Born in De Meern, the Netherlands, in 1963, industrial designer Hella Jongerius studied at the Academy for Industrial Design in Eindhoven between 1988 and 1993. She started her own design studio, Jongeriuslab, in 1993 in Rotterdam. Between 1993 and 1998, she initiated her own designs while contributing multiple projects to Droog, the Amsterdam-based design company. Since that time, she has worked for a select group of major clients, including the likes of Vitra, KLM, IKEA, Maharam, and Royal Tichelaar Makkum, among others. Jongerius moved to Berlin in 2008 and, since 2012, has taken on the role of art director for colors, textiles, and surfaces at Vitra.
Jongerius is known for works that fuse industry and craft, high and low technologies. Among noted works are her three series of Colored Vases (2003, 2007, and 2010), each an experiment in glazes and pigments; Frog Table (2009), a table dominated by the presence of a large, three-dimensional frog that revels in the role of decoration; and the Polder Sofa (2005), Jongerius’s first collaboration with Vitra and her first industrially produced piece of furniture, which was inspired by the typical Dutch “polder” landscape—artificial land composed of long horizontal dykes and drainage canals.
Since its inclusion in the first Droog design exhibition at the Milan Furniture Fair in 1994, her work has been exhibited at renowned institutions across the globe, including, among others, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; the Design Museum, London; and Villa Noailles, Hyères, France.
Jongerius lives and works in Berlin.
