Founded in Antwerp in 2016, Nortstudio is the shared practice of Jef De Brabander and Kathleen Opdenacker, two designers with two very different backgrounds who found common ground in their love of working with their hands and manipulating materials. Kathleen trained as a graphic designer, and has an eye for the expressive use of color and geometry. Jef studied industrial engineering and worked in the construction industry before opting instead to hone his problem-solving and fabrication skills on the more intimate scale of objects.

Together, the pair create furniture and accessories whose colorful, graphic volumes blur the line between two dimensions and three, and belie the meticulous craftsmanship and material exploration that goes into each one-of-a-kind piece. Their work draws inspiration from the structural details of architecture, the daring shapes and palettes of Italian design, and color combinations sourced from paintings and fashion magazines — all filtered through the intuitive process of hands-on studio experimentation.

The exploration of production techniques — and the surprises and transformations that happen along the way — are at the core of Nortstudio’s practice. The duo never stop wondering about how things are made, how those details can inspire new ideas, and how simple materials like wood or aluminum can be manipulated to give those ideas form. Most of their designs start as drawings and find expression through technique, while others arise organically from the properties and limitations of the material at hand, like a recent fascination with molding resin that gave rise to their Graphic series.

The common denominator is the pair’s bold use of color, which is so integral to their process that it functions almost like a material in itself. They can spend hours mixing and arranging pigments and swatches until they’ve created combinations that evoke the right feeling or moment in time, often in ways that are totally unexpected — rendering colors they consider “ugly” beautiful and essential by way of proximity alone. Design Crafted

At first glance, Nortstudio’s designs appear to be precise and perfect, but that’s what makes them so intriguing — in reality, they’re all crafted by hand in extremely limited numbers in the couple’s own Antwerp atelier, with no two pieces being exactly alike. Every hand-bent wooden table base is a slightly different shape, every hand-mixed resin pigment a slightly different shade. The objects’ deceiving sleekness arises in part from Kathleen’s graphic sensibility, and in part from the fact that no screws or joints are visible, even when they’re turned upside down — a characteristic that stems from the designers’ belief in eliminating unnecessary details until what’s left behind is pure, clean form.