As a child, Valentin Loellmann was always restless. Now based in the Netherlands, the furniture and interior designer describes it as a ‘yearning – a longing for home, for safety – yet maybe simultaneously a fear and an appetite to discover the world’.
So the budding artist would rearrange his bedroom to create different worlds where he felt more comfortable, using materials and tools from his ceramicist father’s studio and foraging from the forest surrounding the family farm in southern Germany. Growing up, the idea simply became ‘bigger and bigger – now it’s immense’, he says, laughing.
Today, a big part of this immense vision is his light-filled atelier, which is set across two floors of a renovated 20th-century hat factory in Maastricht, a south-eastern Dutch city. ‘I need constant change around me to stay inspired,’ says Loellmann, who might eat and sleep there, but also sees it as a space for others to share (and where one day he hopes to create an arts foundation).
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‘It feels like a home away from home, but in order to not allow it to become like a typical home, I see it more as a series of residency spaces. I invite artists and musicians to stay; I use it for concerts and exhibitions.’
Loellmann discovered the factory when he rented its front entrance as his first studio after graduating from the Maastricht Institute of Arts 15 years ago. The sinuously sculpted, spindly legged tables, benches, stools and shelving he produced there by hand, hewn from rich materials such as walnut, copper and brass, quickly became so sought-after at fairs such as Art Basel and PAD in Paris that he decided to buy the whole building.
Gutting its interior and replacing the roof allowed him to introduce a sky-lit atrium, from which stems the kitchen and living room. It is planted with a jungle of towering trees, reminiscent of the nature-filled spaces he created as a child.
‘The trees for me are really important because without them I wouldn’t be working at all,’ he says of the fundamental influence nature has always played in how he lives and works. ‘I reinterpret it into my surroundings and my pieces, which are led intuitively from a feeling instead of a drawing or plan.’
High ceilings and expansive glazing allow light to filter in unencumbered from the outside; tactile materials, such as walnut and Belgian limestone, enhance the organic warmth of every space, and soothing white plaster shows the marks of Loellmann’s own hand.
A salvaged cast-iron spiral staircase winds its way up from the kitchen to the curved hallway on the floor above, leading to two bedrooms and a greenhouse-style bathroom, where the hot-pink flowers of a thriving Hong Kong orchid tree provide an exotic canopy over the bathtub.
Benches, shelving and worktops built into the walls evoke the same sense of seamless fluidity that echoes through the silhouettes of Loellmann’s own curvaceous pieces, such as a charred-oak coffee table or a lattice-backed walnut sofa.
Each design, unique and otherworldly, looks almost as though it has been extracted directly from the forest floor, sculpted patiently over time by the elements. Also in the mix are classic Serge Mouille lights, a vintage 1970s sofa and Loellmann’s grandfather’s Blüthner piano.
In the main bedroom, wooden spheres chiselled, charred and carved by Belgian craftsman Kaspar Hamacher sit on the floor, while a stormy charcoal drawing by Maastricht-based photographer Michael Birmanns hangs on the wall. ‘I can’t make everything myself because I just have one life and it would take me another 15 years to develop the qualities I need to create work in a different medium,’ he says.
This summer, Loellmann brought a sense of his Maastricht life to the ‘Arriving Somewhere, Maybe’ exhibition at the David Gill Gallery in London. In the centre of the room, Loellmann has created a large pool and lined it with ceramic tiles he has handcrafted from 2,000 kilos of clay and fired in special kilns in his workshop (housed in another former factory, transformed during the pandemic into a larger space for Loellmann and his 15-strong team to dream bigger).
The patterning of wall-mounted and steel-framed wooden panels in burnt oak intimate the fluidity of undulating water, complemented by a curation of pieces in smoked wood, aqueous resin, blackened steel and plush velvet.
‘I wanted to bring to it an expression of what I’m doing as an artist,’ he explains. ‘You can see my hand in every piece; it’s not drawn by me then somebody else produces it. It’s really sculpted by me,’ he asserts. For this exhibition, the pieces are sensitive and soft, ‘reflecting the feelings I try to put into each of them: movement, sensuality, intimacy and trust’.
And it is these same emotions, ‘the ones I’m always trying to gather around me’, he says, that are visibly and sensorially palpable in his own atelier-cum-home. valentinloellmann.de; davidgillgallery.com
