PELLE Portraits
MAGAZINE · INTERVIEW

Pelle

PELLE is the Brooklyn-based design studio founded by Jean and Oliver Pelle, whose multidisciplinary practice exists at the intersection of art, craft, and design. Trained as architects, the duo create collectible lighting, furniture, and objects that balance sculptural expression with technical precision. Working as complementary counterparts, they draw upon personal observations of nature, geometry, and historical art movements to develop pieces that are both poetic and functional.

Combining handcrafted processes with contemporary production techniques, PELLE explores the dialogue between organic form and constructed order. Through an integrated practice that brings design, fabrication, and exhibition together under one roof, the studio creates enduring works distinguished by their refined materiality, painterly sensibility, and commitment to craftsmanship.

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Interview

Where were you born and where are you from?

Oliver: I was born in Germany and came to the United States to study architecture in my early 20s.

Jean: I was born in South Korea, and my family and I immigrated to the US when I was five years old. I mainly grew up in Los Angeles, then I spent my young adult years living in Berkeley, California, and working in San Francisco. Now I live and work in Brooklyn, New York.

What is your first memory connected to the art world?

Oliver: My parents have always been interested in art. It was always around me. Our house was filled with paintings, drawings, and objects of all sorts. My dad collected paintings as best as he could within his means, and my mom always took us to museums. She collected the show catalogs that I started to look at intensely at some point. I specifically remember a Picasso exhibit in Cologne. The museum sits right next to the Cologne Dome on the banks of the River Rhine. It is quite picturesque.

Jean: My father, who was a professional sculptor, was my introduction to art. I would look at his many sculptures and paintings while growing up in our house, and I would help out a lot at his sculpture studio during my teenage years.

Have you always worked in the art/design field?

Oliver: Pretty much. After graduating from high school in Germany, I studied architecture in the States for undergraduate and graduate degrees. I worked as an architect for many years before I joined Jean to start PELLE.

Jean: Yes, I did my undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture and worked at EHDD Architecture in SF, Eric Owen Moss Architects in LA, and Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects in NYC. In 2008, I decided to start my own design studio creating objects, and then in 2011, Oliver and I joined together to start PELLE.

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What led you to design creation?

Oliver: What matters to me is the physical creation of things where thoughts become tangible objects.  It is the most optimistic act of expression I can think of.

Jean: I really enjoy the design world in general – I love the inventiveness, the creativity, the craft, and the humor or emotion that goes into it. When it comes to creating, I like to have a direct relationship to the work, continually building upon the ways in which I make pieces. That’s a way to evolve the work, and it keeps me going and interested in the process.

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Why did you choose the specific materials you work with?

Oliver: We work with a lot of different materials; all sorts of metals, glass, leather, cotton, paper, and wood. It depends on what we are working on and how the work fits into our method of production. It is not the material that drives the work in most cases as much as it is the idea that drives the choices of materials.

Jean: The materials that we choose are an opening to its exploration. We choose materials that are malleable and that are physically appealing in conjunction with the form of the object. Choosing a material can be exciting if you’re able to see how it could be made to be understood in a new or unseen way. Materials can be like words, and you are constantly rearranging them to create new sentences.

How would you describe your creative process and its influences?

Oliver: Jean and I have started to learn to work together and to learn from one another. I quite often tend to work in a process-driven way where I look at one specific material or idea of fabrication that I then try to develop towards the larger whole. Jean has the ability to envision an idea in its entirety while working towards the specifics. We often meet somewhere in between. She has been instrumental in the development of PELLE and how we have grown.

Jean: I’m a big observer of my environment and the things that surround me. I may notice something that becomes really interesting to me, for some reason. I’m always drawn to nature, but there are many other sights that grab my attention, especially in the urban environment. Sometimes I’m inspired enough to draw what I’ve seen or model it in three dimensions, and then it may turn into a product or an idea.

Could you describe a typical day of your work?

Oliver: Our days always start with taking our kids to school. Then we arrive at our studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. If we have meetings scheduled, we try to get them out of the way early on. We are both still involved in building some pieces within our collections. We prefer to be hands-on. Depending on orders, we might be wrapped up with production work from casting to painting, molding, and assembly. Jean spends a lot of her time on the management of the company, alongside the creative work; I tend to spend my days quite often on drawings and developing parts and custom fabrication drawings. When we are working towards show deadlines, everything shifts a little more toward spending more time on creating new work and working through the process of building the new work.   

