Belgian design studio Muller Van Severen has built a reputation for furniture that balances practicality and playfulness. Its founders explain how their artistic backgrounds help them design without fear, and what they believe makes a piece of furniture truly beautiful
When Fien Muller and Hannes Van Severen decided to collaborate on a furniture collection in 2011, it marked a turning point in their lives. They had met a decade earlier while studying at the LUCA School of Arts in Ghent and fallen in love. After university, the pair pursued separate careers as artists but always harboured a desire to work together. When the chance eventually came, it wasn’t an artwork they chose to create, but a furniture collection for Valerie Traan, a gallery in Antwerp, seeking to blur the boundaries of art and design.
Portrait by Rasmus Weng Karlsen
The experience was so fulfilling that Muller and Van Severen have never looked back. “I felt much freer, working inside this limit, this boundary of function,” recalls Van Severen, who originally trained as a sculptor. “We found that we had a lot of creative space and ideas.”
The collection itself was also a success, noted for its marriage of functionality and artistic expression, a combination that has since become one of the pair’s hallmarks. “We weren’t aware of what was happening in the design world,” Van Severen adds. “We were free in our thinking and without influence. We could create on our island.”
Over the course of the next 14 years, the duo – designing under the name Muller Van Severen – has become one of Europe’s most recognisable and respected studios. They have produced their own collections as well as designs for celebrated brands such as HAY, BD Barcelona Design, Zanotta and Kvadrat. Their work can be seen in the public collections of a number of museums, including the Vitra Design Museum and the Pompidou Centre. When we caught up with them in the spring of 2025, the studio was as busy as ever, with a number of new collections on the way, including a series of cabinets and bookshelves for Zanotta, an outdoor furniture line for French brand Tectona and a collection of cabinets for Hay.
Photography by Frederik Vercruysse
The duo has a unique creative process, which consists of what Muller calls a constant “dialogue between work and daily life”. Because they also live together, work doesn’t “stop at five in the evening and start again at eight”, she says. “It’s always.” The initial spark of inspiration can be anything – the way sunlight lands on a surface or an especially striking colour. “We are inspired a lot by daily life,” she notes. More often than not, the work starts with a material or a mix of materials that the two find particularly intriguing.
Once they land on the seed of an idea, Muller and Van Severen set to work. “One of us draws, while the other makes little maquettes and models,” says Muller. “It’s like playing a game of ping-pong.” They experiment in this way while simultaneously researching and delving deeper into the idea. “When we start feeling that we’re repeating ourselves or making irrelevant things, we will stop,” says Van Severen. “And this world, this little family of designs, is complete.”
Photography by Frederik Vercruysse
Each ‘little family’ released by Muller Van Severen is characterised by a number of opposing attributes that are balanced and held together by a creative tension, not just sculpture and functionality. “It’s also between introvert and extrovert,” says Van Severen. “Present and absent, feminine and masculine, strict and wild, contrast and harmony.”
For their designs to come to life, Muller and Van Severen rely on close collaboration with a few trusted makers. “Some people say that what we’re trying to do is impossible,” says Muller. “We don’t like that,” says Van Severen. “We want somebody who will also wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. Like they’re dreaming with you.”
Photography by HAY
Often this collaboration with fabricators is about achieving the right finish on a material. One word that both Muller and Van Severen use consistently with regard to materials is ‘honesty’. They avoid polishing brass, varnishing wood and treating leather, preferring instead to design furniture that ages gracefully, developing a characterful patina over time. “We believe that it’s a misunderstanding to think that something is only beautiful when it’s new,” says Muller. Van Severen agrees: “We want people to have things around them that age together with them. That’s true, like life – and you can’t deny life.”
This story was originally featured in OnOffice 171, Summer 2025. Discover similar stories by subscribing to our weekly newsletter here
