Dutch designer Teun Zwets has created a Dutch Design Week exhibition featuring colourful, cartoonish furniture, a grotto-like bed and a bathroom made out of cardboard.
Zwets transformed his Eindhoven studio into a mock home that paired his Splitted furniture collection with custom-designed elements, including various pieces made of cardboard.
All the designs share the playful, crafted quality that has come to define Zwets’s design aesthetic.
“I’m really a maker, so most of my designs start with a material, a tool or a machine,” the designer told Dezeen.
“I go into the studio without a plan; I simply start with a material and try to find the beautiful qualities.”
His Splitted furniture epitomises this approach. Zwets creates these works by splitting open pieces of Douglas Fir with an axe and then using the splintered wood to create a form.
Once the frame is defined, Zwets adds plywood panels in between. He then extensively sands and lacquers the wood, resulting in objects with a high-gloss colour finish.
“We use a drill for a brush sanding technique,” Zwets said. “If you used a normal sander, you would remove all the texture.”
Zwets presented the first pieces in the Splitted collection at last year’s Dutch Design Week.
He has since expanded the collection with larger and more ambitious pieces.
New additions include a sofa and armchair with fitted cushions and a sculptural chandelier that combines illuminated spheres with lacquered tree branches.
“Last year was a lot of learning; now we’re presenting a more refined version of the Split collection,” said Zwets.
Since he decided to stage the exhibition as a house, Zwets had to find other ways to create the rest of the furniture needed.
The bed emerged from experiments with a handheld bag-stitching machine.
Zwets created a composition of wooden offcuts and foam, then upholstered it with fabrics from textile company Byborre. The stitching machine gave it a deliberately rough finish, highlighted with neon yellow threads.
The designer built other elements out of cardboard, including the toilet, bath, basin and radiators.
“I work with cardboard a lot,” Zwets said. “I don’t really sketch; I prefer to make 1:1 scale models with a knife and some tape. You can immediately see if the legs are too thick or a tabletop is too huge.”
“Next year, maybe I’ll do an entire show out of cardboard,” he suggested.
The show also includes 17 artworks made by cutting up objects found in secondhand stores across Eindhoven, arranging them in new compositions and then adding lacquer to conceal the joints.
Among them are jugs made from rubber ducks and a desk lamp made from an old helmet.
Zwets graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2020, where his graduation project saw him create furniture out of found objects and materials.
I was a student and I didn’t have much money so I just went out and found things on the street, like an old steel cabinet that I could cut up and weld back together,” he explained.
As a result, Zwets is often invited by brands to work with their waste materials. For example, he recently collaborated with Lensvelt on a collection of cabinets made from leftover steel cutaways.
But for Zwets, it has never been the use of waste that interested him. No matter the material, his goal is to find ways of celebrating a material’s unique properties.
“The idea is not to produce a lot of pieces but to produce really unique pieces and make a setting,” he said. “A nice setting makes people happy.”
“We had someone visit who was so emotional they started to cry,” the designer added. “There are a lot of emotions, which is important to me because what I’m showing is very personal.”
Zwets is among several Dutch designers who showed colourful and tactile furniture at this year’s Dutch Design Week. Elsewhere at the festival, Studio Rens covered a dining table with interchangeable tiles while young designers experimented with textile offcuts, bridal tulle and bioplastic crystals.
Teun Zwets’s work was showing at the Piet Hein Eek factory for Dutch Design Week, which ran from 19 to 27 October 2024 at venues across Eindhoven. See Dezeen Events Guide for more architecture and design events around the world.
