Design

Wood, Reconsidered: Inside Hakwood's Collaboration with Scheltens & Abbenes

In this article you will find

The Photographers
A Shared Way of Looking
From the Factory Floor to the Studio
The Result
Part of Something Larger
Book Collection

Most photography of wooden floors keeps them in context, a backdrop to the rooms they help shape. This collaboration started from a different instinct: that the wood itself is worth making the subject. Hand the material to a duo who treat what they photograph as compositions in their own right, and the grain, the color and the surface become the whole picture. That was the starting point for Hakwood's collaboration with the Amsterdam photographers Scheltens & Abbenes.

The Photographers

Maurice Scheltens and Liesbeth Abbenes are based in Amsterdam, but their work is international and so is their reputation. They have collaborated for more than two decades, he as a still-life photographer trained in The Hague, she as a visual artist from the Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie. Their standing rests on a particular way of seeing. Rather than presenting an object as a product to be sold, they arrange and reshape it until it reads as a composition in its own right, often collapsing three dimensions into a flat, graphic image. Their practice moves between the commissioned and the autonomous: international clients such as Issey Miyake, Hermès, COS, Paco Rabanne, and the Dutch Royal House, exhibitions from Foam Amsterdam to Galliera Musée de la Mode Paris, and an ICP Infinity Award in New York.

A Shared Way of Looking

This was never a search for product photography. The images an architect or designer normally needs to specify a floor: the honest record of color, grain and texture, are a separate job entirely. What Scheltens & Abbenes wanted was to present the material from Hakwood and celebrate it in its own quality. “There are already enough pictures of how it could be applied in a room situation”.

The affinity goes deeper than style. Hakwood looks at its own floors with an open mind, and through its bespoke finishes it keeps pushing at the edges of what wood can do. That belief in endless possibility, paired with the care and attention the work is given, is the real common ground. The result is imagery you would not expect from a wood producer, and that was precisely the intention. That the studio and the brand are both Dutch only adds to that sense of kinship.

From the Factory Floor to the Studio

The collaboration began not in a studio but on the factory floor at Hakwood. Before any photography, Maurice and Liesbeth came to Hakwood for a tour with owner Mark Hak, to understand how the wood is actually made. The number of steps in the process, and the range of finishes possible, gave them a great deal to respond to. The lab drew them in most: a place where they could experiment freely and chase the colors they felt the shoot needed.

“Through the camera we look at objects in all their existence and how we can catch its tactility in a photo(graphic) way. We saw the same intention Hakwood puts in their surfaces of woods”

- Liesbeth Abbenes

The Result

The final series gives Hakwood's floors a presence they rarely get to have. In some frames the duo pushed color combinations you would never expect to see on a floor, the kind of pairings that come from treating wood as material for a composition rather than a sample to document. The parquet tiles in particular were approached more conceptually, photographed in a way that brings the idea behind them to life.

These are images that grow on you. You keep looking, and you keep finding something new. It feels genuinely good to show our product to the world this way.

Part of Something Larger

These images are more than a single campaign. They form part of Hakwood's wider rebranding, a new visual language that will run across the brand's work in the months ahead, the forthcoming brochure included. Looking at wood differently, it turns out, is also a way of looking at the brand differently.