“We have a little oasis in the middle of all this industry,” says designer Sabine Marcelis, from her new Rotterdam studio in the Netherlands. The nearly 20,000-square-foot space, built in 1960, is situated in Spaanse Polder, a port zone northwest of the city center. Outside, seagulls squawk; a crane lifts sand and plops it on a boat. But inside, slabs of colored glass, hunks of polished resin, and sundry material experiments gleam like mirages in the sunlight that streams in from the ceiling and windows. Marcelis calls that luminosity a “core ingredient” for her work; whether she’s cutting marble or experimenting with Japanese urushi lacquer, she explains, “I use light as a tool to make static objects into dynamic experiences.”
Marcelis has made her name by turning industrial matter into objects of uncanny beauty through adept use of light and color. The works are often deceptively simple—a reflective gradient that challenges your perspective; a slice of resin that looks like a supersized gummy, its edges ever-so-slightly translucent. “I identify Marcelis as a colorist,” explains curator and design historian Glenn Adamson, placing her alongside masters like Hella Jongerius. “It seems to me that this is her true subject; color serves as a means of elevating and specifying an object, giving it a strong and memorable sense of character.”
If you boil Marcelis’s prolific practice down to a single object, you’ll arrive at the Candy Cube. Back in 2014, when a fashion brand called her for store displays, she set out to make a polished resin block that could be made in one pour—no seams. “My mission was to create a really luscious object,” she says of the endeavor—her first time working with Sotiris De Wit, who now heads her resin manufacturing. “Something that you want to touch; something that you don’t quite grasp.” The project would, in essence, launch her studio. As for the cube? “It’s gone on to live a life of its own,” Marcelis reports of the piece, which has appeared on Vitra’s chair collection poster, was acquired by MoMA, and went on tour with Lorde.
Born in the Netherlands and raised in New Zealand, Marcelis was a semiprofessional snowboarder before she found design. Up on the mountaintop, her approach was already taking shape. “I realized you can manipulate your experience of the world around you by filtering light,” she says. “On an overcast day, you put on colored goggles to perceive depth better; on a sunny day you use reflective goggles.”
She enrolled in the industrial-design program at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington in 2006 but, two years in, she got “itchy feet,” and transferred to the Design Academy Eindhoven, the legendary Dutch school known for its irreverent spirit. Here, she honed her style and developed relationships with manufacturers. Her graduation project—a glass table that could shift from transparent to opaque—was fabricated by the same factory that now makes her cult favorite Mirage mirrors and more.
“I always want to be involved in the process so I understand how to disrupt it,” she says, asking, “How can you get more and more out of a material every time?”
Often, it’s large, site-specific projects that allow her to push those limits. For an installation at the Barcelona Pavilion in 2019 she created a fountain using the largest sheet of glass possible to bend. For Ra, installed in 2023 at the Pyramids of Giza, she used solar glass to create an artwork that could charge by day and glow at night. For the High Museum of Art in Atlanta last year, she created her first kinetic installation, four rotating reflective volumes that “mess up your perception of your panorama.” Next, she’ll make a 300-foot-long vitreous canopy—with marble seating beneath—at the Seattle airport.
Perhaps the sexiest limb of Marcelis’s studio is private commissions. Clients with an all-concrete house wanted a pop of color, so she devised the butter yellow resin bathroom that took Instagram by storm. For a home overlooking a historic sight she conceived a mirrored wall, making the view visible from every seat. But such extravagances mix in with hard-boiled industrial design—a sold-out 2023 IKEA collab; her debut dining chair made with BD Barcelona for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The latter was not an assignment she took casually—in nearly 15 years she’d never designed a standard seat. “Even when you’re studying, the chair is, like, the holy grail,” Marcelis says. Now, six of them—aluminum, stackable, lightweight, recyclable—surround the studio dining table.
Marcelis relishes those challenges—next on the docket is a listening club in New York City, for which she’s researching the acoustic qualities of her beloved materials. Simply put, she says, “I don’t want to get stuck repeating myself.”
Sabine Marcelis’ studio appears in AD’s October issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
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