The Independent: Maarten Baas: The red-hot Dutch furniture-maker's burning ambition
The red-hot Dutch furniture-maker's burning ambition
Maarten Baas found fame by torching some of the 20th century's most important design works. Now celebrities and collectors are scrambling to snap up his artfully scorched creations. Marcus Fairs meets a red-hot Dutch furniture-maker.
Maarten Baas is a designer who has discovered an incendiary recipe for success: his Smoke range of burnt furniture, which he developed while still a student, has made him one of the hottest properties on the international design scene. Yet the Dutch wunderkind, who is just 29, is also a designer who hasn't actually designed anything. Through the act of burning existing furniture - or gluing junk-shop finds into teetering bookshelves or moulding chairs and tables from clay, as in his more recent works - Baas's methodology is more akin to that of a craftsman or an artist.
Labels: Furniture, The Netherlands
