INSPIRATION 1: Bauhaus Bauspiel (1923)

Since our background is in art – we both studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam – our inspiration mostly comes from artists. We admire, for example, the colourful and playful works by Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder and Joan Míro, but also the simple and bold shapes from the Bauhaus movement, Ellsworth Kelly and Richard Serra. In general you could say we are always looking for simple shapes and colours disguising a world of imagination and adventure.

But it is not only art we look at, we also come across so many beautiful toys and other designs that in one way or another inform our work. From today on every now and then we will share something that inspires us.

Let's start with a classic: Bauhaus Bauspiel (1923) by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. During her training at Bauhaus, Siedhoff-Buscher designed this building game as part of the children’s room in the model house “Am Horn” in Weimar (Germany), built for the first exhibition of work by the Bauhaus design school in 1923. Afterwards the game was produced in different versions in the Bauhaus workshops. The Swiss company Naef has been producing this historic item as a replica since 1977. It is beautiful how Siedhoff-Buscher managed to carve a set of simple shapes from just two pieces of wood, which offer endless possibilities to create all sorts of imaginative buildings, boats, funny people and strange creatures.