Milan Šípek

Role

Architectural Designer - Product Designer - Artist

Born

1984, Amsterdam

Milan Šípek (also written Milan Sipek) is a Dutch designer and artist, born in Amsterdam in 1984. He works across architecture and interiors, furniture, handmade Czech crystal and painting, and leads Sipek Design, his studio in Amsterdam.

He grew up in an artistic household as the son of the artists Bambi Uden and Bořek Šípek. From the age of seventeen he travelled with his father to work on projects around the world, among them the Czech presidential library, Hotel Neruda and the Yu Garden Renaissance Hotel in Shanghai.

In 2010 he founded Sipek Design Co. Ltd in Shanghai. Over the following decade he worked on private villas and large hotel projects all over China, including the Mangrove Tree Resort Hotel, the Atlantis Hotel in Sanya and several villas in the Jiujiantang villa complex. He is known for artworks that become the highlight of an interior, among them large sculptures in Czech crystal made to play with light and shadow.

In China he also set up a company that manufactures design furniture, was granted three furniture design patents and created two brands: Morphit, the pioneer of “plug-in cushion” furniture, and Sipek Crystal, his brand of crystal art.

In 2020 he returned to Europe, settled in Amsterdam and founded Sipek Design B.V. His recent work includes the 3D LineArt paintings, which are drawn in virtual reality and laid on canvas in acrylic by a machine, and designs made for home 3D printers.

Selected work

A magazine profile

From a profile in a Chinese magazine, translated from Chinese.

Milan Šípek comes from a family of crystal artists. His grandparents hold a place in the history of glass art, and his father, Bořek Šípek, was a world-renowned architect and crystal artist. Public figures such as Hillary Clinton, Tyson and Leslie Cheung have collected the family’s work.

He looks younger than the portrait in his brochure, but his dedication is unmistakable: he often works more than ten hours a day, and his attention to detail shows in every design. Born in Amsterdam, he lived in the Czech Republic until he was sixteen. As a child he already knew that he wanted to be a designer.

On his eighth birthday he was given a toy toolbox and spent the whole afternoon building a small bookshelf that could rest on the bathtub, so that he could read in the bath. It was his first design. His father never gave him the chance to be spoiled: from the age of seventeen he travelled the world with him, working on art, architecture and interiors.

At twenty he was invited by Czech President Havel to complete the design of the president’s office. At twenty-three he took on a project for the Renaissance Hotel in Shanghai and expected an ordinary job. He stayed in China for more than ten years, completing one project after another, and taught himself Chinese, beginning with the words of his trade such as “glass” and “cement”.