Hella Jongerius

Born in the Nether­lands in 1963, Jongerius grad­u­ated from Eindoven’s Academy of Indus­trial Design in 1993; after briefly joining Droog, she formed her own studio, Jongerius­lab. Major commis­sions followed, includ­ing a series of color-blocked textiles for Maharam in a tricky fabri­ca­tion never previ­ously attempted at an indus­trial scale. In 2007, she became Art Direc­tor of Colours and Mate­ri­als for Vitra and created main­stays like their Polder Sofa and East River chair while devel­op­ing their Colour & Mate­r­ial Library. In 2012, she joined Danksina as Art Director. 

Mean­while, her own work contin­ued to grow in size and influ­ence. For a collab­o­ra­tion with Rem Kool­haas to redesign inte­ri­ors of the North Dele­gates’ Lounge at the United Nations build­ing in New York, she refreshed the modernist land­mark with bespoke carpet­ing and furnish­ings in bold colors along with a custom beaded curtain of hand-knotted yarn and some 30,000 porce­lain beads. A book, 2016’s I Have No Favorite Colour, followed by the follow­ing year’s Breath­ing Colour exhi­bi­tion at the Design Musuem London artic­u­lated her philos­o­phy of hues and tints, while her cabin inte­ri­ors for KLM airlines put it into practice. 

Recently, Jongerius has begun explor­ing the possi­bil­i­ties of porce­lain, in commis­sions for vases and table­ware. Projects through­out her ongoing career and the B Set dinner­ware service can be found in the perma­nent collec­tions of MoMA, Victo­ria and Albert Museum, and Boij­mans van Beuningen Museum.