Inspired by a magazine, Simone Pullens joined forces with Maarten Groven and Fre Lemmens of Creneau International to design the interior of café Bar Marie in the Belgian headquarters of publishing firm Sanoma in Mechelen. A curtain was designed and developed in the TextielLab as a partition between the café and the meeting area and is a powerful visual in its own right.
Opened in 2013, Bar Marie is a café situated in the entrance lounge of the Sanoma offices in Mechelen. The aim was to design a space with its own identity but with the same purpose as the Sanoma magazines: telling stories, inspiring and informing. The café needed a partition for the meeting area, and the result was a large woven curtain with a classic floral motif symbolising the café’s focus on organic produce. In the foreground are images of food in contrasting threads, but from a distance the images form the face of Marie.
A contrasting thread colour was needed to distinguish the face from the colourful flowered pattern. Using a special weaving technique, a relief pattern was applied to the lines on the face to make it stand out from the background. The highly complex design was translated into 24 colours, and thorough colour testing helped to select the right mix. Due to the enormous number of colours and threads used in this design, it was a challenge to maintain the suppleness of the fabric.
After graduating with honours in interior design and furniture design from the Katholieke Hogeschool Mechelen, Pullens started creating interior concepts at Creneau International, an international design agency based in Belgium. She now runs her own business in Den Bosch. She has designed interior concepts for various retail companies, hotels and restaurants, including the Yup Hotel in Hasselt and the Dutch Kitchen & Bar in the Holland Boulevard at Schiphol Airport Amsterdam.
