RECESSION CHIC

Dutch design is world famous, but how is it coping with the recession? Four leading lights of Dutch design give their views.

FROM HANDBAGS TO HIGH-RISES, DUTCH design has made its influence felt all around the world. As in so many fields, from sport and art to banking and logistics, the Dutch have influenced the world of design more fundamentally than a nation of 17 million has any right to expect.

A 2005 report from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science found the “added value” of the country’s design industry totalled €2.6bn (£2.2bn) per year and provided work for about 46,000 people, making it a major domestic employer as well as an international calling card.

But what does Dutch design mean today? With Dutch Design Week set to celebrate the nation’s creative successes in Eindhoven this October, we spoke to four major players to find out how the industry is faring, and asked what Dutch design means to them.

1. GEORGE GOTTL
“Provoking an emotion”

George Gottl is co-creative director and partner with UXUS, a design firm that specialises in interiors, branding and retail and hospitality. He is a former creative director at Nike USA, and established the UXUS European headquarters in Amsterdam in 2003.

“Dutch design is in a really good state, because it has had a huge influence all over the world. It has moved design away from a traditional, rational architectural approach to a more creative approach – Dutch design is focused on provoking an emotion. It can be rational but usually it’s very witty and tongue in cheek. Dutch design has become so ubiquitous that people don’t think of it as Dutch anymore. It has spread all over the world as the new wave approach to design.

“Dutch design is highly intelligent and not always based on purely superficial objectives. Whereas Italian design always wants to make a project very smooth and very slick and ‘beautiful’ by western standards, often the objective of Dutch design isn’t that at all – it’s to provoke an emotion, to create irony – it’s about engaging the mind as well as the eyes.

“My partner and I travel all over the world to fairs and exhibitions and whenever we see the avant-garde or the newest or the greatest, it’s always Dutch design.

“Across the world the recession has had a huge impact, though. The Frankfurt design fair Tendence was empty – it was horrifying. The recession is bad for design on a commercial level, but it gives a lot of opportunities for new designers because now there is space in the market for young people who have figured out how to do things cheaply.”

2. HESTER VAN EEGHEN
“Never the French frou frou”

Hester van Eeghen has been at the top of the Dutch design industry for more than 20 years. Her bags and leather accessories are sold in locations as diverse as New York’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) and her own boutiques in Amsterdam’s Nine Lanes.

“I’m always at different fairs all over Europe, and there is a certain label that we have. You immediately recognise something as Dutch because it’s simple, it’s straightforward and mostly there’s a kind of humour in it, there’s a wink. It’s more Scandinavian than anything else – it’s never the French frou frou, it’s never the sharp German design. And what I hear is that most of these people are supported by government money – but not quite enough.

What we need is for the young people to come along who are extreme enough to push it through to the next level. You always see the same names – it’s too much of the same thing.

“In my case the recession hasn’t had an effect – my turnover improved in the first half of the year. I presume that the really big labels are now too expensive – people won’t pay that any more – so they try to find something that’s less prestigious but nevertheless beautifully made. People have stepped away from that ridiculous farce where you have to get a ‘must-have’ bag.”

3. JOHN BAKKER
“A lot of help from the government”

John Bakker is the inventor of the PAL-V, a powerful tilting tricycle that converts into a gyrocopter and reaches speeds of 195kph on land or in the air. It has attracted interest from Dutch and German police forces, and the first full prototype will be tested in 2010.

“I’ve had a lot of help from the government, which I think other designers have had too, and it has a big impact on our ability to design. In 2004 I had my design ready and had my patent registered. We made business plans and went to the government and investors. It took us several years but we got a loan and subsidies from the government worth about €1.3m (£1.1m).

“I work with several companies – designers, but also technical designers like Carver – and things seem healthy. In Holland I hear a lot about Dutch design, but I don’t know how they receive it abroad. You hear of Dutch car designers in big companies – Martin de Bruin who designed the Spyker, Christian de Brink who designed the Carver, senior designers at BMW and Audi. So that’s good news, but we’re starting to see now that more designers are approaching us looking for work, which might show that the wider industry is doing badly.”

4. SJOERD SOETERS
“Our suburbs are dull”

Sjoerd Soeters is a founding partner and architect with Soeters Van Eldonk. He has been designing buildings and public spaces in the Netherlands for more than 30 years.

“There’s a small market, but I don’t think the Dutch export a lot of architecture. Some work abroad, but not many. There are more Dutch design products exported, but these are quite niche, and not the mainstream.

“The Netherlands is maybe the only country where modern design has been at the forefront for the last century. In Italy and Germany it died out under fascism, in Russia it ended under Stalin. But modernity as a design statement or mentality has had a prolonged existence in Holland. The government has always supported it, so the Dutch attitude is very much that everything new is better than everything old. The exception is our cities, which mostly date from the 16th or 17th centuries, and are still very popular.

“But in the last century we haven’t been able to expand these cities in a very attractive way. Our suburbs are dull and that’s because in the last century the government played a large part in the development of these suburbs, building many cheap houses. But these are places where less and less people feel comfortable now.

“Suburbia in Holland has a life cycle of 40 to 50 years, and then you knock it down and start again. It brings work for new young architects, but it won’t change the life cycle because fashion in the suburbs changes every 40 to 50 years. Other countries do it in a different way – they build for a longer life cycle, and for things to last. I’m not sure which is better, or that our way is always popular with the Dutch population.”

Dutch Design Week runs from 17-25 October
www.dutchdesignweek.nl

WORDS BY MATT FARQUHARSON

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