Inside Lust’s high-tech 17th-century Dutch office.
Location
The house of the Dutch master Paulus Potter, built in 1652, along the canals of the Dunne Bierkade in The Hague’s old city center
When did you move in?
1999
Size
Studio 2,756 square feet. Garden: 1,658 square feet.
How many people work here?
Six (plus four more in the LustLab)
Specialty
Integrating graphic design and technology
Current projects
A short list: Posterwall for the 20th Century (v. 3) media installation for the Cooper-Hewitt’s “Graphic Design: Now in Production.” Updating the permanent exhibition “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design” at the Museum of the Image, in Breda, the Netherlands. Designing a new version of Res Sapiens for the Centre Pompidou. Designing new print and digital identity systems for the Sandberg Institute and the master’s program GradMediaDesign at the Art Center College of Design. Establishing a data-visualization lab at Philips Design. Developing a new concept for an online magazine/platform initiated by a major automobile company.
The space in one word
Monumental
Best feature
The garden (and the pub next door)
One thing you would change
It gets chilly in the winter.
Essential tool
The computer
What does your typical day look like?
No typical days at Lust, but there is one daily constant: We all lunch together at the studio around 1 p.m.
What’s on your desk?
Two monitors, a lamp, a Wacom tablet, two cups full of pens, two Post-it pads, a transparent ruler with picas and centimeters, a telephone, an iPhone, paper samples from Arctic Paper, an internet-banking passcode calculator, a silver stapler, a roll of white duct tape, three project boxes, Diagrams by Arthur Lockwood, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte, and a half-finished cup of coffee.
What’s inside the boxes?
Those are our project archives. Each project we work on has a box, or multiple boxes, to archive all research materials, sketches, tests (e.g., printing, binding and materials tests), and correspondence pertaining to that project. The latest projects are kept on the shelves; older ones go to the archive in the basement.
What do you store in the metal shelving unit?
Among other things: audio components, batteries, valves, a variety of servos, micro controllers, larger electrical components, adapters, ultrasound sensors, breadboards, lasers (really).
Is the collection of old Macs decorative, or do you use them for projects?They all have been used as work computers sometime in the past but are now, of course, retired. They are, however, still in 100 percent working condition!
How do you procrastinate?
Beers at De Paas, the pub next door. In the summer, they have a boat-terrace on the canal directly in front of our studio. On warm sunny days, it gets hard to concentrate after the boat-terrace opens at 3 p.m.
Sound track
Depending on who’s “driving”: Atlas Sound, Beach House, and Panda Bear; or the Descendents, the Pixies, and the Replacements. Friday afternoon: Poison, Ludacris, ODB, Britney Spears.
What do you take with you when you travel?
iPhone and credit card
Dream collaborator
Ai Weiwei
To see more of Lust’s work, visit the firm’s website.
All photos by Nadine Stijns.