Utopia & Utility

Following her passion for ceramics, Ann Van Hoey changed careers after twenty years.
Inspired by different cultures and fueled by local techniques, Van Hoey has created a ceramic language of her own. Her love for geometrical shapes starts out as mathematical equations on paper.
Hemispheres are connected, merged and consolidated resulting in her distinctive artwork. 
Her bronze work for whenobjectswork are closed forms, mysteriously reflecting their surroundings.
Van Hoey is awarded with the ‘Commander in the Order of the Crown’  by Belgium’s King Phillipe for her achievements as a ceramic artist.

Kate Hume has been at the forefront of international interior design for more than 20 years. Known for combining a rare sense of color, with eclectic finds and custom-made pieces, she never forgets that her high-net-worth clients want their private residences to be serene, elegant, comfortable homes.
Based in Amsterdam, her multilingual practice has crafted sky-high city residences, family beach houses, country manors and the boutique hotel, Tortüe, in Hamburg.

Each project is unique yet all are created and curated with Hume’s hands-on approachability. Hume brings the flair honed through her past career as a stylist in fashion and film as well as an innate respect for the timeless craftsmanship of artisans; for she is herself a renowned glass designer.

What started as passionately hammering away as a child, grew into a full-blown artistic career as a stone sculptor. Belgian designer Kris Demuelenaere wields a chisel and hammer to reveal the sculpture hidden inside his alabaster stone, limestone or Carrara marble canvas. This intuitive way of creating makes Demuelenaere’s art spontaneous yet calculated, fluid yet solid, emotional yet rational and complex yet effortless. Working with Gardeco since 2022, Kris’ breathtaking pieces of stone art are now available to a larger public as delicate and spectacular limited edition bronze sculptures.

Some designers work in a single medium. Kristine Five Melvær works across all of them — and makes it look effortless.

Born in Norway in 1984, Kristine Five Melvær is one of Scandinavia's most compelling voices in contemporary design. Based in Oslo, she trained rigorously across two disciplines: she holds a Master's degree in Industrial Design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and a Master's degree in Visual Communication from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. That dual foundation is not incidental — it defines everything she makes.

Where most designers stay in their lane, Melvær moves freely between tableware, lighting, furniture, textiles, floor mats, graphic design and clothing. Her work is held together not by a single material or category, but by a consistent pursuit: finding the sensuous beauty hidden inside everyday objects — the ineffable quality that makes you want to keep something for a lifetime.

Her pieces are instantly recognizable. Playful but considered, richly expressive, built around strong graphic elements and advanced, unexpected color palettes. Melvær doesn't just design objects — she designs the emotional relationship between an object and the person who lives with it.

She has brought this vision to some of Europe's most respected brands — creating glass, wood and stone tableware for leading Belgian and Danish houses, developing sustainable urban furniture manufactured in Scandinavia, and lending her eye to the French fashion industry. Closer to home, her long-term collaborations with Norwegian national brands have helped shape a new, internationally recognized language for Norwegian design.

The recognition has followed. Melvær's awards include the ICFF Editor's Awards, the German Design Awards, the NYCxDesign Awards, the Riedel Award, the Scheiblers Award, and multiple Bo Bedre Design Awards — among them the prestigious title of Designer of the Year 2019. Her work has been exhibited in Milan, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, London, Venice, Kortrijk, Prague and Washington, and is held in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Norway and the Vitra Haus in Weil am Rhein.

Discover Kristine Five Melvær's collection at Object Origin Collective — a curated selection of her most iconic pieces, brought together for collectors and interiors that value beauty with intention.

In 1988 he founded the Aires Mateus & Associados studio, together with his brother Francisco. Private and public works, numerous awards and international competitions, and the publication of their works in worldwide press releases shape the Aires Mateus brothers as breakthrough figures of the new European architecture, they being characterized by a rigorous research and an extraordinary care in the quality of their works.

Aires Mateus’ architecture, which only superficially can be related to the international “minimalism”, is based on the research on space and materials that, although recognizing the mass as the principal element, aims to eliminate gravity in order to stress the importance of lightness through a substantial de-materialization.

This can be obtained playing with the contrast of full or void spaces, as well as choosing and manufacturing accurately the materials, even the more gravity-connotated ones as stones or marbles. In their constructions, the Mateus brothers seem to re-think the images of the quarries, where the prints left by the excavation generate new shapes.

 

Is a Venezuelan born, German-French architect who after graduatingwas recruited by Andree Putman to assist projects in Miami and Tokyo. In 2006, he joinedthe Christian Liaigre design studio in Paris, assisting several years with projects across theglobe. During a trip to Indonesia, he discovered a heartfelt connection with the country anddecided to establish Studio Jencquel the year after. A number of his projects have gainedmedia attention in the design community, prompting him to take on commissionsin differentcorners of the world and according to Departures Magazine, positioning him on a globalscale as “an exemplar of slow design.”

Born in Brussels in 1981 and raised between three languages and cultures, Nicolas Schuybroek has always been drawn to the spaces between things — the pause in a room, the weight of a material, the quiet that good architecture can hold. That sensibility has shaped everything he does.

After studying at École Saint-Luc in Brussels and McGill University in Montréal, Schuybroek spent five formative years as a project director under Vincent Van Duysen in Antwerp — an experience that sharpened his eye for discipline and restraint. In 2011, he founded his own practice in Brussels with a clear and personal conviction: that architecture should feel like a breath rather than a statement.

