Marnix Van Strydonck

Marnix Van Strydonck shows here as STRYD — pronounced "stride", and in Dutch also the word for struggle. It is a Brussels-born design and furniture platform, built on three principles: formal legibility of plan, clear exhibition of structure, and the valuation of materials as found.

Objects are designed and manufactured with craftsmanship first, in order to create value. That necessitates limited scale, because neither value nor craftsmanship survives large production and distribution. The same philosophy governs the materials, which are always organic, regenerative, durable and repairable.

STRYD forms a resistance to the myth of progress by returning to the basics, subtracting the ornament, and guaranteeing brute strength and quality. It was born out of a will to embody Belgian design fundamentally. It does not seek to be practical, fashionable or even aesthetically pleasing; it offers non-solutions to problems you never knew were there. It exists for those intuitively drawn to Belgian design — a radical ode to form follows function that will unsettle any devotee to elegance.

Where GROUND established the discipline — joinery as argument, material as evidence — Maison d'Artiste asks what that discipline does once it has to hold a body.

This furniture was built to be sat in, leaned on, eaten from, and the pieces gathered on the sixth floor test whether a structural proof can still function as a chair. Nothing here softens for domesticity. The joint stays visible, the leg stays sharp, the ornament stays absent — and the room, not the object, is what has to adjust.