February 27, 2017Married couple Monique and Jan des Bouvrie started collaborating when Jan’s architecture clients asked her to decorate the homes he designed. Top: Jan designed the sprawling Njoy XL sofa for Linteloo and teamed up with Monique on the white cubic coffee table for this home in France. The Charles and Ray Eames lounge chair is a version made exclusively by Vitra for Jan. A pair of Verner Panton Fun lamps are placed at each end of the console table. All images courtesy of Des Bouvrie Photography
In Holland, where design is as essential as food and water, JAN DES BOUVRIE is a celebrity, the kind of person invited onto the TV show Verborgen Verleden (the Dutch version of Who Do You Think You Are?), where he discovered that he shared an ancestor with Britain’s Earl of Radnor. But his design-world lineage is at least as impressive.
Jan des Bouvrie Gets His Start in Minimalist Architecture
Born in 1942, Jan grew up above his parents’ furniture store in Bussum (less than 20 miles southeast of Amsterdam). As a young man, he studied with the legendary architect GERRIT RIETVELD. He showed Rietveld a project and, Jan reports, the master responded, “It’s great. And if you take everything out it will be even better.”
Jan listened to his teacher. He has created a body of minimalist architecture, including houses with so little detail that they look as if they’d been Photoshopped into existence.
When he was starting out, in the 1960s, the jobs were mostly renovations. One after another, houses that had been divided into small dark rooms emerged as flowing spaces the color of snowdrifts.
He pioneered the open kitchen in the Netherlands, he says, and began giving closed-up houses verandas because “inside and outside should always be connected.” Eventually, he began building ground-up houses that are, he notes, strictly symmetrical, not just side-to-side but sometimes also front-to-back. Symmetry, he explains, leads to clarity, and clarity to comfort.
He’s also well-known as a furniture designer. In the 1960s, Jan created plush MODERNIST pieces reminiscent of LE CORBUSIER’s Grand Confort and Mies van der Rohe’s BARCELONA SEATING. One of his earliest efforts, the Kubusbank sofa, designed in 1969 for GELDERLAND, is still in production.
Jan continues to create products for a wide variety of manufacturers. That has made him a role model for a younger generation of Dutch designers, including Marcel Wanders, PIET BOON and Job Smeets, of STUDIO JOB. Smeets calls him “a father” and writes (in the introduction to a 2012 monograph of Jan’s work), “This remarkable man has a mastery of the softer side of modernism that seems as natural as a bird whistling and a chameleon changing color.”
A lipstick-red Bocca sofa by Studio 65 pops in the minimalist entryway of this Jan and Monique des Bouvrie–designed home in France.
Jan and Monique des Bouvrie Become Sought-After Collaborators
Jan’s most loyal protégé may be his wife, Monique. The couple met in 1987. Back then, Monique recalls, Jan was “a radical” in minimalist architecture who used to paint even the ornate frames of OLD MASTER paintings white. After they married, she started warming up their own house by adding flowers; then she brought in art and furniture. “People think white is very cold,” says Monique, “but it’s not true if you use colorful art.”
Residential clients started asking her to work alongside Jan, who says, “Monique brings atmosphere to my interiors.”
Suddenly, the architect and the former public relations agent were a professional duo. “At the heart of all his designs lies simplicity, a wish to reduce everything to its simplest form. Monique uses color, accessories, unique objects and her own line of linens to make people feel happy in their homes,” journalist Tamara Gijrath explains in the introduction to the 2015 book Des Bouvrie: Architecture Interieur (teNeues), adding, “After all these years they still butt heads.”
The des Bouvries do so in an old (1688) arsenal building in Naarden, outside Amsterdam, which contains his-and-her design studios, a design academy, shops selling their furniture and lighting (as well as classic pieces from Vitra and CASSINA) and two restaurants. Monique calls it a “lifestyle center.”
Minimalist Architecture Meets Its Colorful Interior-Design Match
The colors Monique adds to Jan’s houses include the red of painted lips and the yellow of butterflies. (In an Antwerp apartment, they had a baby grand piano painted bright red.) Both husband and wife are lovers of Pop art; they have sold pieces from their collections (including works by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Jim Dine and JOSEPH BEUYS) at Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
Monique des Bouvrie’s Catwalk table features a set of steps for impromptu runway sessions. In this Amsterdam home, it is surrounded by a set of Marcel Wanders Monster chairs. The artwork is by Mart Visser.
For clients who don’t have collections, Monique creates art overnight, buying bold images from stock photo companies and printing them as large as the walls of Jan’s house will allow.
Nothing is too loud for Monique, who also likes to work with zebra skins. (Pressed, she says the zebras died of natural causes. “I buy them from a very good company in South Africa.”) She also likes plants, the bigger the better. “Even in a small room, you want some big items, to give you the feeling of space,” she says.
She doesn’t do many small rooms anymore. The houses the des Bouvries design are vast — like one in the north of Holland for clients who, she says, “want the equivalent of a small hotel, with a big swimming pool inside, for parties.”
But aren’t the Dutch known for avoiding opulent displays of wealth? Monique demurs. “I always like it when people want to have something special,” she says. Besides, she avoids designing houses with rooms that won’t get used. “I say to clients, ‘How are you going to use this space? How are you going to house that space?’ I make sure every room fits their needs.”
The des Bouvries still do renovations, but their updated houses don’t look much different inside from their new ones. One exception is a 19th-century house in Amsterdam, in which they left the original ceiling details and even a crystal chandelier but added their kind of furniture. Monster chairs by Wanders surround Monique’s ingenious Catwalk table, which has stairs that make it accessible to would-be models but also serve as shelves.
Minimalist Architecture and Bold Design in the des Bouvrie Home
The des Bouvries practice what they preach. When they’re not at their getaway in Saint-Tropez, they occupy a massive 100-year-old house in Naarden, where one room is centered on a giant Studio Job teapot that’s reflected in Jan’s typical bright-white floor, walls and ceiling.
But don’t think Jan only likes white: The garage houses several of his cars, including a Ferrari Dino, a Jaguar E-type, a Chevrolet Corvette and a Porsche 911. Every one of them is black.
