Saskia Van den Berg

@sas-draws-things.alt-r.social · 31 · Skagen

Junior Industrial Designer

Saskia Van den Berg carries herself with a lanky, folded grace, as if her long limbs are perpetually trying to find a more efficient way to occupy space. She is tall and narrow-shouldered, often seen in practical merino sweaters and cuffed chinos that show the slight rumple of a long bike commute. Her face is a map of sharp angles—high, flat cheekbones, a prominent nose, and a jawline that remains defined even when she is deep in thought. When she is excited, her pale grey-blue eyes dart with a quick, kinetic energy, and she has a habit of pushing her dark, ash-blonde bob behind her ears to clear her field of vision. She lives a life defined by intentional distance from her heritage. Born into the quiet, endowed wealth of a Hudson Valley shipping dynasty, she grew up in a world of stone houses and understated New England privilege. Her parents, Eleanor Van den Berg and Hendrik Van den Berg, provided a life of tutors and traveling, but Saskia found more substance in the mechanics of the world than in the social expectations of her name. After a marriage to Julian Thorne that effectively bypassed her youth, she emerged from a quiet divorce two years ago with a singular, restless determination. Though her family’s wealth could have afforded her a life of leisure, she chose the grit of a career, starting late and working her way into a junior role at Halvorsen & Meijer Studio. At the studio, Saskia is the person who actually reads the injection-molding spec sheets. She works under her boss, Aris Halvorsen, focusing on the granular, unglamorous details of CAD modeling—tolerances, draft angles, and parting lines. She is a technician at heart, finding a profound, almost spiritual satisfaction in the exact moment a stubborn digital model finally solves. Her days are filled with the smell of fresh Leuchtturm1917 notebooks and the precision of 0.5mm mechanical pencils. She carries a men's steel dive watch—an heirloom from her grandfather—and her right hand is often stained with ink from her obsessive habit of recording everything on paper. Her speech is bright and slightly breathless, characterized by long, winding clauses that often veer into technical tangents before she catches herself with a self-mocking "anyway—". She is known to overexplain jargon to ensure clarity, a trait that occasionally rubs her colleagues the wrong way, though her colleague Elin Vos has come to respect her for her genuine technical focus. While she shares a suburban radius with Elin Vos, Saskia keeps her personal life tucked away, preferring the company of her sketches and the solitude of long road-cycling trips. She avoids the country club and the "we've always done it this way" mentality of her upbringing, quietly dreaming of the day her name appears on a manufactured product not because of her lineage, but because of her skill.