Sillón Ll04 de cuero de Maarten Van Severen para Pastoe, Bélgica, 2004

Belgian designer Maarten Van Severen was born in Antwerp in 1956 and is best known for his strong silhouetted seating collections produced by Vitra.

The son of a well-known painter, Maarten Van Severen studied architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. He graduated after three years, and worked on various interior design and furniture projects. In 1986, he created his first piece of furniture, which was a long, narrow metal table (first in steel, then remodeled in aluminum). The following year, Van Severen established his own studio, where he produced his own designs on a semi-industrial level. This unified process of design and production became Van Severen’s signature, and allowed him to be involved in the creation of each piece from start to finish, resulting in designs which were almost always limited editions.

Known for his pared down, pure-in-form tables and storage units, it was not long before Van Severen abandoned them to focus almost solely on seating design. Like many designers, Van Severen dedicated himself to creating the ultimate chair, with optimal form and production processes. In 1996, Van Severen collaborated with Vitra, designing for the company until his death in 2005. During this time, he worked with a wide variety of materials including aluminum, plywood, steel, and Bakelite. His most notable chair designs for Vitra include the .03 chair (1998), MVS Chaise Lounge (2000), .06 chair (2005), as well as the LL04 lounge chair (2004) for Pastoe.

Over the course of his career, Van Severen’s designs were produced by several European furniture manufacturers including the aforementioned Vitra and Pastoe, as well as Bulo, Durlet, Edra, Kartell, Obumex, and Target Lighting. Many of his designs are still in production today. In addition to work as a furniture designer, Van Severen worked on residential projects in France with fellow architect Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) for the Dutch architectural firm OMU and held teaching positions at the University College West Flanders in Kortrijk (1996), the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht (1996-97), Delft University of Technology (1998), and universities in Helsinki and Barcelona (2000).

In 2005, Van Severen died from cancer at the age of 46 in Ghent, Belgium. In 2008, the Maarten Van Severen Foundation was established in his memory, and is dedicated to preserving and promoting the designer’s artistic legacy. In addition to the Foundation, Van Severen’s works are housed in the Ghent City Archive, the Flemish Architectural Archives, the Design Museum in Ghent, and the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning in the University of Ghent.

Pastoe’s story began in 1913 in Utrecht, when German-Dutch businessman Frits Loeb (1889-1959) decided to produce chairs in a traditional cabinetmaking workshop to sell in his own shop. His atelier—named Utrechtsche Machinale Stoel-en Meubelfabrik (UMS) at the time—quickly grew and in 1917 moved into a large factory facility, manufacturing furniture for a range of retail outlets. In 1918, the factory was moved again to the Rotsoord area in Utrecht, where it is still located today. While the early furniture lines produced by UMS were intended for a general audience, the company—under the direction of designer-manager D. L. Braakman (1885-1966)—was one of the first in the Netherlands to adopt a more austere, minimalist aesthetic expressed in then-novel materials like tubular steel and bent plywood. The Dutch market was slow to respond to these designs, so it was all the more audacious when UMS, in 1947, became dedicated to producing only modernist furniture. To reflect the new mission, the company’s name was changed to Pastoe.

In 1848, Cees Braakman (1917-1995), D. L.’s son, took the helm as designer and director and furthered the company’s modernist aims, advocating for low-cost, modular designs inspired by the likes of Charles & Ray Eames and Alvar Aalto—the latter of which created the first series of Pastoe geometric cabinets at the end of the 1940s. During the 1950s, the company focused on developing flexible cabinet systems that could be assembled by the consumer, which led to the highly customizable, highly successful Made-to-Measure storage system (1955). In 1957, Made-to-Measure furniture was awarded a silver medal at the 11th Trienniale in Milan and crowned with the Le Signe d’Or in Belgium.

Today Pastoe continues to manufacture formally simple, high-quality furniture, including cabinet systems, storage pieces, chairs, and more. Many of Pastoe’s designs have attained an iconic status, such as Cees Braakman’s SMO5 Chair (1958), one of the first stools to be entirely fabricated in steel wire, and Studio Pastoe’s L-Series Cabinet (1979).  Recent collaborations include projects with the late, great Belgian designer Maarten Van Severen, German designer Konstantin Grcic, and rising-star Dutch studio Scholten & Baijings.

Pastoe’s objects have been exhibited in galleries and museums broadly, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, and the  in Amsterdam.

* All images courtesy of Pastoe