Designer Maurice Mentjens won the Dutch Design Prize for interiors with his new interior for the Beatrix room, DSM’s reception and conference room at the company’s head office in Heerlen (NL).

On behalf of the Managing Board, Catharien Romijn, the curator of the DSM collection, was on the lookout for a new modern and innovative décor for the Beatrix room, which is DSM’s reception room in Heerlen. It was decided to commission designer Maurice Mentjens (Holtum (NL), 1964) for the project. He drew his inspiration from an altarpiece from the Middle Ages, ‘The Lamb of God’, by the Van Eyck brothers. The connection that Mentjens draws between this painting and his interior concept is nature. According to the designer, the altarpiece is a hymn of praise for creation. And that is exactly what the Beatrix room had to become, too: a hymn of praise for nature in our century.

By using enlarged prints of details of nature photos, Mentjens went down the path of producing enchanted reflections of micro-organisms: enzymes such as the aspergillus niger and yeasts such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Mentjens has covered the walls of the reception room from floor to ceiling with prints of these substantially enlarged photos of microorganisms. In order to increase the sense of space, the ceiling was covered with mirrors. A white bowl hangs in the middle of the room as a lamp, which is reminiscent of the holy ghost with the triple halo in the Van Eycks’ altarpiece. The large, white table rests on trumpet-shaped legs that are reminiscent of both a goblet, and also DSM’s cooling towers. This enables the interior to form a link to DSM’s activities in the past, present and future. The result is experimental and daring and seamlessly matches DSM’s image.