anymore.” RICHARD REYES
Never! Never!
That’s Gert Voorjans’ emphatic reply when asked if he ever went through a minimalist phase. He cringes almost, twitching his nose, but adds with a smile: “But I can appreciate an empty wall.”
The Belgian architect and interior designer is best known for his work on fellow Belgian Dries Van Noten’s boutiques. Voorjans has collaborated with the fashion designer for the last 18 years. His sensibilities mirror that of Van Noten’s, who’s known for prints and colors.
On his first visit to Manila, Voorjans meets with us at Raffles Makati’s Writers’ Bar, dressed fittingly in a Dries Van Noten peach-colored summer suit and a black tie with floral embroidery purchased from a New York shop.
“I love color,” he says, in between sips of his extra strong cappuccino. “When I started working over 20 years ago, it was a lot of egg wash, beige, gray, minimalism.” He’s in Manila for a brief holiday, on the invitation of Ricco and Tina Ocampo, whom he met through Joyce Ma, the Hong Kong fashion magnate and who is his client. Voorjans designed the Joyce flagship boutique on Queen’s Road, apart from other Ma properties.
“I like the purity of minimalism, but not too gray or without character, because where I live in Antwerp, it’s very gray already,” he adds. “I like orange, I like pink, but in the right balance, of course. I won’t say that you exaggerate. But I’ll say we need a bit more of color in our interiors.”
Craftsmen
Voorjans’ visit is also to satisfy his curiosity about the fine Filipino craftsmen he has heard so much of. His book, “Interior Life,” published in 2012, was in large part an homage to craftsmen, he says, to whom he has profound respect, especially in an age where, he notes, “everything is becoming more generic and industrial” and over-commercialized.
“I want authenticity, uniqueness, things made in small quantities. I fight cheap reproductions. It kills the beauty of something if it’s over-reproduced.”
About 90 percent of Voorjans’ projects are for private clients, including the likes of Mick Jagger and Nina Garcia. But even with such a high-profile celebrity client base, Voorjans is a rarity in this age when designers put their stamp on every object that can be had by anyone with deep pockets. He will never go the Philippe Starck route and design, say, a chair or some other commercial object.
Voorjans also scoffs at so-called designer buildings rising in major cities. “That’s the power of evolution. I’m for evolution but all evolution also brings bad elements.” There should be more focus now on the technical aspect of designing buildings, he says, to incorporate nature, to be green and sustainable. “Because the look you can always change. But nature, it’s always the payoff of progress.”
Of designing objects for mass production, “It’s not my ambition,” he says. “I believe more in a total concept. If you have this wonderful chair, I want to see it in a context. Philippe Starck is the biggest now, and he does wonderful things. But I don’t want to see [the object] and the context is completely wrong… In my job, I have to do it myself. I don’t want to make something and sell and just go play golf at the end of the day.”
Not alike
Even with his work with Dries Van Noten, no two boutiques are exactly alike. To do that, he says, “is a pity, to see one store and it’s exactly the same as the store in another city. If I do 20 stores, I do 20 different stores. I want authenticity. I don’t want things to be generic.” That’s one reason he turned down a job from a fashion conglomerate, surely unthinkable in this day.
There’s that French Dries Van Noten boutique, in an old Parisian apartment, which demonstrates Voorjans’ impeccable and eclectic taste. It could perhaps be considered the one single business card of his work, so successful that everybody wanted it copied. Van Noten customers would sit on the tufted sofa, and they’d want to own it. (In fact, his office still receives requests for that custom sofa.) He has had private clients sign him up after they’ve visited that elegant boutique along the Seine.
“They want it but they can’t have it,” he says wryly. Local culture comes into play when he decorates a home or a store. In Van Noten’s Tokyo shop, Voorjans brought in a Renaissance European painting to contrast with the concrete structure. “Japan is more concrete, more Tadao Ando, more rationalism. We did all that but we put something in contrast. Upstairs in the men’s section, we brought in a contemporary Japanese artist. You can’t just buy style. It’s not our approach.”
To those who want to copy his style, he says with a laugh, “Go ahead! You can’t!”
Customers are a blank canvas, Voorjans says. He has no one single solution for each of their wants and requirements.
It’s hard, of course, to teach taste, he adds. One has to have an innate sense. “If you like everything brand-new, it’s difficult,” he says. “I’ve had customers who have a problem that an object is chipped. I like old things, too… But fashion helps a lot. When they see unfinished treatment, say, from Raf Simons or Martin Margiela, people start to think. In five or seven years, you will see it in interiors. Five years ago, in Russia, they were all bling-bling, like in Saudi Arabia. But look at them now.
“People are becoming more free. Like in fashion, you can easily mix a beautiful bag and jeans. But one element that will always stay is quality.”
Never static
He doesn’t mind when people describe his aesthetic as eccentric. “I like crazy objects. I don’t want boring. Even my taste evolves. If you work with a client for two, three years, you get influenced also. My taste is never static or fixed.”
More people are taking to the kind of work that he does now than they did 10 years ago. “We live in a very eclectic but interesting way. I don’t like nostalgia or living in the past. I like to take the best elements and spirit of the past and add it with something of today. So it’s difficult if you don’t have taste. That’s when we come in to help.”
He doesn’t believe Asians are essentially afraid of his aesthetics. “In Europe, they understand what I’m doing. But here, the elements may be too strange or too French. But I can easily do it, too, using Asian elements.”
Globally, Voorjans says design is evolving into the middle ground between minimalism and maximalism, as people learn to sift through all the global influences. “What we are going into is a period of purification. More art deco styles will replace baroque elements,” he says.
“You can never be off-trend,” he adds. “I don’t want to call it global brainwash, but somehow you do something and everybody is also doing it. You use a certain color, and it comes out in others’ work as well. So, yes, subconsciously that’s what’s happening.”
He encourages people to “be yourself” when designing one’s private space. “There’s no one solution. Feel free. People are anxious with making decisions. Take what you feel. Don’t copy that of a showroom. If you’re into pottery, display your pottery. I’d rather you put that than something that has no story.”