About
Base BRUSSELS
is where it all began, and never quite settled
Base Brussels is the motherhouse, founded in the 90s at La Cambre Art School by Dimitri Jeurissen and Thierry Brunfaut, who proved design could be conceptual without losing common sense. Operating today from a renovated former hat factory in downtown Brussels, it serves as the European hub of the network, projecting influence and momentum across borders. Specializing in non-specializing, BRU moves fluidly across sectors, combining research, narrative intelligence, and human-centered processes that have shaped the entire Base group and the brands it partners with. Its work spans cultural institutions such as KANAL Centre Pompidou, Grand Palais, La Monnaie Opera as well as brands including Birkenstock, Caudalie, and Maison Dandoy. Anchored in storytelling and wit rather than a defined visual style, the studio is now led by a new generation of Basers rewriting the original script.
Meet the basers
Cold winters, great corn, big smiles. Here is how Julie, Base’s Global Editorial Director, describes her Midwest. It comes as no surprise then, that this Chicago-born go-getter knows how to weather a storm and take on a challenge — moving from NYC to Paris, where she studied fashion business at IFM, before building up experience in fashion and beauty houses, big and small. No surprise either, that Julie knows how to shuck a cob and her way around the kitchen more generally. There’s nothing she likes more than to cook, bake*, gather people around a table and a good meal: to ‘create conviviality’, as she says. And then last but not least, no surprise that it is all dimples, enthusiasm and drive that she joined Base in Brussels in April 2023. Since then she's set up its communication arm, developing new processes and new output for the department from the ground up. Working with each and everyone at Base, across design, strategy and digital, NYC, BRU, MEL, GVA, and SGN to tell stories about the work we do: somehow making culture or, in her own terms, ‘the exterior influences that shape who you are as a person. They can be intimate and less personal, span generations and country borders.’
*Come by the office on Monday, and expect a slice of homemade banana bread
