Lionel Jadot, Designer of the Year – Hospitality at Maison&Objet September 2024

Fashioning the future from the past
Lionel Jadot was raised in a cabinet-making workshop in a popular neighbourhood in Brussels, where his family had been carving the sleekest of armchairs, sofas, and chairs for six generations. The rest of his tale is a grand adventure in style, fuelled by a child’s precocious passion for transforming anything he could glean from meagre scraps abandoned to the workbenches… Mastery of recycling is an essential part of the lifeblood of this designer, who was introduced to art and creation as much by his teachers as by the craftsmen and architects with whom he grew up. The randomness of his raw materials, sourced according to availability, increases his creativity tenfold. These materials dictate the beginning of the story, which he then endeavours to project into fantastic universes on the fringes of art. Lionel Jadot creates unique works of functional art and collectible design. Instead of catalogues, he prefers durable objects that last long beyond mere paper impressions. When it comes to interior architecture, it is not unusual for him to call on his community of designermakers in order to fashion unique interiors. In his workshops in Zaventem, he welcomes some 30 designermakers, so that they can work alongside him rather than for him. Selected for their ability to shake up the established order, together, they are paving the way for serene, desirable ecological designs, driven upwards by a love of art and the prowess of high technology. An optimist by nature, Lionel Jadot is sowing the seeds for a future burgeoning with possibilities.

Life begets life
“I was quite literally born in a workshop. My DNA comes from several generations of chair-makers, established since 1895 in the Saint-Gilles district of Brussels. I grew up with my parents and my sister above a 3,000 m² cabinet-making workshop, surrounded by felled beeches and 35-odd craftsmen making sofa frames and upholstering seats and armchairs. It made me who and how I am today. This workshop was a place where anything was possible, a playground where I was allowed to pick up anything that fell off the worktables: wood shavings, cracked Louis XVI-style table legs, and curved armrests where knots in the wood had splintered… For my sister and me, these scraps became the pieces of an extraordinary KAPLA-like construction set for building castles. My parents were quite content to watch us spray-painting and charring the surface of the wood with a blowtorch. What a fortunate childhood! These discarded materials were like the contents of a treasure chest to me.”

The art of self-education
“I felt somewhat trapped in traditional studies. I’ll always remember the day my mother told me that the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels was opening a section for secondary education, for teenagers aged 14 and above. I started there at the age of 15 and discovered what it meant to be free. I learnt about drawing, life model classes, graphic design, colours, sculpture, and collages with some amazing teachers. I felt completely at peace for all four years – I seized my chance, and I loved it. Then my mother passed away, and my whole life changed.”

Dynamic dynamo
“When my mother died, my father decided to leave the workshop, where they had formed an inseparable duo. So I decided to take over the business! My father made me sign some paperwork, stating that I could leave whenever I wanted. At the ripe old age of 19, I found myself at the head of a company, managing orders, schedules, designs, deliveries, and customer relations. My mother gave me all her energy, while my father instilled in me a sense of proportions, taught me to look at what my predecessors were doing, and not to settle for the easy way out. The combination of the two enabled me to succeed through these perilous challenges. During that 10-year period, I acquired everything I needed for life. Our clients included leading European architects, such as Claire Bataille and Jean de Meulder, for whom we produced topof- the-range furniture. They became my teachers and my mentors. Then I was asked to fit out a chalet in Verbier and a loft in Brussels all by myself… In 2000, I ended up setting up my own studio, which incorporated the idea of recycling materials. My sister, on the other hand, stayed with the family business.”

Refinement rooted in recycling
“In my parents’ workshop, I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I had set up my own little work area in the corner. When I was six, I made my first stool from scrap wood, and one of the craftsmen helped me use the woodworking router to assemble it using mortise and tenon joints. I upholstered it with remnants of straps and velvet, because there was no way I was going to open a new roll. Waste collection days were a big thing in our little working-class district of Brussels. My sister and I would set off with a wheelbarrow to collect all the rubbish that people dumped along the pavements. It was a source of riches that drove us absolutely crazy. We’d scour the streets, and when the wheelbarrow wasn’t enough, we’d call in a foreman with his van. I immediately understood the value of these resources, which I could transmute and transform. In my first flat, I created panelling with a collection of stripped turn-of-thecentury doors, arranged along the wall like a jigsaw puzzle.”

