When Hella Jongerius opened her studio Jongeriuslab in Rotterdam in 1993, the design world was in transition. The Memphis Group, founded by Ettore Sottsass, had spent the previous decade challenging modernism with furniture defined by cartoonish shapes and zig-zagging geometries – the anthropomorphic Carlton bookcase from 1981 being an apt example. But by the early 1990s, a recession across Europe ushered in a more cautious mood, and the theatrical energy felt increasingly out of step.
At the same time, designers were becoming visible cultural figures whose names could define products and brands. Few designers embodied this shift more clearly than Philippe Starck, whose objects for Alessi helped define the period. His three-legged Juicy Salif, a lemon squeezer released in 1990, looked like a small alien sculpture as much as a kitchen tool.
Running parallel to this was an aesthetic associated with designers such as Jasper Morrison and architect John Pawson, who favoured restrained forms and natural materials. Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa would later describe this sensibility as “Super Normal” – objects that disappear into everyday life but are superior in their design and long-term usability.
The Netherlands was also developing a distinctive voice in design. In 1993 – the same year Jongerius founded her studio – art historian Renny Ramakers and designer Gijs Bakker introduced a group of young designers during Milan’s Salone del Mobile under the name Droog Design (‘Droog’ meaning ‘dry’ in Dutch). Works such as Tejo Remy’s “You Can’t Lay Down Your Memories” Chest of Drawers – assembled from salvaged cabinets strapped together – approached design with humour and an interest in reuse, offering a counterpoint to luxury manufacturing.
It was within this context that Jongerius quickly established a position that diverged from many prevailing approaches. Rather than pursuing either expressive or reductive design, her objects took on a visual language that spoke of irregularity, craft and the behaviour of materials. “When I founded Jongeriuslab in 1993, the design world still largely revolved around products, function and the polished surface of industry,” she says. “At that time, I believed design was primarily about shaping objects. Starting my own studio allowed me to question that framework from the inside, to look beyond the object and towards the systems behind it: social, material, political.” She views this period as a shift from “making products” to “shaping relationships”, adding: “Even then, I sensed that design needed to be more than decoration; it needed to raise questions.”
Jongerius was born in 1963 in De Meern, near Utrecht in the Netherlands. Before studying design, she worked in carpentry and a woodworking workshop, an experience that shaped her early understanding of materials. In 1988, she enrolled at the Design Academy Eindhoven, graduating in industrial design in 1993. The academy at that time encouraged students to question the conventions of industrial production and to treat objects as carriers of meaning as well as function.
Soon after graduating, she became associated with Droog Design, and Jongerius’ pieces from this period were shown and distributed through the collective. This included her graduate project, a soft bath mat, and the Soft Urn and Soft Vase, all made from polyurethane, their inflated forms appearing to sag and fold like rubber. Around the same time, she designed the Pushed Washtub, another flexible container with a distorted form and uneven density that blurred the distinction between industrial product and experimental design.
From there, she launched her studio and began producing ceramics, textiles, furniture and interiors while collaborating with manufacturers including Royal Tichelaar Makkum, IKEA and KLM, as well as building long-term relationships with partners like Maharam, Nymphenburg, Galerie kreo and Vitra. The most significant of these began in 2004, when Vitra’s chairman Rolf Fehlbaum invited her to collaborate with the company. Jongerius created pieces including the Polder Sofa in 2005 – a low-slung seating system composed of upholstered fabrics in shifting tones inspired by the Dutch landscape – and the East River Chair, originally created for the delegates’ lounge at the United Nations headquarters in New York, combining wood, metal, leather and woven textiles in stacked colour compositions.
“The most defining moments were the collaborations that allowed me to challenge the system from within, especially my long relationship with Vitra. They offered a space inside the industry where I could ask: ‘What can be changed?’” Jongerius also cites her manifesto Beyond the New, a critique of the industry’s obsession with novelty written with design theorist Louise Schouwenberg, as another key turning point. “Writing it made me realise I didn’t want to simply embellish the existing structures anymore; I wanted to confront them.”
