New artistic directions in Ghent: a design duo’s creative home

Photography by Mr Frank

Walking around their home, their shaggy dog Polly in tow, the couple point to various pieces that have been passed down: a leather-backed chair in the living room designed by Hannes’s father; the bust in the hallway by the early 20th-century artist Rik Wouters; an abstract painting on the wall by Fien’s father.

“You want to surround yourself with things you think are beautiful, that inspire you, that give you a nice feeling, memories and humour,” says Fien. “For us, that’s family, it’s friends.”

She and Hannes have continued their families’ creative legacies. Having met at the LUCA School of Arts in Ghent, they started their careers as independent artists, Fien as a still-life photographer, Hannes as a sculptor. But in 2011 they decided to team up to design and produce furniture and objects under the name Muller Van Severen. Over the past 14 years the duo has worked for top global furniture brands including Zanotta, BD Barcelona, Tectona and Hay, becoming in the process a highly sought-after studio.

As well as being a gallery for their families’ artworks, their home is also a test ground for their own pieces. In the living room is one of their first designs as a studio, from their 2012 Future Primitives series: a compact steel frame with polyethylene shelves and a leather seat, which serves as a desk, lounge chair and shelving unit in one. Across the room is one of their most recent designs, taken from their 2024 solo exhibition at Antwerp’s Tim Van Laere Gallery – a vast piece of polished steel that is both a sculpture and wall-mounted desk.

Fien and Hannes bought this house in 2007, because they wanted more space for their growing family and their work than Ghent’s city centre could offer. Hannes spent two years “obsessively” looking for a property like this, with a spacious house and a separate building that could be the couple’s studio. Fien says she was “a bit more doubtful” about the whole project – the property is about four miles from the city, in an unprepossessing light-industrial area, and the house itself needed a lot of work. However, she could also see its potential, its “beauty and authenticity,” she says.

Hannes spent a year getting the house into a decent shape, eventually moving in with their two young daughters in 2008, and changing it piecemeal ever since. “We have touched every corner of this house, the studio and the garden,” says Hannes.

Arguably the most striking feature of the entire house is the rust-and-white chequered tiles, sourced from a former school, that run from the hallway into the kitchen and then out on to the open terrace, shaded by a slightly untamed Virginia creeper. “A house should be a little bit wild,” says Hannes. “Like our furniture, we don’t like it to be too polished.”

In the kitchen, turquoise enamel cupboard doors stand out against the black-and-white Breccia Violetta marble on the walls. “It’s a beautiful, wild marble,” says Fien. “We love the movement you get in it.” Open shelves are packed with vases, pots and trinkets, including several bowls resembling giant vegetables from the Portuguese ceramics maker Bordallo Pinheiro. A colourful enamel-topped table in the centre of the room is a Muller Van Severen design for Hay.

Each morning, Hannes and Fien have coffee in the kitchen, then commute to their studio: a walk of 30 yards from the terrace across the garden, with its colossal acacia trees. Built in 1903, this separate building was originally an orangery for the local flower industry. Renovated in 2017, with the help of interior architect Elise Van Thuyne, it’s an airy space with red-framed arched windows. Here, Fien and Hannes sit together, sketching, designing and conjuring up new ideas for collections. Hannes has a nap every day after lunch. Idyllic.

Back in the house, Hannes points to the place in the hallway where, on Christmas Eve one year, the ceiling fell in, just before their families arrived for the festivities. Looking at the turquoise-painted staircase, he recalls how their daughter once carried two kittens downstairs as a toddler. “When I was a kid, I moved house all the time, and I was a bit traumatised by that. Whenever I felt like I was at home, we had to leave,” he says. “I wanted something stable for us and our kids.”

He looks around the living room, with its artworks by his and Fien’s parents, his own sculptures from a previous life, and a handful of one of their daughters’ childhood drawings (she is now at art school, continuing the creative traditions). The family has lived here for nearly two decades now and, like a living, breathing organism, it holds all the collected artefacts of a life well lived. “This house has changed with us,” says Hannes. “As you get older, your house, like your identity, becomes more mature and it evolves.”