MVS Chaise
5 June 1956, Antwerp, Belgium- birth day and place of Maarten Van Severen, a famous furniture designer whom we owe some of the best contemporary designs. Because we like him and receive many requests for his works, today we celebrate him in a new blog post of “Our famous Designers” category.
Maarten Van Severen studied architecture at Ghent art school, completed three years and then went to work in various agencies on interior design and furniture projects. 1986 is the year when he started to make furniture. The first design was a simple, solid oak table, the purest form of table with well-balanced proportions and formal simplicity.
Wood Table
Do you know the chairs in most McDonald’s restaurants? They are called .03 chairs and are an icon of 20th-century design, as design specialists say. A key characteristic of the .03 chair is the way in which the back, seat and legs are one fluid line.
.03 Chair
Another of his most appreciated designs is Kast Storage, on which Van Severen worked on during the last few months of his life. Kast Storage is modular in structure, the base version of which is a sideboard. Van Severen paid special attention to the colour for the sliding doors and the elegant and classical proportions. Van Severen also created exhibition stands of steel shelving for use at shows and trade fairs.
Kast Storage
Unfortunately, Maarten Van Severen died of cancer in 2005, at a too young age. Three years later, his family and friends founded The Maarten Van Severen Foundation, a non-profit organisation which “manages his entire artistic legacy, making it accessible and keeping it alive”. Out of Après‘ partnership with Vitra, we try to promote his work and recognise his great designs.
On this day in 1908 the American designer George Nelson was born. For his magnificent creations, we celebrate him and give him his own blog post today in “Our Famous Designers” category. Nelson is, together with Charles & Ray Eames, regarded as one of the founders of American modernism, having designed and created many iconic [...]
The whole world celebrates today the life and creations of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Designers and art-lovers look back at van der Rohe’s design principles and remember his “Less is more” famous quote. On the 27th of March, 126 years ago, Ludwig Mies was born in Aachen, Germany. When he was 19 years-old, the [...]
