Lionel Jadot

My family has been making chairs for six generations, so it’s been in my DNA for a very, very long time. I was born in Brussels and we lived above this very big family workshop and an another floor we’d upholster the chairs. The atelier was around 4,000 metres squared, with around 30 craftsmen. It was my playground on Wednesday afternoons after school and the weekend. It was like a treasure hunt where I’d find a piece of wood or fabric or a scrap on the floor that I’d take into my room. I started making toys and gigantic castles with towers and tunnels with my sister from the empty crates used to deliver the stuffing. This was the start of my story using leftovers and giving them a second life. At the age of 18, I was meant to go and study design in Florence but my mother died, my father wanted to stop the business and the family exploded. So I told my father that I’d stay and work with him. I was doing everything: management, creation, drawing, contacting clients, deliveries… We collaborated with a lot of prestigious, international interior designers who ordered bespoke pieces and were my mentors. Ten years later, I founded my interior architecture agency because people asked me for increasingly bigger projects. That was 20 years ago. I started doing private, upmarket projects in which I immediately integrated the philosophy of re-using materials to tell another story, working with craftsmen and other creatives.

The idea was to launch a creative hub oriented towards collectible design. There are 32 studios, 25 designers. A selection committee interviews each person; we look for very different, atypical people to maintain diversity. My own agency is on site and when we have a hotel project, we invite the designers to collaborate with us, leaving blank spaces for their proposals. We put the plan on the table and ask them to choose what they want to do – such as making chairs or chandeliers. I accept 99% of their proposals. Each studio invoices directly to the client. We also contact local designers who live within a 50-kilometre radius of the project. We give the client a unique, long-lasting and ecological proposal because everything is produced locally. If the client decides to stop the hotel in 20 years, the furniture can be edited in an auction catalogue because all the designers become better known, some become stars. It’s an investment that increases in value with time. For the Mix hotel in Brussels, we produced chairs costing €400 that are numbered, signed and created by different designers; in five years, they could be resold for the same price or double.

We’re about to start the Jam hotel in Rome in three or four months. We’re in the process of discovering local designers that we can collaborate with through Instagram and fortuitous encounters. I like telling a new story each time and bringing attention to the traceability of the project. The idea is to create with my clients an eclectic, rational chain that’s fresh for the visitor’s eyes and differs from the international mainstream of interior design, adding this storytelling to realise a real economy of sustainability.

When Maison & Objet invited me and named me Designer of the Year, I was very honoured. I told myself that even though it isn’t somewhere I’d do shopping for my home, it’s the opportunity to show my approach, emerging and confirmed talents, how to construct a large-scale hotel differently by using recyclable materials, and share that with people. Out of the 30 artists presented here, 10 are from Zaventum Ateliers.

Grond Studio works with raw earth from construction sites to create columns. Xavier Servas is a visual artist who creates lamps from from pigs’ intestines – large inflatable sculptures with a small motor inside that deflate when you switch them off. They’re very poetic objects transforming animal matter into something else. There’s Precious Peels by Loumi Le Floc’h who recuperates aubergine skins from Lebanese restaurants, cuts them up and reworks them in an astonishing way [to make lighting pieces inspired by stained glass windows], Bel Albatros who works with recycled bags to make furniture and wall coverings, and Mathilde Wittock who makes wall surfaces, headboards and acoustic panels with [SoundRoot, a material developed from] the roots of plants; her work is almost agricultural.

I produce the pieces at Zaventum with leftovers of broken antiquity objects. And I’ve made a line of furniture from asphalt that I’ve picked up off the street. When I’m in my car, my eye scans what’s on the side of the road to see if there’s anything interesting. I’m trying to create something different by transforming trash into art; my work is really “functional art” in all media – plastic, wood, marble… I create collisions between materials that have nothing to do with each other and try to create a new poetry. In my studio, I have all these materials – stones, fabrics, wood – in various drawers and I start by bringing out elements, putting them on the table and making jigsaws. Then I find something that gives me another idea and start making another jigsaw; I work on five or six pieces simultaneously which enables me to be free. My way of working is strongly linked to automatic writing, a technique that the Surrealists used a lot. It’s instinctive; I don’t reflect. I never make sketches or know what I’m going to make.

I created Cohabs with three business partners five years ago. We buy very damaged properties and renovate them intelligently keeping the maximum amount of the interior’s materials and furnish them with second-hand things. We collaborate with local artists who make interventions. These co-living spaces have a communal kitchen, living room and gym for 15 to 30 people aged between 25 and 35 year olds. We thought there was a real demand for these projects. Having grown-up children studying abroad, I saw how difficult it was for my daughter to find an apartment to rent in Paris. When you arrive in one of these houses, you have 15 to 20 friends straight away that become your local family.

It’s chaotic! I’m lucky to have an open-channelled brain and have no problem working on several projects at once. It’s a way of life, animated by a flow. I think that I must be lazy because I don’t plan; I like this permanent chaos and fog of lots of things happening. When somebody asks me questions about a project, I make choices very fast, like ping pong.