Belgian furniture designer Marina Bautier is known for her succinctness. Her pieces, all made of waxed oak, have no flourishes: they are a pure distillation of pleasing form and function. But in her own compound, she is voluble on how her work can be put to use: her studio, in a Brussels residential area aptly named Forest, is right next to her shop and café. And upstairs, there are two new guest apartments, all of which showcase the easy, conversation-filled settings Marina sees for her furniture.
“Every piece has been conceived with the ambition of finding an essential format,” she notes. “Simple as they look, great efforts have been put into the research and testing of how to arrive at the essential.” Come take a tour.
Photography by Stephanie De Smet, unless noted, all courtesy of Bautier (@marinabautier).
The Shop and Café
The Studio
Marina grew up in Brussels and studied furniture and product design at Buckinghamshire New University in the UK. On graduation, she established her practice in Brussels in 2004 and has since created designs for Case, Stattmann Neu Moebel, and Ligne Roset among others. She started her own brand 12 years ago with the idea of creating solid oak furniture basics and now has a nearly full home collection. Photograph by Justin Paquay.
The Apartments
Marina prioritizes sustainable design and equipped the addition with a heat pump and 20 solar panels, which power the café ovens, among other things, and a rain barrel “used to irrigate the garden, flush toilets, and run the washing machines.”
Marina had the interior walls “plastered with a kind of cement you work with the trowel to achieve an uneven finish” that, she notes, adds “depth and materiality to every surface.”
The Bautier compound is at 314 Chaussée de Forest, on the south side of Brussels, an easy commute to the city center. The apartments start at €180 a night.
We featured a Bautier-designed entry hall unit on page 26 of our book Remodelista: The Organized Home and here’s our first story about her furniture.
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