Demakersvan is the literal translation of “The makers of”, three connected words forming only one name, a symbol of unity as a way of thinking. Two brothers Joep and Jeroen Verhoeven and a girl, Judith de Graauw (above in the photo 1, by Raoul Kramer with the Lost & Found lamp), each of them born no later than 1976. After their graduation at the Academy of Eindhoven, this young group of Dutch designers abandoned the single ego to get one unique and common identity, which is expression of challenge and research with no limits of fields. Three different personalities with one purpose, which materializes itself as an intriguing innovation of something already existing and belonging to the past, or by contrast, as a beautiful phenomenon of crazy ideas. In their website is textually reported: “We are plain but love the impossible…” A stubborn attitude which proves how the real talent does not meet any boundary along the way.

M.E.F.: I kwow that you started your firm just in 2004 and after a few years you were already present at the V&A museum in London, at the MoMA in New York and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. What was in your opinion that “something special” which let you reach such incredible goals in so little time?
J.d.G.: Naivity, luck, persistency. At the beginning we worked extremely hard, and said “yes” to everything. Sometimes we used to sleep in the studio. Moreover we also travelled all over the world, mainly organised by Lidewij Edelkoort, the Dutch design icon. It was a fruitful period then, but not our funniest one, if I have to look back.
M.E.F.: Why “Demakersvan”? It sounds as if the craft and the manual capacity would be that main aspect of your way of creating.
J.d.G.: We just want to create things that make people happy looking at or living with. Design is often presented as being much more than this. With our name we want to go beyond ego and individual names... And above all, the biggest, most amazing projects we do are those ones which we are working for, as a team.

M.E.F.: Your work approach looks very heterogeneous and I see a sort of romanticism in the composition of forms. Is it just a new way to look at the past or rather a new interpretation of normal daily objects? I am referring to your “Lace fence” and “Lucky charm” creations. (See photos 2 and 3 by Joost van Brug).
J.d.G.: Objects often have a great story, usually with an open-end. The “Chainlink fence”, is very functional, hostile and yet very friendly when we combined it with the lace. The open-end leaves us thinking about a sequence that is beyond the most logical one and that makes it exciting, new.

M.E.F.: In many Dutch designers I have seen a real passion for Baroque shapes. And “White Carrara marble Cinderella table” seems to be a protruding version of a bidimentional Baroque drawing.
J.d.G.: True, but it was the original “Cinderella table” (see the photo 4 by Raoul Kramer) that carries on the concept, I mean the strongest one. The marble version was an exclusive production. But Baroque shapes are not very interesting to us. We took as samples 17th century tables, because that period was just right before furniture was being made industrially. We obtained hand sketched working drawings and started designing with them by the computer. The combination of 2d sketches and 3d drawings made really amazing results. This way, we crossed the borderline between craft and high tech.

M.E.F.: You are a close team. But what are the specific characteristics of each of you? How do you interfere and cooperate in your works?
J.d.G.: Besides being designers we love to know how things are constructed, produced. That is where the three of us are on the exact same line. A sense of humour, glamour, fairytales, to make the impossible possible and the ugly duck a beautiful swan, they are all specific aspects of our way to conceive things, actually. We are business-wise and each other’s opposites. We make compliments to each other but we also have different attitudes in seeing things. That is why we can run a “business” at the same time. We get the most brilliant ideas because we function as each other’s mirror. And, in order to justify or defend a concept, a thousand times, it sharpens it. So we are always looking for the best way to communicate our ultimate dream.
M.E.F.: I like very much the “Lost and found” chair. How far is the typical technique of making shoes influenced its final result? In other words how much a particular method can determine such an original shape?

J.d.G.: When I was a child, as I had new shoes, I loved going to sleep just staring at them. Every detail, stitch, smell was lovely to me. And when the Dutch brand Montis asked us to make a new design, we carried out a stool as a token of their most honest way of producing. They literally had to go back to their own history to get a shoe stitching machine to manifacture the stool, since Dongen was the leather capital in Holland of the last century. The machines needed wide seams and a thick thread, characteristics which you can see in the result of the final design. (See the photo 5 by Raoul Kramer).

M.E.F.: How much important is functionality in your works? Because I think it is really strechted to its limits and the form of your objects prevails on it. Am I wrong?
J.d.G.: I see it as a compliment, since most of the products we design are in fact usable, except for the “Cinderella table”, in which we wanted to show a final dream without making any concessions. But usually, yes, it is a battle between functionalty and shape. If the viewer does not see that, it is a quality design. We are also very good at leaving apart what does not work, and keeping what does, instead. I really believe that every designer has good ideas, but not everybody can see the trees through the wood. Sometimes we give lectures on this subject.
M.E.F.: I have read that you do not like the consumption aspect of Design products. Design is not just following a trend, the new wave, but it must be timeless. Is it just for this reason that most of you are oriented towards an Art status of your objects instead of responding only to market strategies?
J.d.G.: We rather inititate than respond, because with the latter one you are already restricted. We like very much working for the mass market too, but also then, we need to have a bigger vision, a concept before we think about a practical use of an object. The practical use is a matter of altering & trying it out, again and again, to see if it still fits the main concept we originally had in mind.
M.E.F.: Do you think that using the word Design for “limited edition” creations is still a proper word for defining them?
J.d.G.: No. It is a shame that the word “limited” is abused so many times in order to give the design an extra value. We can produce everything unlimited with our gigantic factories. The only time we create a certain number of objects is when we produce something ourselves, and we do not want only to do that, for the rest of our lives.

M.E.F.: Various cooperations for architects like MVRDV and Wink and for different other brands such as Swarovsky (see the Chrystal Garland photo 6 by Swarovsky), Fornarina, Nike and so on. But what was the most significant meeting for your career and your favourite creation for one of these important firms?
J.d.G.: Selling all the “Cinderella tables”, in one year and a half, is something that we had never expected. That Brad Pitt closed the line is even greater! The facade for “het Podium” by SeARCH was a significant step for our “Lace fences” and a dream came true in the sense that we wanted it to be a product, and then, it became a 31.000 ft2 reality! Right now we are working on a resort in Taiwan, designing a bottle for “Belvedere vodka”, a trolley for “Fatboy”, a fence for the Bijlmer park in Amsterdam, and furthermore the production of “Light wind” is going on and we have been invited to a “solo” show for Christie's Haunch of Venison.