This is behind the wave - a designer Spotlight Series.
On tears, texture, and the art of coming home. Every edition, we sit down with a designer who believes a space should do something to you.
A conversation with Jeroen Machielsen of Studio Hermanides
Jeroen Machielsen founded Studio Hermanides in 2008, after years of working alongside renowned interior designers Jan des Bouvrie and Marcel Wolterinck. Based in Amsterdam, he designs luxury interiors for private residences, offices, holiday homes and yachts, in the Netherlands and beyond. His signature approach, which he describes as Timeless Eclecticism, blends classical elements with a contemporary sensibility: pure materials, a considered colour palette, and spaces that feel both harmonious and genuinely luxurious.
In this series, we speak with interior designers who believe a space can be more than beautiful, that it should do something to you. Today, Jeroen talks about material, feeling, and the finest compliment that fabric and stone can ever receive.
Materials & texture
There is a thread running through all of Jeroen’s work: everything is meant to be touched. Wood, wool, natural stone, bronze and glass — these are the raw materials of his interiors, but it goes beyond a list. It’s about layering. About the way a brushed wooden surface feels different from a polished stone, and how placing the two side by side creates something you can’t quite put into words.
In terms of colour, he gravitates toward deep, greyed greens and dark blues colours that hold their ground without overpowering a room. Lately, though, he finds himself drawn more and more to deep oranges and brick tones. Warm. Earthy. Colours that pull you in.
“Tactility matters to me just as much as appearance. A velvet sofa, a wool plaid, a natural stone with a leather finish, it’s the feeling under your hands that brings a space to life.”
The creative process
His process begins the moment he sits down with a client for the first time. Before any moodboard exists, an image forms in his mind a mood, a direction. From there, he translates it into a colour palette, and from the colours, materials begin to surface naturally. The moodboard grows, breathes, loses things, gains others. He steps back deliberately, returns, looks again.
What drives him most is working alongside the client not designing for them, but with them. Until the image feels right. Not just on paper, but when you’re standing inside it.
