About
Designer, maker and geometric thinker, based near Hamburg.
I make furniture, sculpture and light that starts where most design ends: in the underlying structure of things, the proportions and patterns that give a form its meaning.
Every piece is drawn with compass and ruler and made with the techniques of fine cabinetmaking. Each one has its own geometric logic. Most are made once, a few in small editions. Alongside the studio I teach geometric design to architects, designers and teams, with programmes in Saudi Arabia, China, Egypt, Brazil, Spain and the UK.
How it started
It started at my father’s workbench.
A wooden tower, built over ten years.
The first buildings.
I was eight when I began building the Castle in the garden at home: a wooden tower about six metres high, with three rooms, a tower chamber and secret drawers. It took me ten years.
More buildings followed, among them a reading pavilion on an octagonal plan, crowned by a sixteen-fold lantern, and a small firewood storage shelter with a steep timber roof.
Learning how buildings were made.
Knowing how something was built was never enough for me. I had to try it myself. So I started to study vernacular architecture and the old building traditions, and at the same time I built in the local northern German way, with timber frames, hand made bricks and no shortcuts.
The granary is a pine frame filled with reclaimed handmade bricks, in the northern German tradition.
From building to geometry.
The old builders all worked from the same thing: geometry and proportion. It clicked for me in 2010, in front of a church floor in Rome. That led me to London, to an MA at The King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts.
My degree project was the Muqarnas Pavilion: a dome of more than 3,000 hand-carved pieces, held together without nails. The research behind it won the Barakat Prize.
The studio
My own studio.
Where every piece is drawn and made.
In 2013, straight after the MA, I opened my own studio, first in Northamptonshire in England, later on the outskirts of Hamburg. I work on commissions, pieces made for a particular person and place, and on speculative pieces, which I design because an idea will not let go of me and then build on my own account. Origin was one of those. So are the light sculptures Meridian and Cypher, which turn live market data into light.
Everything is drawn by hand, with compass and ruler. I make my pieces with traditional cabinetmaking techniques, together with cutting edge technology, and I like the two best when they meet in one piece.
And buildings? I have never lost my passion for architecture, so every now and then I still take on an architecture commission. A house I did recently is a good example.
A recent house
A 1952 house in Hanover, redrawn.
House transformation, 2023.
The house was refurbished and extended, and I was commissioned to redesign all of it and to make the exterior and interior woodwork and ornament. The new facades are set out on one geometric grid, from the placement and proportion of the windows down to the decorative detail.
As every traditional house would have, it also received a “Hausgeist” above the entrance for protection, created by Aline Marion.
BeforeToday
The facade on its grid
The Hausgeist
Bio & CV
- 2015
- INTBAU Excellence Award, Emerging Talent. Member of INTBAU, the international network of architects and designers dedicated to traditional and sustainable building.
- 2013
- Barakat Prize, awarded by HRH The Prince of Wales, for research into the geometry and symbolism of Muqarnas in Middle Eastern architecture.
- 2013
- Master of Arts, King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, London.
- 2011
- Bachelor of Science, Landscape Architecture and History of Architecture, Leibniz University of Hanover.