Jean: I like to organize my days and usually split the day into two parts – the mornings are for office work, which consists of emails, team meetings, calls, and checking in with our people and with the goings-on of the studio. Then the second part of the day is where I’m able to focus more on the making or creative aspects of the studio, but that usually means production work for current orders, and those activities involve coloring, painting, building, assembling, casting, and sketching. Around midday, Oliver and I will take a lunch break and take our dog out for a walk to the pier, which always feels refreshing.

What are the technical particularities of your creations?

Oliver: As our creations are so varied, the technical aspects of executing the work vary as well. Some of our work relies heavily on mechanical precision of 1/1000 of an inch, whereas other works celebrate the handmade process of making the pieces. What unites the work is the precision in execution and our intent. We share an underlying sensibility about our work which is based on our desire to make work at a very high level, at the best quality that we possibly can.

Jean: We cast and shape cotton paper using our own methods that we developed, so there are many particular ways to this process. There is also a good amount of time spent on mixing colors – dyes and paints that are used to color the cast paper, and then hand-painting the colors onto the paper.

What advice could you give to beginning artists who would like to create sculptural design works?

Oliver: I think the design world is changing rapidly through social media and the ongoing development of digital technologies. There is a potentially huge upside to that, as a designer has ways to reach the ‘client’ in so many ways. The downside is that styles and techniques are absorbed at an ever-increasing speed by larger players that smaller studios cannot really compete with. In the end, I would encourage every designer to focus on their own voice. There is no shortcut, and we are in the same boat as everyone else trying to find our place.

Jean: I think a good place to start is to understand yourself – what are you particularly good at and what process do you enjoy the most? It will really help to know that about yourself and make decisions to go from there.

If your works had to belong to a design movement, how would you define it?

Oliver: I never think of our work in that way. I leave that to others if they feel so inclined.

Jean: I believe it would be Contemporary.

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What contemporary artists, in any kind of art, have you been inspired by?

Oliver: I used to play piano since my childhood. The one person that greatly inspired me was Keith Jarrett; his Cologne Concert to this day is one of my favorite recordings. It keeps ruminating in my head.

Jean: I appreciate and have been inspired by Vija Celmins for her drawings and sculptures, and Noah Davis for his paintings, Martin Puryear for his sculptures – these artworks draw me into their world.

If you had to summarize your creations in one word or sentence, what would it be?

Oliver: Ongoing.

Jean: The work that we do is highly personal; it’s created by two people, and our goal is to learn, grow, and enjoy the process of our work.

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What designers and artists have influenced you?

Oliver: I studied for my undergraduate at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The school was led by Mies van der Rohe for many years, and most of the buildings have been designed by him. Sitting in Crown Hall many late nights has had a profound influence on me in terms of doing so much with as few elements as possible. The idea of proportion and balance is something I think about a lot. And the element of quietness that I see in his work while being strong and determined. At the core, I always thought of Mies as a romantic. Similarly, there were other architects like the early works by Libeskind or Chipperfield that I often looked at for inspiration. These designers occupy a space between expressionism and minimalism to varying degrees, or arbitrariness, maybe ambiguity, to determinism. That space is very interesting to me.

Jean: I get inspiration from various designers for different reasons. I’ve been inspired by Hella Jongerius, Ron Arad, Ingo Maurer and Frank Gehry for their creative spirit. I look at David Chipperfield and John Pawson for their architectural restraint and rigor. And I’ve always been impressed by Bruce Goff and Frank Lloyd Wright for their unconventionality, exuberance, and originality.

What contemporary designers do you appreciate?

Oliver: I really love the more process-driven work by Nacho Carbonell these days. I especially love the ever-larger scale of his work. The ‘One-Seater Concrete Tree’ he just showed at Design Miami is pretty amazing. I also really enjoy the variety from plain sculpture to ‘useful objects’ to furniture from Atelier Van Lieshout. There is a clarity of expression in the work I find enigmatic.

Jean: I love the work of Paavo Tynell and Ingo Maurer for lighting, and Donald Judd and Pierre Paulin for furniture. They are masters at what they create.

“What unites the work is the precision in execution and our intent.”

The Questionnaire

The Questions

(The Proust Questionnaire is a set of questions answered by the French writer Marcel Proust.
Other historical figures who have answered confession albums are Oscar Wilde,
Karl Marx, Arthur Conan Doyle, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Cézanne…)

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