Designer Isaac Monté was born November 14, 1988 in Ghent, Belgium. He graduated Cum Laude in 2009 with a Bachelor’s in interior architecture from the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo, Norway, and subsequently obtained a Master’s in interior architecture from LUCA, School of Arts in Gent in 2009 as well as a Master’s degree in product design from Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam in 2013. From 2012 until 2013, Monté held a product design internship at Studio Mischer’Traxler in Vienna, Austria.
Monté’s fascination for unusual materials—combined with an urge to master and manipulate these materials—led to the establishment his own multidisciplinary design studio in Rotterdam in August 2010. Notable designs include the Crystal Series (2016), which features a collection of vases, lights, and accessories manufactured in collaboration with Galerie PUUR, Form&Seek, and BioArt Laboratories. Using the metaphor of time as inspiration, Monté replicates stalagmites by organically growing the crystals for his series, allowing each object to be completely unique in shape, color, and texture.
In 2012, Monté founded Sweatshop Deluxe, a social design label and production company based in Rotterdam. He also lectures and leads workshops at various institutions, including the program Unexpect, which teaches children to use design as a solution for social issues. Since 2014, he has taught Sustainability, Product Design, and Lifestyle Design at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam.
Monté’s work has been shown in galleries and exhibitions in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany. He is also the recipient of multiple awards including The Threshold Prize for his project Filter Factory (2013), the Henri Winkelman Award for young creative entrepreneurs (2014), and was a recipient of the Bio Art and Design Awards (2015), which afforded him the opportunity to design The Art of Deception (2015) in collaboration with Toby Kiers, a professor in evolutionary biology at the Free University of Amsterdam.
