My Approach
Nothing begins from nothing.
Every object carries evidence of how it came to be: the material it began with, the hands involved in making it and the marks gathered through use.
Isabella Langaard Studios questions why good design is so often expected to appear flawless and untouched. Instead, Isabella works with irregularities, visible decisions and traces of process, allowing each piece to develop a character that cannot be perfectly repeated.
These marks are not defects to overlook. They are what connect an object to the people around it, giving it a history, a sense of belonging and more reason to be kept.
The objects I remember most from growing up were never perfect.
They were used, repaired and kept. Some of my happiest memories come from my way of living in South America. Things felt simpler. Materials were used honestly and objects were expected to age with you. I did not realise how deeply that had shaped me until I started studying design. The more I learned about how things are made today, the more frustrated I became.
I had never naturally cared much for perfection, but I was constantly being told to “clean it up”, make things more uniform and remove anything that looked unresolved. For a while, I questioned my instincts. Was good design supposed to look flawless? Was I meant to remove every mark that showed how something had been made?
Leather became the clearest example. It begins as a natural hide, most often a by-product of the meat industry, already carrying scars, grain and evidence of a life. Yet we so often coat, correct and standardise it until almost everything individual about it disappears. That bothered me. Why take a material with a history and work so hard to make it look as though it has none? Why take something natural and repairable, then add synthetic finishes to reduce its ability to biodegrade? I began noticing the same thinking in my own work.
Eventually, I realised those were often the parts I cared about most. I became drawn to materials that record what happens to them. Clay that keeps a fingerprint. Timber that carries an old hole or repair. Leather that darkens where it is held. Instead of correcting those things, I started keeping them. I became more interested in what materials could become when I stopped forcing them towards perfection. That is also why repair matters so much to me.
I do not want an object to become less valuable every time it changes. I want it to age, break, be repaired and continue gathering a story. Maybe that comes from growing up between places and never feeling entirely from one of them. Objects became a kind of anchor. They carried people, places and memories with them.
and that is what I want my work to do. Not stay perfect but be worth keeping
