Unwrap Hella Jongerius’ fascinating creative universe, as her archives go on view at Vitra Design Museum

Hella Jongerius is one of the great designers of her generation. At 62, she doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone, and she doesn’t need to make a name for herself; she’s done that already with her ‘Polder’ and ‘Vlinder’ sofas for Vitra, cabin and seat interiors for KLM, textiles and seating for the UN with Maharam and Galerie Kreo, and porcelain pieces with Nymphenburg, to name just a few projects, not to mention solo shows and installations at the Design Museum, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Gropius Bau, and the V&A.

But instead of hunkering down, consolidating her reputation and cashing in commercially, Jongerius has decided to divest herself of her extraordinary archive, stop making commercial products and dive deep into new channels of investigation. In 2024, she announced she would be entrusting the bulk of her studio archive to the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and this will now form the basis of the first retrospective of her work, opening at the museum this spring.

Hella Jongerius: design through investigation and experimentation

Born near Utrecht, Jongerius studied industrial design at Academie voor Industriële Vormgeving (now Design Academy Eindhoven), graduating in 1993 just as Dutch design was beginning to have its big moment. She walked straight out of college and under the umbrella of Droog, the conceptual design company founded that same year by Gijs Bakker and Renny Ramakers. In 1994, Droog exhibited Jongerius’ graduate project, a polyurethane bath mat, in Milan, before going on to produce and distribute it.

Jongerius’ involvement with Droog, she says, was a loose one – ‘we didn’t meet a lot, we saw each other maybe once or twice a year’. But not having to ‘do promotion or find networks’, thanks to them, meant she could concentrate on her studio research. ‘I was the one that was really interested in materials and craft imperfections,’ she says. ‘I was in my own bubble.’ This bubble was the space she used to hone her individual practice, creating soft urns and washtubs in silicone and rubber, purposefully misshapen ceramics, and one-off porcelain pieces that played with production ‘faults’.

Jongerius’ hands-on investigative approach, seeking connections and pathways, was to make her one of the leading figures in a movement taking the focus of design away from the service of commerce and towards research, experiment, concept and craft. Because of her, and others like her, product design taught to students in recent years has become much more about process and much less about product.

Jongerius did not stay with Droog long. After a while, she began taking on assistants and decided her studio needed a name. ‘It wasn’t a big deal,’ she says. ‘I took my own name and added “lab” as a research indicator that fitted, and it still fits.’ JongeriusLab was born, and a series of highly fruitful collaborations followed with brands and galleries alike, from Ikea and Galerie Kreo to Kvadrat and KLM.

Asked about her influences, she names not artists or designers but four company directors she worked with for years: Rolf Fehlbaum at Vitra, Michael Maharam at Maharam, Ingrid Harding at Nymphenburg, and Jan Tichelaar at Royal Tichelaar Makkum. ‘In order to come up with a successful story, or with work that resonates, you need to have a super-good chemistry and social grounding with your client, and you have to grow together,’ she says. ‘They took risks and let me fly, but they also educated me. I’m the one that can think outside the box and ask questions, but they’re the ones who know how the world turns.’

Jongerius believes in serendipity. She counts herself lucky to have met such producers who fostered and shared her success. Such collaborations have also brought her to the understanding that design is less about problem solving and more about relationships with people and objects. ‘Objects interact with your house, with you, and the identity you want to create, but they’re also part of a web of materials that came from somewhere and were made by somebody.’

She has recently strengthened this connected approach by adapting her studio so that visiting designers can sleep over or stay the weekend. This means she can ‘invite people with other heads and other hands, from other cultures’ so they can eat together and interact socially, as well as work and think about projects. In this way, the sterility of the lab perhaps becomes much more about domestic warmth, facilitating the sociological weave that is already so apparent in her textile work.

That is not to say that Jongerius doesn’t have a clear understanding of all the tools at her disposal, social and material. She is perfectly aware of how to manipulate colour, form and material to beguile and create desire in the consumer. ‘Colour is just a material,’ she notes. ‘It is just a tool that brings beauty; it makes you care. If something is beautiful, then it resonates and you open yourself up to it when you look at it or if you use it. You take care of it and you repair it if it gets damaged.’

Over the last few years, Jongerius has begun working with clay in a really visceral and artistic way, ‘taking the time to get lost’ – though, as she is quick to insist, ‘I am not an artist’. After her 2021 ‘Woven Cosmos’ exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, which focused on the healing function of objects, she realised she hadn’t produced any animal figures for a while, not since her Nymphenburg animal bowls in 2004, her wall hanging project for Ikea in 2009, and her animal mirrors and ‘Frog’ table for Galerie Kreo in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and that she needed them again in this current context. So she got deeply involved in clays and glazes for a while, materials she hadn’t worked with for years and then surprised herself with how angry their faces turned out. ‘I made these half-product, half-animals. They were all really angry and I was like, “Oh my god!”’

She says she felt empowered by her ‘Angry Animals’ series, first shown at Salon 94 Design in New York in 2024, and later at Galerie Kreo, and the joy that the knowledge to make such things still lay in her hands. She acknowledges where the anger comes from, and she continues to make them because ‘they express where we are in the world’. They all have women’s names, she says, ‘because we have every reason to be angry with the bullies of this world and the setbacks to the position of women’.

Her angriest piece yet, she says, is in production right now: a ceramic shark-infested pond, complete with a fountain, due to be installed on the Vitra museum’s front lawn in time for Art Basel. Being angry is a privilege of getting older, says Jongerius, and she acknowledges that, thanks to the position she now has as a designer, she has nothing to lose – particularly as major collections of her work are now safely housed in the V&A, MoMA, Pinakothek, Centre Pompidou and TextielMuseum, as well as Vitra. ‘I also feel that it is my responsibility to speak out and be a role model for others. That’s the freedom you have when you don’t work in a system any longer. You can speak out and speak loud.’ We can’t wait to hear what she will say next.

‘Hella Jongerius: Whispering Things’ is on show from 14 March until 6 September 2026 at Vitra Design Museum, design-museum.de