Interview with Five Am

Design atelier Five AM was established in 2011 by interior designers Mathieu Bellens and Olivier Caluwier. Creating interiors and exhibition spaces for semi-public organisations and private companies, the Five AM portfolio also extends to product design. The studio’s aim is to generate a moment of astonishment in the process of realising an inspiring result.

With simplicity as a starting point, each design needs to interact with the user and build up naturally until the story is complete.

For us, design is what people use everyday. It's the designer' task to design an object,interior,... as user friendly as possible. Only the second stage is making it special.

We like to do semi-public interiors because there you can go further. In that kind of work we push ourselves to the limit in searching of new ways of communicating, working, living etc.

We are very inspired in House N designed by S.Fujimoto. The design erases the idea of enclosed spaces. Inside you can not determine if you are outside or inside.

Five AM's first task was to design a brainstorm space inside an office full of starting companies. It is made completely out of OSB panels. In the middle we've designed a unique seat that can be transformed to a big meeting table.

One word: natural materials. We dislike to use fake materials.

At 5:00 AM :)

We like to put a lot of effort in our pre design. Sometimes it takes months to come to a well though design. But we are convinced if the pre design is flawless, the following steps are easier.

In every design we try to be astonished.

Same same. When it's finished we feel very proud. But when the users are happy to, thats the best compliment a designer could have.

When the user is happy with it.

I think everybody got another opinion about good or bad. For myself I always think : should I like to use it ? To live in it ? ...

It's our task to deliver a solution to a problem that the user has. We try to make the solution as simple (like : budget friendly) as possible.

I like the evolution that design is becoming more simple.

We are very inspired by the Japanese architects

Flexibile minimalism.

We live in Belgium, a country where every citizen loves to build. The con is that the Belgian people are very conservative and don't search for solutions elsewhere.

We work together with various other companies, like architects, landscape architects, product designers, ... For every project we search for good partners, sometimes from a totally different work field.

We dislike the fact that companies don't really search for a designer, but actually think they are in a shopping mall. Most of the time they ask us for a (free) pre design before they make a decision. Such projects we try to avoid. We like that our client chooses for us and our thoughts, not because we are cheap,expensive,...

Like we said, the pre design is the most important one. We start with searching similar projects trough the world. Sometimes we travel to another country to see how they interpret the same projects there.

I like my couch form Daniela Dipadova. A small company in Italy that makes couches by hand.

Our days are filled with fun :)

In fact we are young designers. Every day we learn from the constructors, clients, firms etc. Now we are glad we spent 6 years in other offices to learn and develop our design thoughts.

The negative is that people sometimes don't know how much work there is needed to make a good design. The positive is that you are each day in the middle of creative people & atmoshphere.

Don't exaggerate.

Knowing where to stop and where to go on.

We use vectorworks and cinema 4d for our cad drawings. But we always start with the pencil and sketchbook.

For some brainstorms we use a close deadline. If we don't find anything till the deadline, we close the brainstorm and restart it on another date.

Depends on the object.

In what color should I paint my living room walls ?

Working abroad.

Mostly companies : drukta , formail , legio , Province West Flanders...

I like the sketch fase, because its manual.

We like to do more projects abroad.

We work as a small team.

At the moment we are working on a very exciting office design. In May it will be on our website.

Trough mail ; question@fiveam.be or phone +32 478 69 11 16