about

brand

Studio Ceres is a brand dedicated to curating distinctive vintage and contemporary design furniture and decorations. It was founded in 2022 in The Hague by Shari de Boer and Julie Hartkamp. Our aim is to give recognition to overlooked pieces and their designers, to bring more attention to objects of which the inventors have been forgotten about, but also to bring more transparency into how we source our objects.

We consider ourselves as two halfs, depending on each other in our objectives and creations. And apart from being half of Studio Ceres we are both half, but fully dedicated to other fields of specialisations: photography & art history. It defines us, as well as our brand.

sourcing, collecting, transportation, repairing, research, presenting

Our collection comes together by the never ending task of sourcing. It starts when you wake up and ends when you go to sleep, unless.. you dream of it. We mostly collect our items in The Netherlands, Germany and Italy. Every three months we organise a longer trip to Italy where we meet our still growing network of dealers. We enjoy the most stuffy and chaotic warehouses full of vintage design furniture and art objects ranging from the late ninetheenth-century through Art Deco and Mid-century modern, to the eclectic seventies and Postmodernism. Although we have a long wishlist of items that we would love to add to our collection, we always try to go without expectations or specific objectives in order to be open to anything new or unfamiliar. Back home, in order to get our collection up and running as fast as possible we put ourselves to administration, cleaning, restorations, research, textual and visual presentation. It takes time and effort, but when everything comes together, the result is something else.

Apart from sourcing for our own collection we also source on commission! Are you looking for specific design or items in a specific style, do not hesitate to set out a search.

founders

Julie graduated with a masters degree in Art History at the University of Amsterdam, with a specialisation in late Medieval and Renaissance art, Italian in particular, but very detailed Eyckian painting has always intrigued here as well. Her interest for untold stories and fascination about original meaning, function, materiality and artistic practice has always been core to her art historical research. In a sense, this fascination trancends time, as twentieth-century art and craftmanship triggers the same kind of curiousity. Research is crucial to Studio Ceres' identity. Our aim is to provide our audience with items that carry their unique story with them into your home. It encourages us to curate pieces that are lesser known, and are still able to surprise us with their often forgotten backgrounds.

Graduating in 2016 as a documentary photographer from the Royal Academy of art, Shari has alway been about visual storytelling. With her eye for specific details, that in their banality to many would seem unremarkable, she aims to reveal something new, something that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. In one of her most significant projects Proving Ground she examined 'war game' and how this is translated into videogames and becomes an inspiration to the children's playground. Children playing in the woods, dressing up like soldiers and moving just like them , it seems like an everyday scene that you would easily pass by, but is it? As the other half of Ceres this aim to unveal banality means sourcing objects that might have been forgotten, because their design did not stand enough against the flashiness of icons, and retelling their story by capturing their truest essence.