Studio Job’s House of Delft is the Netherlands’ biggest, craziest artwork

Designer Job Smeets of Studio Job invites us into his atelier to see work in progress for his surreal 2,000 sq m ode to the Dutch city of Delft

BY JOHN WEICH Image credits: Josh Croll

Some artists treat fabrication as a means to an end; Job Smeets is not one of them. He likes to get his hands dirty. His work is loaded with conceptual metaphors, but he speaks most passionately about the tactility of majolica, the plasticity of bronze or a wall tapestry’s interlaced warp threads. Since founding Studio Job in 1998, the Belgian-born designer has sculpted and moulded a language of his own that hovers somewhere between ornate sculpture and pop-influenced design, folkloric and kitsch. His work has both fans and critics, but no one has ever questioned his material prowess or the sincerity of his craftsmanship.

We visited Studio Job weeks before the October 2025 soft opening of House of Delft – at 2,000 sq m, the largest commission of Smeets’ career. When completed (before its official inauguration in October 2026), it will also be the largest artwork in the Netherlands, surpassing the 1,680 sq m Panorama of Scheveningen by Hendrik Willem Mesdag in The Hague…

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