YLdesign
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text by Susan Lahey
photos by Alan Jensen Photographer
styling by Kate NixonYvette Laduk always designs things in her head. While working as an art director and creative director in advertising and marketing, Laduk’s mind teemed with ideas for whimsical products for practical needs. In 2004, while she was ruminating about a rug that would resemble a slice from the end of a burned log, her boyfriend challenged her to make her idea a reality. The Woody Wood rug was born, and with it a design career that would garner recognition throughout Europe and the U.S.
Laduk and her contractor boyfriend Bas de Boer live in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, in a home she uses as the backdrop and showroom for her creations. The whole house is a joint work of art that the couple created in 2007. It had been built in the 1970s, and it showed. It had olive green tiles and odd features, such as a glass wall between the living room and bedroom. But it had enough land for a garden, which is rare in urban areas in the Netherlands. It also sits on a small stream full of ducks and fish. Both Laduk and de Boer grew up in rural areas and needed space around them. The house’s deficiencies didn’t scare them, and they had the expertise to turn it into something wonderful.
They tore down many inside walls, making a vast living room that stretched into what had been the patio. Then, they covered it with a glass ceiling. Laduk chose a dark, burnt oak floor because, with all the natural light, they didn’t need a light floor. They added a hanging fireplace designed by Kees Marcelis.
Much of the house is decorated in various shades of gray, a color she loves because there are “eleven hundred sorts of gray.” She prefers warm grays with brown, red, or yellow undertones rather than cool blue grays. For example, the bathroom is tiled with gray Indonesian stones.
Her favorite color, though, is orange.
“Orange makes me happy,” she said, but she knows she can’t use too much of it without “shouting.” So she has orange bursts: orange hand towels, orange toilet paper, and in her sparsely furnished dining room, five white Marcello Ziliani polyurethane foam chairs—and one orange one.
“I like the wink of things,” she said. “Also, it’s interesting when you have people for dinner and you say, ‘Come to the table,’ to see who will choose the orange chair.”
Watching people’s emotions and behavior—such as who will choose the orange chair—along with her own plays a huge role in Laduk’s design. Her second creation, the Broom of Light, offers soft light close to the floor. It was inspired partly by the fact that she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a rug designer, but also because she knows that people need light when they come home to a dark house in the middle of the night. Her Turn the Season rug, which resembles a mass of green leaves on one side and brown on the other, came to her when she watched the seasons change outside and thought people would want something to reflect that shift indoors.
Now, Laduk works up to 70 percent of her time as a designer. She works on her own designs and for two manufacturers, one Danish and one French. Her work has shown up in hundreds of magazines, including several countries’ versions of Elle, B*io Magazine in Italy, Villa d’Arte, AD Russia, and In Residence. And she’s delighted to be recognized at Milan’s A’Design Award and Competition where the best designs will be presented at the A’Design Museum and Gallery, in Italy.
She’s looking for ways to break into the U.S. market on a grand scale, rather than sending individual products to individual customers. Still, she never even expected to cross the boundaries of the Netherlands with her products and she’s happy with where she is. It isn’t Dutch custom, she says, to say one is proud of oneself. But if it were, she probably would be.