Nicolas Schuybroek Architects creates architecture, interiors, and objects defined by an acute sense of detail, tactile materiality, and deep craftsmanship. His approach — sometimes described as living minimalism or minimalism with a soul — resists the seductive pull of spectacle. There is no straining for effect in his work. Instead, there is something rarer: a muted elegance that reveals itself slowly, and stays with you.

The spaces Nicolas designs are serene, yet unmistakably warm. Monastic in their simplicity, but surprisingly sophisticated in their execution. He works with unassuming, raw, and tactile materials — stone, plaster, aged wood — chosen not for luxury, but for honesty. Every project, from the roughest structural decision to the smallest interior detail, reflects a rigorous and deeply contextual vision of how people actually inhabit space.

His international portfolio spans continents and typologies: private residences on the Côte d'Azur and in Mexico City, The Robey hotel in Chicago for Grupo Habita, Aesop's flagship store in Lyon, offices and showrooms in Belgium, and ongoing large-scale projects in France, the Netherlands, the UAE, the USA, Taiwan, the UK, South Korea, and Indonesia. In 2016 and 2022, he collaborated with Belgian design brand when objects work to create series of objects and a Signature Kitchen for Obumex, presented at the Milan Furniture Fair and Salone del Mobile.

Recognized multiple times on the AD France AD100 list since 2013, his work has been published in Wallpaper*, AD France, AD Germany, AD Italy, WSJ Magazine, Elle Decor, Abitare, and many more. In November 2021, Hatje Cantz published his first monograph — a wide-ranging portrait of the first decade of practice.

Nicolas Schuybroek's multicultural upbringing and extensive international travel inform a perspective that is both grounded and expansive. He works fluently in English, French, and Dutch. His work is not about trend or style — it is about finding the soul of a space, and letting it breathe.

Studionudo was born from a simple but enduring idea: that raw materials deserve to be honoured, not hidden. The name says it all — Studio, for the discipline of form; Nudo, for the nakedness of material at its most essential.

Founded by Fabiola Laccisaglia — a designer and art director from Como, trained at the Politecnico di Milano and forged in the style departments of Marzotto and Poliform — the studio creates everyday objects that carry the memory of their origins. Shapes and colours drawn from nature evoke open air, freedom, and the quiet of untouched spaces.

Every piece is crafted in collaboration with master artisans across Italy: leather worked by Florentine hands in Tuscany, marble and stone shaped in Veneto, glass blown in a historic Milanese workshop, ceramics fired in the ateliers of Brianza. Skilled and virtuous hands give each object its uniqueness — and its soul.

"Only the objects we truly love will last forever." — Fabiola Laccisaglia

Pia Wüstenberg doesn't make objects. She makes conversations — between materials, between cultures, between the handmade and the contemporary. Finnish-German by heritage and Royal College of Art by training, Pia graduated from the Design Products programme in London in 2011 and founded Utopia & Utility the following year. Since 2017, she splits her time between a studio in Northern Germany and the quiet landscapes of Eastern Finland — and that tension between the industrial and the elemental runs through everything she makes. Her signature is the Stacking Vessel: a modular composition where mouth-blown glass, hand-turned Curly Birch, semi-precious metal, and other handcrafted elements come together into a single, composed object. Each vessel can be taken apart and rearranged. Each piece works alone. But together, they form something that stops a room. To make them, Pia travels across Europe — to Czech glassblowers working techniques passed through generations, to Finnish woodturners sourcing their own timber, to North German workshops where the final assembly happens by hand. She doesn't commission remotely. She goes. She builds relationships that last. In her own words: "This is more than collaboration; it's a shared journey of creativity and passion, resulting in heirlooms designed to be treasured for generations." The pieces in this collection are exactly that. Not decorative in the passive sense — they have presence. They hold a room with quiet confidence. Made for people who collect with intention and live with beauty without making a fuss about it. At Object Origin Collective, we carry Pia's work because it represents exactly what we believe design can be: purposeful, poetic, and made with deep respect for the hands that shaped it.

Meet Örn Þorsteinsson — Icelandic sculptor, dreamer, and storyteller in stone and bronze. Born and based in the dramatic landscapes of Reykjavík, Iceland, Örn is celebrated for his sweeping monumental public sculptures that have become iconic fixtures across Iceland's cities and open spaces.

 

For Gardeco, Örn has channeled that same raw, elemental energy into something you can bring home — the Travel Pieces, an exclusive line of smaller sculptures designed specifically for intimate spaces. Each piece begins its life hand-carved from raw, disposable materials — a deeply intuitive process — before being masterfully translated into refined ceramics and bronze by Gardeco's skilled craftspeople.

 

What makes Örn's work instantly recognizable? Those fluid, biomorphic curves — shapes that feel alive, ancient, and strangely familiar. They echo the volcanic ridges, glacial valleys, and wind-worn shores of Iceland's breathtaking terrain. But look closer, and you'll find something deeper: every sculpture carries the name of a Norse God, a quiet nod to Iceland's rich mythological heritage — Odin, Thor, Freyr, and the countless beings that once shaped how Icelanders made sense of the world.

 

Owning an Örn Þorsteinsson piece is like holding a fragment of Iceland itself — wild, poetic, and timeless.