Rather than specialising in a single discipline, her practice has consistently moved between furniture, textiles, interiors and ceramics united by experimentations in glaze and texture. “I often work through accidents, imperfections and unexpected outcomes,” she says. “For me, research is a form of listening: to materials, to processes, to what they reveal when something cracks, bubbles or collapses. It’s a slow, iterative approach in which success is never the goal. Understanding is.” This is a mindset that she has carried through her entire career. “I like the idea of serendipity: when something unexpected happens and suddenly opens a new path. You cannot plan that kind of insight. You must allow materials to go on their own and stay attentive to what emerges.”
Jongerius also started examining colour, materials and surfaces across her own pieces as well as Vitra’s wider product range, a project that started in 2006 and spanned a decade. This included historic designs like the Eames Plastic Chairs and the Artek collection now under Vitra’s umbrella. Her work restored the vibrancy and nuance of these pieces and also informed broader approaches to material interaction, sustainability and ongoing collaborations with Nora Fehlbaum (who succeeded her uncle Rolf Fehlbaum as CEO in 2016). She also contributed to the development of Vitra’s Colour & Material Library, a system organising materials into four atmospheric ‘colour worlds’ – including reds, greens, lights and darks – to help designers understand how colours interact across surfaces and lighting conditions. Her exhibition Breathing Colour, presented at the Design Museum in 2017, extended this research through sculptural ‘Colour Catchers’ that explored how pigments shift throughout the day as light conditions change. “In my work I think about how coloured objects affect other objects and how all the objects behave in a certain setting,” she explains. “The different materials have an impact on each other, and certain colours can accentuate horizontal shapes, while others are better for vertical forms. And then the lighting conditions or colour temperature also change a space. There are many facets that require research beyond these questions, because the relationship between colour and shape is a puzzle with many solutions. There’s no truth, it's subjective, but I try to understand the matter.”
Another thread running through Jongerius’ practice is an embrace of imperfection – an approach that has often led critics to describe her work as “misfit” design. Since the early 1990s, she has deliberately challenged the industrial ideal of flawless, identical products by introducing small deviations, irregularities and traces of the hand into manufactured objects. “Perfection is boring; it disconnects us from reality. I value the awkward, the irregular, the unfinished because that’s where humanity resides.” To Jongerius, a successful design is one that leaves room for imagination and evolution, where the process is revealed, displayed front and centre with nothing to hide. “When everything is polished smooth, nothing is left to question.”
In this way Jongerius positioned her work in the space left unexplored by conventional industrial design. Rather than focusing solely on finished objects, she asks what design might reveal about the systems behind them, thinking about how materials are sourced, processed, coloured and assembled. “Design today must address systems, not just objects. Materials are not neutral. I believe designers have the responsibility to expose these stories, to show the agency of materials, and to resist the fast-paced, efficiency-driven logic that dominates our industry.”
A new chapter in her career will open in 2026 with a major retrospective at the Vitra Design Museum. The exhibition coincides with the transfer of her studio archive to the museum’s collection, bringing together three decades of work across objects, prototypes, drawings, collages and material experiments. The archive will sit alongside those of designers including Charles Eames, Ray Eames, Alexander Girard and Verner Panton, situating Jongerius within a wider lineage of modern design. “Seeing my work in the archive of a museum creates distance and clarity. Seeing the work through the lens of an institution allows me to look at it differently – not as something unfinished or personal, but as part of a larger context. To connect to other great designers that are present in the archive gives it an interesting context. That shift is important, both emotionally and professionally.”
Jongerius insists that her studio will remain intentionally small so that time can remain what she calls the “central ingredient” in her work – giving time for materials to speak, colours to settle and for processes to unfold. “I see my work continuing to deepen along those lines: more patience, more intimacy, more questioning, and a continued commitment to resisting speed in both industry and culture.” By doing so, she proposes a different role for design. “Design can no longer focus on making ‘better products’. We need to design systems. Responsibility must include repair, reuse and material recovery from the very beginning. Designers are not neutral – we help shape the systems we live in.”
This article is taken from Anima Issue 4, to purchase a copy or subscribe head here
