Nicolas Verschaeve

Eyes on Talents member, Nicolas Verschaeve, inaugurated Le Monde's summer series "Un designer, un territoire", which looks at a designer and his or her environment every Sunday until 17 August. Nicolas Verschaeve, designer dans le Grand-Est : l’appel du bois takes us to the Vosges, France, where Nicolas Verschaeve makes wooden coat racks, glass-blowing moulds and enamelled dishes with a connection to the land. Around sixty kilometres north-west of Strasbourg lies the village of Meisenthal, whose beating heart is the former glass factory, which became the Centre International d'Art Verrier (CIAV) in the 1990s. For the designer, who moved into the former garage of the village's old carpentry workshop a year ago, it was not he who chose the Vosges du Nord, but the territory that chose him, starting out with a student workshop at the CIAV during his studies at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 2015. "Here I discovered the magic of a form emerging from a reaction to gestures and tools. Unlike wood, which can be made to take the shape you have drawn, glass is a source of fascinating variations. It has become essential for me to be at the very place where the material is transformed."