Whether or not you like an object, it's the product of an individual person making decisions about things. That's what makes it interesting.
A good gift celebrates the relationship between the giver and the receiver. When you open that box, you feel like, 'Wow, you really understood me.' At the same time, you think this gift could come only from that person.
Ambition is a beautiful thing.
Amsterdam is a breeding ground for new creative pursuits in many areas fueled by a tolerance and openness to ideas unlike any world city I've been to. There is something for everyone here, especially when you dare to go off the beaten path.
I wear mascara sometimes, a little lip gloss.
Function is fundamental to design, of course. If something doesn't work, it's a bad product, and I certainly get frustrated by things that aren't functional. But there has to be more than function. A house has to function, but if that's all it does, you don't love it.
You can go to any second-hand store and get an amazing piece - I have pieces from flea markets at home. You don't need to buy throwaway furniture.
Inspiration has become this word that people tend to talk about as something from the outside. The truth is that... it is inside, like a burning fire: it is the feeling of certainty that your life has a meaning and you'll do something important.
Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn't reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow - and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.
An object should elicit desire, and often it happens not because people need it but because they love it.
To me, relaxing doesn't mean that we play ding-dong songs and look at a wall of bamboo. It's just completely unoriginal.
In tech, people want an object for what's inside it, what it does. You need to make a defensive design that people won't walk away from. A chair is aggressive - you want a customer to choose it from many others.
We are buying stuff we know we don't need, and that is a problem we should face in design. It starts with creating an object that transports through time a valuable idea: that it can live forever.
I have been a designer all my life, and design, for me, is to share love and trust and show the future in a beautiful way. I have worked on this principle all my life.
I've always liked the idea of making things that last forever, not necessarily in the sense of being unbreakable, but more psychologically permanent. Most people throw stuff away not because it's broken but because their relationship with that object is broken.
Opulence doesn't cost more than boring.
When you look at the work you do every day, you do see things. But if you look at the work you did for 25 years, suddenly you start to get a more complete picture.
The works we do in Moooi are very diverse, very eclectic. That's how we like it.
I think architects design outside in. Or they design basically outside. They don't get in the building anymore.
Humor has the tendency to be funny once. If I tell you a joke, we're going to have a big laugh. But the second time I tell the joke, it's going to be a bit strange, and the third time you're going to ask if there's something wrong with me. So I am very cautious with jokes, but there is a lightness in my work.
