Job Smeets Hermès window display: A Surreal Vegetable Garden in Hong Kong

Dutch-Belgian artist Job Smeets has collaborated with Hermès to design Hortus Maximus — a whimsical window display transforming the Hermès flagship store in Hong Kong into a magical vegetable garden. Job Smeets Hermès window display is on view from August to November 2023, this dreamlike installation reimagines the urban landscape as a surreal oasis where nature, luxury, and imagination intertwine.

Inspired by the eccentric world of award-winning vegetable growers and Smeets’ own garden in Belgium, the project invites viewers into a world of anthropomorphic charm and oversized flora. Within the windows, animals take on the roles of elegant farmers, while vegetables swell to monumental proportions, blurring the line between fantasy and craftsmanship.

Hortus Maximus continues Studio Job’s signature maximalism, blending surreal high-end finishes with familiar domestic icons — watering cans, wheelbarrows, and garden tools — elevated into sculptural art. The result is both playful and mysterious, echoing the spirit of a childhood fairy tale retold through contemporary design.

This marks the second collaboration between Job Smeets and Hermès, following a series of acclaimed works that include the Tree of Life in Miami’s Faena district, the bronze Horse Bust at Chamber Gallery in New York, and the Watering Can & Fruit Series.

“The project is filled with a sense of a fairy tale and how life was narrated to us as children,” says Smeets. The installation’s mannerist exaggeration of proportions transforms ordinary vegetables into hyperreal sculptures — their scale and detail bridging nature and surrealism.

Visitors can experience Hortus Maximus at the Hermès flagship store, Landmark Prince’s Building, 10 Chater Road Central, Hong Kong, through November 2023.

Written by Otávio Santiago, designer and visual storyteller exploring the intersection of design, art, and architecture.