12 Sep 2011

Piet Hein Eek

A portrait of the designer, Piet Hein Eek

Original artists are often inspired by the last thing you would expect. And that is certainly true of Dutch craftsman Piet Hein Eek.

While walking around a junkyard in his youth, Eek had the surprising realisation that old wood was more attractive than new wood. Since then he has crafted the finest, most desirable furniture from the often neglected material.

We love the idea of seeing things in a different way, so we asked Piet what his past inspirations were, and what his creative visions are for the future.

HUGO Create: You are widely known for making furniture out of a material that might surprise people - scrap wood. What was your inspiration?

Piet Hein Eek: The main inspiration for my designs is often to do with materials, technique and craftsmanship. These are commodities I value so I suppose it was not such a surprising idea to use scrap wood. The inspiration came at the time of my exams when I was strolling around at a lumberyard. I saw huge amounts of scrap wood and I felt the beauty of it and a necessity to make furniture out of it. If I hadn’t have found the scrap material to be so beautiful, and not appreciated the love and respect that had gone into crafting those pieces before they became scrap, I would never have developed this idea.

A chair designed for the Kroller Muller museum

HC: Have you made any other furniture or pieces of art by methods that people might feel are original and inventive?

PHE: We (Piet Hein and his business, Eek and Ruijgrok) were the first artists to make steel furniture for domestic purposes. It was inspired by the rise of CNC machines (an industrial machine Piet uses to punch holes in metal). Every design I made has a little fairy tale about how it grew.

HC: You’ve previously said, 'Creative people are the most important in the world in terms of economy and social development'. Can you explain why you believe that?

PHE: In general we’re living in a world where specialism is the norm. This is one of the reasons why we face enormous problems at the moment. A designer has to think about the whole process from the first idea until the product is actually used. So production, sales, distribution, transport, every aspect contributes to the process of making a good design. This means being a designer is one of the few professions where there is a generalist approach. So we have to be incredibly responsible.  

HC: You're an advocate of individual thinking. Is there a method you can use to help yourself think originally?

PHE: People can work on their skills and stimulate and improve them. But in order to create something great using your own skills you must first have quality at doing that thing. If the quality isn’t there in the first place, one shouldn’t put too much energy into it. In Holland we call that pulling a dead horse.

HC: Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

PHE: We’re working in new premises, which on its own is a very exciting story. The essence is that we created an environment in which we feel like a fish in the water every day, creating, producing, interacting, and being happy. And of course we have a lot of commissions and we’re developing a range of products.

Tubes chair