Newsweek

Meet Axel Vervoordt: Interior Designer-Exhibitor

He creates rooms just as he collects art, by following his nose—his own intuitive sense of how to combine texture and form, melding old and new.
Vervoordt with an Anish Kapoor installation, "At the Edge of the World," in Vervoodt's eponymous gallery in Belgium.
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In the beginning, there was intuition. It’s where innovation starts, when a scientist seizes upon a sudden hypothesis, or when an artist arranges an image on a canvas. And it is where the influential Belgian interior designer, antiquaire and art dealer Axel Vervoordt begins. “Intuition has always been my leader in life,” he says.

It’s led him a long way. Vervoordt, now 69, began his career as a teenager in the mid-1960s, buying low and selling high on European antiques and paintings (aged 21, he made a $47,600 profit on a Magritte he’d bought for $2,400). Soon enough, customers were asking him to help arrange their treasures for him, then design rooms for them, then whole houses.. Most recently, included him in its 2017 AD100 hall of fame.

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