Marten Baas' Furniture Is a Genuine Search for Beauty

Setting your degree show on fire is not, perhaps, a smart move. But that’s exactly what the Dutch designer Maarten Baas did in 2002, at the end of his last year at the Netherlands’ world-renowned Design Academy Eindhoven. For his degree-show collection, which he titled , Baas took "a blowtorch to pieces of secondhand furniture—which included some serious Baroque antiques alongside flea market junk—then he painted the charred results with epoxy resin. Half usable pieces of furniture, half art, was an instant success with the industry: In 2003, the Dutch furniture manufacturer Moooi began producing versions of three chairs and a candelabra, which it still sells today. Before long Baas was torching grand pianos, high-back chairs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the classic “zigzag” chair by Gerrit Rietveld,