Right At Home

Gert Voorjans crafts lavishly intimate interiors that are almost as recognisable as the styles of his long-time client, designer Dries Van Noten

- Maritess Garcia Reyes

“I think we were a bit predestined to end up working together,” the interior designer Gert Voorjans laughs while talking about how his decades-long partnership with fashion designer Dries Van Noten began. The creative duo met in Antwerp, where they both live, in the Nineties, a few years after the breakthrough of a group of designers, including Van Noten, who emerged from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and became known in fashion circles as the Antwerp Six. Their distinctive vision for fashion, which flourished in the mid-Eighties, established Belgium’s largest city as a notable destination for fashion design.

“I was a big fan,” Voorjans says. “I wanted to be dressed in all his clothes. We shared wonderful musical evenings and cultural events. We carry the same interests and sort of speak the same language.” Voorjans was working under the tutelage of Axel Vervoordt, another famous name in the interior design scene in Belgium, who maintains galleries outside Antwerp and in Hong Kong. “Dries came over to Vervoordt’s Gravenwezel castle a lot because it was a very unique setting then,” Voorjans continues. Van Noten eventually employed him full-time.

“After working for him in Japan for two years, I suggested contributing freelance and making him a priority whenever there are flagship stores to be designed.”