lifestyle - Bram Boo
Written by Oryx
Balancing function and beauty, Bram Boo’s unusual but practical furniture designs are instantly recognisable, with their surprising forms and element of fun.
Awarded Designer of the Year 2010 by the Interieur Biennale, Belgian-born Bram Boo is a self-made independent designer who made the foray into furniture design when he couldn’t find the furniture he wanted for his own home.
Although his designs are for very simple things such as tables and chairs, beds and desks, the everyday objects receive fun extensions, squarish additions, concave voids, or practical stackability, which conjure up a fresh new use for the object. The limited editions, the made-to-measure furniture, the designs for manufactured production, or Bram Boo’s special installations, are made with a tongue-in-cheek wink towards familiar forms and uses.
“As experimental as they look, my pieces never lose the main role they have to fulfil,” he says. “I aspire to create new ideas and emotions to surprise myself and the people who I’m working for. It seems I’m addicted to function!”
For Bram, design is a straightforward and useful way to give forms to commonplace objects for sitting, leaning, or lying down on, but that go beyond what’s traditional and familiar. He doesn’t use complicated recipes or theoretical models, but a healthy dose of intuition and an elementary knowledge of basic materials and colour.
The jury members of the Designer of the Year – including the Interieur Foundation, Design Museum Gent, Grand Hornu Images, and the magazines Knack Weekend and Le Vif Weekend – were charmed by the ‘original frugality and the strong, innate formal language, the sensitive use of colour and the boundless enthusiasm’ of Bram Boo – and it’s not hard to see why.
