For more than twenty years, Marie Michielssen has been a leading designer within the Serax design portfolio, and by now she can easily be considered the uncrowned queen of intuitive design. Inspiration comes to her from everything around her. Like a sponge, she absorbs the beauty she encounters outdoors and transforms it inside her small, cosy studio into ceramics that are perfect in their imperfection.
Her studio sits right next to the kitchen of her sixteenth-century home in Antwerp — a location she considers humble and fitting. “It’s a fairly small, sheltered room with a sense of history, thanks to its old wooden parquet floor and elegant ceiling. I find it important that the atmosphere is pleasant and the space thoughtfully arranged. For example, I have a lamp by Muller Van Severen. Although its style is very different from my own, it inspires me. Surrounding yourself with good design makes you look at your own work differently and pushes you to a higher level.”
Marie has been designing and creating since childhood, often as a way of escaping reality. “I made tiny pieces of furniture for my dolls, decorated rooms for them, and even built dollhouses. On the beach during holidays, I would start my own little flower shop — and I made the flowers myself as well.” She was the creative girl who loved going to art school and later studied graphic design. “After graduation I first landed a job in media. It wasn’t until a friend casually asked me to hand-paint some flowerpots that the creative spark truly reignited. I loved it. The pots sold well, and that’s really how it all began.”
Her studio is filled with striking art objects in all kinds of styles, collected over many years. The intuitive, spontaneous, perfectly imperfect form — that is the essence of Marie’s work. But what makes an object beautiful? “For me, beauty begins when the proportions are right. It’s all about balance — not only in the shape, but also in colour and material. In that constant search for interesting proportions, I love to experiment, which means I sometimes design in very different styles.”
“Besides the right proportions, imperfection is another key ingredient of beauty. When mistakes happen during the design process, I sometimes leave those flawed pieces sitting in the studio for a while, returning to them later. Mistakes often lead to new and interesting insights.”
“I’m constantly searching for beauty, and I genuinely look for it everywhere. When I walk into a clothing shop, I look for the more unusual pieces to see whether I can find something beautiful in the garment itself.” Her collection serves as her personal library of inspiration. “It’s mostly art objects — but I find inspiration just as much in history books or while travelling. On the street just as much as in museums. I’m a real collector, unlike my husband. So sometimes I have to rein myself in a little.” (Laughs)
So how does she turn all that inspiration into actual design? “I sketch every day in a classic sketchbook with a black cover. The drawings are often very rough. But every design is developed entirely by hand, with pencil and paint. Eventually, I create cardboard models to study the proportions further.”
“No computer ever enters the process. I work very tactilely, with my hands. I admit, I’m an old-school designer and deliberately push back against the digitalisation of the profession.” In doing so, Marie is part of a movement of designers who consciously seek the earthy and the personal. Materials like clay play a central role, and each design begins from human imperfection. Marie also always works from intuition — something a computer still cannot replicate.
Marie spends hours each day in her studio, but that doesn’t make her withdrawn. “It’s a place where my husband, children and friends drop in freely, and I love that lively atmosphere. They come by and give their unfiltered opinions on my designs. The studio sits on the street side. When I open the windows, I hear the city and the people passing by — that inspires me as well. I live in Antwerp, a city rich with history. The architectural details, the balustrades for example, can be wonderfully stimulating. I feel the same way in Paris.”
