Delvaux and Ben Storms: A Belgian Dialogue in Antwerp

A Refined Overview

• Delvaux, the world’s oldest fine leather goods house, founded in Brussels in 1829, has opened a temporary boutique in Antwerp staging a series of sculptural installations by Belgian designer Ben Storms — a collaboration the Maison describes as “a dialogue between craftsmanship and contemporary design.”
• Storms’s In Hale series forms the centrepiece: marble slabs that appear to float on hydroformed metal cushions, each constructed from two sheets of welded steel, brass or copper inflated with high-pressure air.
• The partnership builds on a relationship begun at Delvaux’s 2022 Brussels flagship and extended through the House’s 2023 global holiday window installations.
• The Antwerp boutique represents the most fully realised expression of the collaboration to date, with Storms effectively co-authoring the boutique’s entire scenography.

Design & Shared Creative Instinct

Both Delvaux and Ben Storms operate from the same conceptual position: take a familiar material, apply disciplined technique, and produce something that reads as genuinely new. For Delvaux, that discipline is expressed across nearly two centuries of uninterrupted leather work, producing bags — among them the Brillant, the Tempête, and Le Pin — whose forms are achieved through hand-techniques preserved since 1829. For Storms, it produces the In Hale cushions, the Twin Mirrors, and the Ex Hale tables, objects that treat industrial materials with a stonemason’s patience.

Placing the two side by side in a temporary boutique makes their shared identity legible in a way that neither could achieve alone. A Delvaux Brillant bag, positioned near an In Hale piece, reads differently: as an object shaped by the same fundamental instinct. Both are exercises in transforming raw material — leather in one case, metal and marble in the other — through skilled hand-work into forms that transcend their category.

Movement & Materials: The In Hale Technique

The technical process behind Storms’s In Hale pieces is precise and counter-intuitive. Two sheets of solid stainless steel, brass, or copper are welded together and then subjected to hydroforming, a manufacturing method in which high-pressure air is injected between the sheets to gradually inflate them into an organic, three-dimensional form. The result is indistinguishable, to the eye, from a fabric pillow. The marble slab that rests on top is sourced from stone leftovers, polished on its upper surface but otherwise kept as found, so that the raw and unpolished sides reveal the material’s true character.

As Storms has articulated: “In my practice as a designer, I push materials to their boundaries, often questioning common notions. Does marble always have to look heavy? Can steel look soft?” The sister works in his broader vocabulary reinforce the proposition. Ex Hale reverses the In Hale dynamic — marble that reads as soft as a cushion. The Twin Mirrors pair a stainless steel wall piece with one in Noir de Mazy marble, each reflecting the other’s material impossibility. The In Hale Wallpieces are inflated metal cushions that function, through their polished surfaces, as poetic mirrors.

Heritage & Lineage

The Antwerp installation is not the first meeting between the two houses. Storms’s sculptural furniture entered Delvaux’s design vocabulary through the Maison’s 2022 Brussels flagship, where his work appeared alongside pieces by Nathalie Dewez, Alain Berteau, Jules Wabbes, and Emiel Veranneman. In 2023, his sculptural metallic pillows formed part of Delvaux’s holiday window installations across the House’s global boutiques. The current Antwerp residency is the deepest expression of that relationship: a temporary boutique whose entire scenography has been co-authored by Storms rather than merely accented by him.

Ben Storms trained across art history, sculpture, stone cutting, and woodworking — the son of a Belgian stonemason — before directing his practice toward furniture design from his Antwerp atelier, Haptic House. His position among the most collected Belgian designers of his generation owes precisely to this combination of inherited stonemasonry knowledge and contemporary manufacturing methods, a duality that mirrors Delvaux’s own layering of nineteenth-century technique with quiet modernism.

Antwerp as Context

The choice of Antwerp carries specific weight. The city’s design identity is shaped by the Antwerp Six generation of fashion designers who reshaped international fashion from the mid-1980s onwards, and by a contemporary craft ecosystem that continues to produce some of Europe’s most respected Belgian craft practitioners. For Storms, whose Haptic House studio sits within the city, the installation is a home event. For Delvaux, it represents an act of alignment with a design community whose values the Maison’s own history most closely mirrors.

The temporary Delvaux boutique in Antwerp, featuring installations by Ben Storms, is open to the public for the duration of the residency. Complete information, opening hours, and appointment details are available at Delvaux‘s Antwerp page.

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