Milan 2013: Belgian designer Maarten de Ceulaer presents the latest piece from his collection of furniture made from piled-up suitcases in Milan this week.

On show at Milan's Nilufar Gallery, the newest addition to The Leather Collection by Maarten de Ceulaer is the Chest of Suitcases.

The custom-made leather suitcases can be stacked up to make chests of drawers in various configurations, from tall and narrow towers to wide and low benches, arranged either in neat lines or chaotic, overlapping piles.

The suitcases come in soft shades of green, blue and cream or alternatively in a monochrome palette of white, grey and black.

De Ceulaer first explored the idea of stacking up suitcases to make furniture as part of his graduation project at Design Academy Eindhoven, before launching a desk and chest of drawers in Milan in 2009.

The collection is on show until 14 April at Nilufar Gallery, Via Della Spiga 32, in the Brera district.

Other projects by De Ceulaer we've featured on Dezeen include an installation of stripy leather furniture for fashion house Fendi and colourful lights shaped like laboratory flasks – see all design by Maarten de Ceulaer.

We'll be reporting on all the highlights from Milan this week, including Zaha Hadid's monochrome pendant lamps for Slamp and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec's installation of cork carousels – see all news and products from Milan 2013 or take a look at our interactive map featuring the week's best exhibitions, parties and talks.

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Maarten de Ceulaer appeared first on Dezeen.

Maarten de Ceulaer used materials provided by Fendi, a brand that traditionally specialises in fur and leather, to create the soft surfaces in the Transformations collection.

He drew on Fendi's signature motif, which is inspired by the geometric and abstract forms of Futurism and the Bauhaus, to create the patterned furniture.

The foam-filled planks are handmade from strips of leather and suede in various colours, and each has two eyelets for the leather-covered nails.

"I wanted to create a system with which I can create functional graphics, functional patterns," de Ceulaer told Dezeen at Design Miami. "So I decided to make them soft and to make them upholstered with foam, so they become nothing more than cushions, basically, stripes of cushions, with which you can do anything."

"You just smack it onto a wall with a special tool, which has a curve, so you can easily hammer it into anything," he added.

Whitewashed pine was chosen as a surface. "It’s logical that you nail something to wood," he said, "and I’m doing the same thing [with wood] that I do with the leather – it’s all different kinds of patchworks which flow from one to the other."

He added: "I didn’t want to design a sofa or a chair, but rather a system that does the same – you just find some boxes like you see here and you can create your sofa, or you can create your daybed."

Fendi has previously commissioned work from Formafantasma, who showed pieces made from discarded leather at the Design Miami/Basel fair in Switzerland this year, and Aranda/Lasch, who made seating out of foam pyramids as part of a project for Design Miami in 2010.

Other projects by de Ceulaer we've featured on Dezeen include a series of knobbly foam seats and colourful lights tinted by food colouring.

Dezeen was at Design Miami last week reporting on all the highlights of the collectors fair, including an "ice halo" made of Swarovski crystals, a cast bronze lamp shaped like a bent Eiffel Tower and an entrance pavilion that looked like inflatable sausages – see all our stories about Design Miami.

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Photographs are courtesy of Fendi.

Here's some more information from Design Miami:

Fendi presents Transformations by Maarten de Ceulaer
Design Miami/ Miami 2012

Following the Design Miami/ Basel edition in June with Craftica by FormaFantasma, Fendi has invited Belgian designer Maarten de Ceulaer to develop for the December 2012 programme a project that responds to its visual identity and its legacy of Modernist-inspired patterns and emblems. Maarten was selected for this project because he has demonstrated a remarkable affinity for crafting sophisticated furniture and objects imbued with lyrical, whimsical narrative.

