Please join us in celebrating this month’s spotlight surface designer, Baptiste Vandaele. We know you’ll find his story inspiring!
Please introduce yourself.
I’m French, living in Paris. I’m inspired by big cities and wild nature. As a designer, I value hand-crafted products as much as the process for industrial goods. I’m very bored with trendy minimalism so I tend to explore the opposite direction.
Tell us a little bit about your design journey.
I’ve studied graphic design at the Fine Art School in Nancy in the east of France, a city very much impregnated by the Art Nouveau movement, and I think I can say now that I’ve been influenced by this ornamental approach in terms of graphic design, textile design, and interior design.
I started to work as a graphic designer for agencies, but it was not creative and fulfilling. I then had the opportunity to design a wallpaper collection for a small Parisian brand, that’s how I started surface design and I’m now (10 years after) full time on surface design. I’m now focusing on designing carpets and other textiles for the hospitality industry.
Do you have a favorite portfolio design or client collaboration?
I’ve been working as a freelancer for 7 years now for the Mama Shelter Hotel brand. Their design is very sophisticated, colorful, incongruous and joyful, so I believe our collaboration is a very good match. I design custom carpets for the rooms, corridors and restaurants, as well as fabric, wallpapers, tiles, and even a mosaic recently. Each design is connected with the city where it’s installed, telling stories about history, art, food, local culture, etc.
What or who are you inspired by?
Gustave Doré, Grünewald, Lucas Cranach, Dürer, Jean Lurçat, Ernst Haeckel, William Morris, Sol Lewitt, Susanna Shannon, Fabienne Verdier, Ricardo Bofill, Björk… Animals and plants, cities and architecture, crafts from all over the world and especially Islamic art.
Do you have resources you’d like to recommend?
Book: Bitten By Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Nineteenth-Century Home, by Lucinda Hawksley at Thames & Hudson
Book: Atlas of Forms, by Eric Tabuchi, Poursuite editions
What do you like to do outside of surface design?
Besides the commissioned works, I’ve co-created “Burning For,” a brand of handmade and hand painted ceramic tableware.
I love drawing letters and designed some typography, as an amateur. I also love hiking, swimming, reading, clubbing and cooking.
When you look back at your design journey so far, what are you most proud of?
The ceramic brand I’ve mentioned before, it was quite a complex challenge to design these patterns, because they required to be painted by hand, in only one color, easy to reproduce by a third person, to have diversity and be coherent as a whole together, be in between simplicity and complexity, etc. It was thrilling to collaborate with an old and traditional ceramic workshop in order to produce contemporary products.
If you could offer advice to other designers who are struggling, what would that be?
From the beginning, it’s very important to know everything about licensing contracts. Do not sign anything without asking for advice.
Where can we find you?
Website: www.b-v.fr
Instagram: @baptistevirgile
