Ruud Belmans is Co-Founder and Creative Director of WeWantMore, an independent design studio specialised in interior design and branding based in Antwerp, Belgium. This autumn, the studio launches its first office in London, in The Market Building in Clerkenwell.

After graduating with an industrial product design degree at the Antwerp university, Belmans became disillusioned with designing technical consumer goods, and found himself drawn to the designing for brands. After graduation, he worked as a freelancer for a few interior designs where he developed his interest in commercial design and honed his own design vernacular.

In 2006 Ruud and his best friend and business partner, Thomas Vanden Abeele, founded WeWantMore. The studio now has 40+ employees and a network of international clients across hospitality, retail and workplace. The studio focuses on the fully experiential, from branding to spatial design, and houses two teams – one dedicated to interior design, the other to branding.

Under Belmans’ creative lead, WeWantMore explores the junction of design, art and entertainment to shape the unimaginable. The team stands for simple ideas, crafted to perfection. What makes the studio’s work interesting is that it’s not prescriptive. Rather, each project and each client are treated as unique entities whose bespoke needs are taken into consideration for each project; the style of the studio is never at the forefront of the design

Ruud and his team have built up a sizeable portfolio of work in hospitality, retail and office design, with a client roster that includes AccorHotels, Corinthia, McDonald’s, Neuhaus, and Loop, with collaborations with companies such as Vitra and Muuto.

As a result, WeWantMore’s interior designs have been rewarded with AHEAD, Architizer and Design Week awards among others.

More recently, with a key focus on sustainability across all disciplines, Belmans and his team are curre,ntly building a bespoke software programme, called Monarch, which will enable designers to start impact engineering in the same way they do value engineering, during the design process. After a thorough research and classification process, materials are given a sustainability ‘number’ which is deducted from a sustainability ‘budget’. Materials in sample libraries are colour coded to reflect this, and Belmans hopes that the system can be rolled out as a user-friendly industry standard across hospitality design.

WeWantMore’s projects that shine a light on sustainable design include: ‘The Mush Room’ – an experimental installation built in 2023 in London, taking a theme of ‘great things will grow’. The result was a large-scale mycelium bar in collaboration with art agent La Succulente and artist Côme Di Meglio.

The bar was a huge success, leading WWM to win the Frame awards and several projects including a retail concept for Op ‘t Oog, a Belgian eyewear brand. Collaborating with Blast Studio, the practice created mycelium columns that double as product displays and mirrors. The floor-to-ceiling pillars are 3D printed using recycled paper coffee cups sourced from the streets of London, which act as a base from which the mycelium skin grows. Belmans is keen to ensure these types of sustainable materials can work in commercial environments on a larger scale – resulting in the studio’s most ambitious project to date, McDonald’s, to create a pilot design to be four or five times as sustainable as the existing restaurants.

Launching in London this autumn, the expansion represents WeWantMore’s strategy to attract design briefs in the UK and win more work in the region. More to come soon.