Anti-conformity and new equilibria
“My sense of expression is not set in stone or in wood, and I don’t like to repeat myself. I strive to amaze myself, and to allow myself to slide down the slipperiest of slopes. When I’m working on a project with my colleagues, after a while, the thread we’re pulling often tends to become too obvious and tedious. That’s when I like to snap the thread and start again from scratch. It’s a very sinuous, organic process, and I don’t believe in just one way of thinking. I hate catalogues and conformity – I far prefer chaos and happy accidents.”

Ateliers Zaventem
“I was looking for a new workshop when I stumbled across this huge former paper mill spanning 6,000 m². The building was derelict but gave off some very strong vibes. I think I somewhat wanted to reproduce the family workshop. I immediately had this vision of bringing together a community of creator-producers, launched a call for projects, and then put together a board of eight people who would help me curate the future residents. We were pretty radical in our choices. Candidates had to be driven and devoted, with enough energy and ambition in their vision to actually change things. Steel, wood, bronze, leather… The skills involved are extremely varied. One works with salt, another tans aubergine skins. The Ateliers Zaventem workshops are intended as neither a showroom nor a gallery. They are a place of creation and production, where each workshop is independent, with its own structure and clientèle. In the end, they represent the coming together of 32 egos, working in harmony.”

The Mix Brussels venue – a manifesto
“I’ve just completed the interior design for Mix Brussels, a project that has kept me busy for two years. It all started with this iconic building, originally built in 1969 by Stapels and Dufau to house the Royale Belge insurance company. I was commissioned by a developer to transform part of it into a 180-room 4-star hotel, with a 2,500 m² food court and a 3,000 m² sports hall. Its cross-shaped, functionalistic architecture is made of concrete and weathering steel. The auditorium features copper columns some 8 metres high, sculpted by Sabatier. He considered that his sculptures incorporated their functions. In the same vein, we created sculptures throughout the building, each dedicated to its own function, be it the restaurant, the bedrooms, and so on. A total of 52 designers worked on the project, each filling in a blank space. The style is brutalist, much like the original building, but with a high level of comfort and finish. Everything was manufactured less than 50 kilometres from the site. In the end, there isn’t a single aspect picked from a catalogue. The owners run a collectible design collection, where every item is numbered and signed. Nothing will ever be thrown away, only passed on and carried forward.”

Hospitality as seen by Lionel Jadot
“When I’m staying at a hotel, I like to be transported to another place of wonder and wanderlust. I like to go against convention. But today’s customers are slightly more attentive to production methods. They are prepared to accept different, unique furniture lines rather than products from the other side of the world. I can develop furniture for interiors made from recycled asphalt slabs, which isn’t a particularly sexy material when we consider its past of being constantly run over by tyres, but it can go on to become a distinctive and comfortable piece of furniture. In terms of comfort, I design everything as instinctively as possible. I check everything: the height of the surroundings, the enveloping lighting, the acoustics, the seating… Then I make sure that there’s a little life in everything, and that we feel good about it all.”

Terra Cosmos: the 2024 theme for Maison&Objet
“I grew up with science fiction, reading Dune and the Moebius comics. We’re just an insignificant speck of dust in the universe. But I believe in distant universes, parallel worlds, and extraterrestrial life. This freedom takes me away from academicism and opens up a field of possibilities pointing resolutely towards the unknown. With Artificial Intelligence, we are now living in a world of science fiction. As soon as the first Open AI tools were launched, my team and I rushed out to test them. We fed them all kinds of data and let our minds run wild. By lending them a little of our own culture, they were able to generate all sorts of flukes of fate and unexpected things. I already liked to draw, as a way to set my mind free. But now we can play with AI to generate moodboards.”

His project for Maison&Objet
“I’m looking to create a central pavilion that will illustrate my philosophy of hospitality, but in a much more radical and experimental way than what I opted for at Mix Brussels. A whole series of artists will be involved, each using different techniques for processing recycled materials. The idea is not simply to appreciate the design, but the way in which it was produced. The experience and the storytelling are equally important points. There will be nary a catalogue in sight – everything will come directly from a designer’s workshop. For example, there will be a table with a beechwood base, upon which a mushroom top has been grown. This mycelium will be passed through a special kiln in order to kill any bacteria and make the material very hard. The bedroom and living room will be housed in a dome inspired by the Kogetsudai moon-viewing platform, a sand cone built centuries ago near Kyoto.”