Studio Pastoe

Over its more than hundred year history, the Dutch furni­ture masters Pastoe proved Modernism’s main point time and time again: good design should not only be acces­si­ble, but adapt­able. Founded in 1913 by Frits Loeb as a carpen­try shop, Pastoe came into its own when Cees Braak­man took the reigns in 1945 and combined a fasci­na­tion with the work of Amer­i­can design­ers includ­ing Charles and Ray Eames with the company’s legacy of crafts­man­ship. The result was a series of cabi­nets includ­ing 1948’s Oak and 1950’s Birch, which asserted a geomet­ric aesthetic which clients could mix and match to their liking. Pastoe went a step further in 1955 with their ​“Made-to-Measure” series, which consumers could assem­ble and customize themselves.

While Pastoe’s 1950s Wire Chair by Braak­man and Adriaan Dekker would rival Bertoia in its deft, airy struc­ture, the company’s true genius remained evident in its storage systems. A pinna­cle of the High Tech move­ment of the 1970s, the A’dammer series by Aldo van den Nieuwe­laar trans­formed parking bollards into cool columns with domed tops and tambour doors, coated in ever-updat­ing palettes of lacquer. And Karel Boon­za­ai­jer + Pierre Mazairac’s Vision system like that of the company itself, looks time­less, with seam-free boxes and open shelv­ing ready to be arranged in any form imaginable.