The designer found particular inspiration in Fendi’s signature Pequin motif, creating “Transformations” in celebration of Fendi’s long heritage of abstract rectilinear and geometric imagery. Throughout the decades, Fendi designers have drawn from the beautiful, groundbreaking work of pioneering design movements such as the Wiener Werkstätte, De Stijl, Futurism, the Bauhaus and Art Deco. Since 1983, Fendi has incorporated striped Pequin materials into many accessory lines, from handbags to luggage. Numerous designs for Fendi furs also feature patterns that evoke the feel of vanguard graphic designs from the 1910s to the 1930s.

For Design Miami/ 2012, Maarten has transformed this repertoire of two-dimensional expression into a three-dimensional installation, exploring the boundaries between hard and soft, natural and man-made, organic and geometric, luxurious and mundane. Converting the idea of a stripe into a physical module based on a piece of lumber, “Transformations” juxtaposes lacquered wood boards and tree stumps with exquisitely handmade leather planks arranged in a variety of eye-catching, multicolored compositions. The result is a total environment that, as whole, becomes a living pattern reminiscent of design work from the early years of Modernism.

The “soft planks” that Maarten developed for this project can be applied wherever additional comfort is desired: the gesture of applying them is as simple as nailing a board to a tree.

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Milan 2012: these knobbly seats by Belgian designer Maarten De Ceulaer are on show at Spazio Rossana Orlandi in Milan this week.

Each piece in the Mutation series is made from foam spheres, cut so they fit together, attached to a frame and coated in rubber or flocked.

De Ceulaer's work is also on show at the Triennale di Milano and as part of IN Residence at Ventura Lambrate.

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile takes place from 17 to 22 April. See all our stories about Milan 2012 here.

Photographs are by Nico Neefs.

Here are some more details from Maarten De Ceulaer:

Mutation Series

The pieces in this series look like they weren’t made by hands, but have grown to their present form organically. They might be the result of a mutation in cells, or the result of a chemical or nuclear reaction. Perhaps it’s a virus or bacteria that has grown dramatically out of scale. The Mutation pieces make you look at furniture in a different way.

Maybe one day we would be able to grow a piece of furniture like we breed or clone an animal, and manipulate it’s shape like a bonsai tree. On the other hand, the project can be seen as an experimental review of classic furniture upholstery. It reminds us of the famous and iconic deep buttoned (Chesterfield) sofa's, interpreted in a highly contemporary and sculptural way.

Instead of upholstering springs and foam with leather or textile, these pieces are created by carefully composing patterns with cut-offs of foam spheres of various sizes, and applying them onto a structure. In the end the entire piece gets coated, with a durable rubber or tactile velvet-like finish. It is hardly possible to ever recreate such a specific pattern, so every piece is completely unique.

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De Ceulaer's previous works include food colouring-tinted lights and installations composed of stacked suitcases. See more of his work on Dezeen here.

Watch another Tales of the Hunt movie featuring Korean designer Kwangho Lee here.

More about Maarten De Ceulaer on Dezeen | Tales of the Hunt: Kwangho Lee

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Milan 2010: Belgian designer Maarten De Ceulaer will present a series of lights containing water tinted with food colouring in Milan later this month.

Called Colour Lights, the range consists of glass vessels filled with water containing non-toxic colourants.

The lights will be presented at Spazio Rossana Orlandi during the Salone Internazionale del Mobile from 14-19 April.

See all our stories so far from Milan 2010 in our special category.

Here's some text from the designer:

Any colour can be created by the right mix of the primary colours Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. The spherical shape in the bottom of the bottles is sandblasted from below, so the power-LED below it, mounted on an aluminium disc, illuminates it completely.

The food colourants will be supplied with the lamp, can be ordered afterwards, but can also be bought in most supermarkets. All lamps will be handmade in collaboration with a laboratory glass-ware atelier in Brussels. What you see on these images is the first series of prototypes, it will soon be expanded with more typologies of bottles, and various sizes will be available in each model.

These prototypes will be presented at Spazio Rossana Orlandi (Via Matteo Bandello 14/16 20123 Milano) during the Salone del Mobile, from 14-19 April.

Leather Collection (above, May 2009)

A Pile of Suitcases (above, October 2008)

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