The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Now I will tell you the story of how I got started walking the path to upcycling and designing materials and objects.

This journey began with my profession as a builder and renovator of apartments in the city of Amsterdam, Holland.

For that purpose, I rented a workplace downtown. I transported all equipment and materials with my car but soon experienced that it was impossible to do it that way so I bought a Piaggo APE 50 and that was the start of being able to pick up whatever I wanted to collect.

Traveling with that Piaggo confronted me with all the thrown away building materials on a large scale. I started picking up those materials for my own work. At that point I started to feel happy with the fact that I was able to use materials that otherwise would have been lost. After a few years I started to pay attention to all other beautiful things besides building materials inside containers and started to collect them and piling them up at my workplace.

I was so happy that I had that place! There I kept them in stock and once in a while I made a piece of design out of that but unseen and not admired by anyone outside that place.

From this point on, during several years, there was a desire, a plan, you might call it a dream, to make a profession of it and and have a life in my studio working all day on ideas and pieces. The biggest challenge probably was showing it and let it shine being able to compare my ideas with other designers and to discover what could be special about my design.

Would there be enough power and originality in it?!

The passed year I decided to commit myself to my need and urge to play with ideas, create them, and try not to reckon with the ideas of the spectator but only with my own and I am in the middle of that process which is a journey in itself.