Belgian making at its most disciplined, in service of the unexpected.
Brothers Serge and Axel Van Den Bossche founded the house outside Antwerp in 1986, after years spent trailing their mother's flowerpot stall through Belgian markets: the kind of apprenticeship that teaches you what people actually want to live with, not what merely photographs well. Axel still runs it, alongside his wife and longtime collaborator, designer Marie Michielssen, plus a rotating set of designers from around the world. Three decades in, the instinct hasn't moved: make considered, well-made things that don't need a special occasion to earn a place in the home.
Three collections in, the partnership behaves less like a project than a conversation: one Wearstler and Serax keep picking back up, never quite finishing the sentence the same way twice. What draws her back isn't a shared palette so much as an appetite for the same things: a bit of irreverence, an object willing to hold a story instead of just a purpose. Serax has real fluency there: Serax has real fluency there: a command of craft precise enough to let an unruly idea keep its edge instead of flattening into something safe. Their audience is fluent in it too, collectors who buy for the narrative first and the function second. That's the register she keeps aiming for, which is why every new chapter lands somewhere she hasn't stood before.
Three collections in, the partnership behaves less like a project than a conversation: one Wearstler and Serax keep picking back up, never quite finishing the sentence the same way twice.
Zuma
Grid ceramics and ombre glassware, running a futuristic 3D vector grid against motifs borrowed from ancient glass. Designed to mix and match across colors and shapes.
Dune
Ancient Greek pottery forms updated with a trick no ancient potter had: the same ridge, rendered matte in one piece and high-gloss in the next, carried across ceramics, glassware and flatware.
Planters
Wearstler's first venture into ceramic vessels, built from four design languages, each piece coming alive under hand-applied glazes that shift with the light.
The partnership works because neither of us is interested in the safe version of anything. We don't share a language so much as a dialect only the two of us speak.
