. They just pop-out in projects whenever they're ready. I can't really give you one example right now, but definitely more with metals and wood.

Yoko: Oh, nice.

Sabine: I think people obviously know my work from resin and glass, but I don't want to be sort of boxed into just that material. It can be much broader as well, and I am experimenting more with those materials too now.

Yoko: Last question for you, I know that you are part of a charity project, “19 Chairs,” and there will auctions very soon, in May.

Can you tell us what would you have been doing for this charity and how do you want people to participate?

Sabine: So in 19 chairs. I was approached by Tom and Will Butterfield already quite some time ago. Time is all like blending into nothingness. Now I have to dig back into my brain.

Well, essentially, they made 19 very simple wooden chairs made from the same wooden beams and then asked 19 different designers and artists to customize them in their own way, for the chair that I got, it was a very simple intervention to make it more comfortable, which was the addition of a rubber layer over the seated section and the back section.

There's a little touch from each designer, and they will be auctioned off, which is amazing. Well, there's a lot of auctions happening lately, and I feel like it's such a good initiative because there's a lot of people that are in very difficult times at the moment, and if we can partake in this way, that's amazing. 

A few years ago, Maria Cristina Didero initiated another charity auction, asking different designers to make holiday gifts. And then all the proceeds went to homeless people in London. 

Also, just actually yesterday, a new collection of wallpapers was released by Calico Wallpaper, and I created one of those, as well as Dimore Studio. It's great that even with something like that, some of the proceeds are going to charity as well.

We have to keep charities in mind continuously in this industry because we create items that people want to buy, the proceeds can always be shared with others that are less fortunate. 

Yoko: Yes, that's very true. In the past year, we all had time to reflect on our work and see how we can contribute to the community. So this is a great way for designers or artist, all kinds of creatives, to give the two cents (in a figurative sense)

Sabine: Absolutely. 

Yoko: Great. Thank you so much, Sabine, for the chat. It's always nice speaking with you and look forward to all the new works. 

Sabine: That's great. Nice to speak with you, Yoko

Yoko: Thank you, thank you. See you next time. Ciao