Piet Hein Eek

I actually already spend more than enough time surrounded by my own designs, so I wasn’t madly enthusiastic about the idea of coming up with ideas for the shop fittings and having to make them. Luckily the old shelving racks scattered about the building gave me the idea of fitting the shop out with old workplace furniture. Subsequently, we went and bought all sorts of old work benches, tables and cabinets. In the first instance, the idea was to paint all the items in one colour, so they would blend into the background (we planned to leave the most beautiful ones unpainted) but unfortunately, in the hectic build-up to the opening, there was no time left to do so. The shop was filled with a mishmash of workplace furniture. It immediately looked in place, but it was also beautiful. When we put price tags on a couple of them after a month or two, it turned out that they sold well too. A side-line was born and the shop changes continually because the furniture has become one of the best-selling items. To even half keep up with the tempo, we’ve had to become second hand dealers in stuff that we actually always really liked anyway.