REM Atelier

REM Atelier is a Dutch art and design studio founded in Rotterdam in 2015 by Remty Elenga and Remco van Halderen. Its name brings together the opening letters of both founders’ names, reflecting a collaborative practice that spans furniture, lighting, sculpture, and installation. Elenga studied fine art at the Willem de Kooning Academy, focusing on photography and video, while van Halderen trained in furniture making before working in set design and exhibition construction. Together, they combine an interest in perception with practical experimentation in form and materials.

The studio explores the relationship between natural structures and their artificial representations. Organic textures and familiar objects become starting points for works that question how we recognise materials and experience our surroundings. Moving between handcrafted ceramics, wood, light, and synthetic materials, REM Atelier creates pieces that retain a practical function while introducing unexpected surfaces and sculptural forms. Their work invites closer observation, allowing decoration, structure, and material transformation to become equally important parts of an object.

This interest in perception emerged in Growing Plants Indoors, a series of illuminated works depicting banana plants within shallow display cases. Through carefully constructed imagery and an illusion of depth, the plants appear to occupy more space than the objects physically contain. The project connects Elenga’s background in photography with the studio’s broader investigation of how images and objects can alter the experience of an interior.

Ceramics have become a central part of REM Atelier’s practice. In the Surfaced Cabinet, thirty ceramic tiles form a continuous organic relief across the cabinet’s front, bringing an undulating surface into dialogue with the grain and geometry of wood. The composition draws on the unexpected forms that emerge when natural materials meet and grow together. Across the studio’s furniture and sculptural objects, texture becomes a means of transforming familiar structures into something visually ambiguous and tactile.

REM Atelier’s work has been presented internationally, including at Ventura Future during Milan Design Week in 2018 and in the Dutch Stuff presentation at London Design Fair that same year. The studio also participated in Objective Gallery’s third-anniversary exhibition in 2023. Its practice has been explored in a dedicated interview with vtwonen Design, while ELLE Decor featured a REM Atelier sculpture in its coverage of a Hamptons residence by Fox-Nahem, demonstrating how the studio’s experimental objects inhabit domestic spaces.

REM Atelier’s complete catalog available upon request.