Oil Bottle Reed

Rick and Linsey run Brût Homeware from an office in Amsterdam, where they design everything themselves and share a life as well as the work. On paper the split is tidy, Linsey leads design and marketing, Rick runs the buying and the day to day, but the design really begins with the two of them at a table, sketches spread out, arguing over what looks good and, just as much, what actually works. They would rather make an object you use than one you only admire, robust things with an eye for function over decoration. What they draw in Amsterdam is made by hand in small batches at a handful of workshops they choose carefully, in Asia and in Bosnia, and they travel to those workshops themselves to see the conditions and hold the work to their own standards, with a colleague, Mahesh, doing the same in India. It all started plainer, as Brût Home Industrials, whose hooks and clipboards European shops still stock under that older name.