Très chic

Lifestyle and furniture brands big and small are prepping for the big day as France's most important interior design fair Maison & Objet will open its doors next month.

Edwin Van Der Gun, Eichholtz's design director. Photos courtesy of Eichholtz

From Sept 8-12, traders, buyers and design enthusiasts will get to witness the unveiling of the latest collections by some of the most exciting design brands in the world -- but luckily for those in Thailand, Dutch luxury furniture, lighting and accessories brand Eichholtz has collaborated with Thai furnishing importer Quattro Design to bring a never-before-seen sneak preview of their latest products to Bangkok.

Sitting inside the Eichholtz by Quattro Design showroom in Thong Lor are four concept rooms filled to the brim with new furniture and accessories created by the brand's own design director Edwin Van Der Gun.

Neutral Charm room. Apipar Norapoompipat

Chosen from his four favourite colour themes, the rooms range from what he calls "Modern Eclectic", featuring the sculptural Equilibre Coffee table designed by Willy Rizzo; "Neutral Charm", featuring extremely classic furniture designs with an elegant polish; "Tropical Fusion", the biggest but homiest room featuring eye-catching birdcage lamps and the elegant Villiers coffee table; and "Classic Blue and White", featuring simple and classic furnishing pieces suitable for any situation. From what it looks like, Eichholtz has it all, and does it all.

"We have chinoiserie to very modern. From contemporary to vintage. From Scandinavian to Baroque. We can do so many styles, and that's what we love to show," said Edwin Van Der Gun, sitting on one of the sofas inside "Tropical Fusion".

A powerhouse of the furniture manufacturing world and a regular exhibitor at Maison & Objet, the 25-year-old company started out as a simple furniture sales company until Van Der Gun stepped in 10 years ago.

Asked to revamp their catalogue book, Van Der Gun, who has had an extensive background in fashion, added a little more spice and flair to the company. With the new catalogue becoming a huge success, Van Der Gun continued to work with them.

"Now it's much more about lifestyle," he said. "It's much more about a look, a feel, a vibe. When a creative director enters a new company, sometimes like in fashion, the company enters a new direction and a new book opens again. I think that's what happened when I came into the company."

Now, Eichholtz is famous for eclectic designs -- mixing and matching materials and different styles from different eras and somehow making it work. Iconic lighting designs include the Royal Marine floor lamp, consisting of a lampshade on top of an antique-looking tripod seen everywhere from the biggest hotels to the smallest hipster cafes.

Tropical Fusion room. Photos: Apipar Norapoompipat

"I had a different point of view," he said. "I used things differently. I love to juxtapose and do things differently. It's my personal touch to make it different and more exciting. I think that's what happened when I joined the company. The combinations were different. Not one light was hung, but I combined three [together]. There was more layering, and it was more about interior decoration, and less about only furniture."

What's incredible though, is the amount of designs and pieces that Van Der Gun and his team produce every season. Now with more than 2,500 pieces in the collection, he and his team are still able to design and create a whopping 600 new pieces per year.

"I travel all over the world, and what we do is we buy antiques, buy vintage pieces that we add to our collection," he said. "We're reproductionists, but we also create. Maybe 25-30% [of our pieces come from vintage]. We buy from well-known auction houses like Sotheby's or Christie's. We'd buy 100-year-old lamps or an antique birdcage which we convert into a lamp. But next to it, we create our own collections to match the vintage antiques in the same style."

Whenever a piece, for example an ashtray, becomes highly successful, Van Der Gun then creates more furniture, accessories and decor based on it. He can spin it into a lamp or a chair, or whatever else he can come up with.

"Because we're doing a lot of series, sometimes just one design becomes six items," he said. And with their fast paced production rate, copycats are the least of Van Der Gun's worries.

"If you want to be successful -- Karl Lagerfeld once said -- you must be ready to be copied. It's actually like that," he said. "But if you continue like us, where every year there's hundreds of new items, the people are always running behind. In the end, people buy the real thing before the knock-off. No one wants to be behind in fashion. We see [copies], but it gives us more power to go ahead and create new direction and design new things."

"I think the DNA [of the company] is the newness and the creativity," he continued. "We always bring new looks, new items, new things and put it in a very creative way. The combinations we make have nothing to do with fashion. We're always thinking ahead and thinking forward and creating things and combinations that people have not seen."

Check out Eichholtz's new collection before the rest of the world at Eichholtz by Quattro Design on Thong Lor 13. Follow Quattro Design on Instagram and Facebook @quatro_design.