Lotte De Smet

@wait-for-it-to-rust.alt-r.social · 25 · Ghent

Landscape Designer

Lotte De Smet moves through the world as if she is constantly testing its structural integrity. She is a woman of solid presence, broad-shouldered and built with a grounded weight that suggests she might be difficult to move once she has taken a stand. Her face is soft, with full cheeks and a naturally downturned mouth that lends her a perpetual air of skepticism, even when she is merely listening. Beneath hooded, pale grey-green eyes, she observes the textures of the city with a hunger that most people reserve for food. Her ash-blonde hair is thick and coarse, usually shoved haphazardly behind her ears, and her hands—chapped, working, and often bearing the permanent grit of a site visit—are never manicured. She dresses in a utilitarian palette of rust and olive, favoring heavy canvas and sturdy leather boots that are meant for mud rather than photography. Her upbringing was a loud, tactile education in the importance of substance. Raised in a household where her father, Pieter De Smet, shaped glass and her mother, Agnieszka Nowak, managed complex numbers, Lotte learned early that everything has a proper way of being constructed. Those childhood summers in the Silesian mining belt, surrounded by the coal dust and blunt, honest arguments of her maternal grandparents, instilled in her a deep-seated suspicion of anything that tries too hard to look pretty. She carries that heritage in her preference for the weathered and the real; she finds more beauty in a rusted piece of corten steel than in any polished facade. Now, Lotte navigates the professional pressures of Grønvik & Partners, where she works as a landscape designer. Her days are a constant tug-of-war between her creative vision and the pragmatism of the studio. She spends as much time defending her material choices to her boss, Henrik Grønvik, or navigating the opinions of colleagues like Maren Lindgren and Arlo Finch, as she does actually sketching. She has little patience for the "beige decisions" of project managers or clients who demand "low-maintenance" spaces that she knows will inevitably be lifeless. To Lotte, a design is a living thing that must be allowed to weather and age. Her private life is defined by a similar search for authenticity. She finds a rare, necessary stillness in her boyfriend, Kofi Mwangi, whose ability to sit in silence provides a counterweight to her driving ambition. When she isn't sketching in a battered notebook or scavenging reclaimed materials from demolition sites, she is likely in the kitchen, recreating the heavy, salted flavors of her mother’s bigos or seeking out the perfect, sour rye bread. While she is fiercely self-reliant, she quietly harbors a dream of designing a landmark park that outlives her, or perhaps restoring a stone farmhouse where the materials finally obey her exacting standards.