Sabine Marcelis

Sabine Marcelis (b. 1985 in Alkmaar, Netherlands) is a Rotterdam-based designer whose practice is rooted in a fascination with material properties, glass, resin, stone, and the ways light passes through them or reflects off their surfaces. She grew up in New Zealand, where her family emigrated when she was ten, studied industrial design at Victoria University of Wellington, and returned to the Netherlands to graduate from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2011. She founded Studio Sabine Marcelis the same year.

Her process is research-driven, with each project emerging from extensive material experimentation in the studio. The results are objects defined by soft colour, smooth surface, and unexpected translucency: resin bowls, glass lighting, sculptural spatial installations. Wallpaper named her Designer of the Year in 2020; Architectural Digest placed her on its list of the hundred most influential creatives in 2021 and 2022.

Her collaboration with IKEA produced the VARMBLIXT collection, which launched across all markets in February 2023. The twenty-piece range spans lighting objects, serveware, textiles, and rugs. The central motif is the torus, the perfectly infinite doughnut shape, which appears in a pendant lamp and in glass serveware pieces available in a warm orange-pink tone. VARMBLIXT is a demonstration that sculptural, sensory design can be translated to mass-market scale without losing the tactile quality that defines it.