A Day of Dutch (De Stijl) Design in Bergeijk

My morning started with a bus ride from the Eindhoven city center to a small town out in the countryside. I was on my way for a tour of Bergeijk, specifically the iconic De Ploeg building. A collaboration between two Dutch artists from the De Stijl period, De Ploeg was once a weaving mill where they made curtains in the 1970s (you can imagine the style).

The building was designed by Gerrit Rietveld (famous for his De Stijl chair) and Mien Ruys. De Stijl is one of those artistic movements that triggers something in each of us. Largely made up of simple lines and primary colors, it’s the type of art that people have an immediate reaction to. Throughout my childhood I had a poster of one of Piet Mondrian’s works hanging in my bedroom so I grew up with the clean aesthetic of De Stijl; it’s partly what inspired my love of design.

De Stijl takes the abstraction from earlier periods of art and brings it to an extreme. Color and form are portrayed seemingly…