Reacting against the dominant Art Nouveau style, Hoffmann drew on a smorgasbord of influences, including Islamic decoration, to create compelling, eclectic and highly imaginative designs and interiors. His work is defined both by its originality and cool geometry. Informed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and William Morris’s liberated English Arts and Crafts ethos, in an increasingly industrialised world, Hoffmann unerringly believed in the power and the beauty of the work of the hand. In 1903, he co-founded the Wiener Werkstätte, a prodigious (though not profit-making) Viennese workshop and collective of artists and designers dedicated to bringing the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the “total work of art”, evocatively to life. Over close to thirty years, they served a slew of illustrious clients, even briefly opening a Manhattan branch. But perhaps their greatest act came in 1905-11 when the Belgian banker and collector Adolphe Stoclet commissioned the creation of Palais Stoclet, his private mansion on the outskirts of Brussels.

Hoffman forensically oversaw every inch of the sprawling, and brilliantly eccentric, 4,000 sq ft interior, from the Gustav Klimt mural that embellishes the dining room wall, to the dresses that Stoclet's Parisienne wife Madame Suzanne wore whilst hosting guests including Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Cocteau there. Widely accepted as the apex of his avant-garde Viennese Secession vision, it remained crucial to Hoffmann, who celebrated his 85th birthday there (he died aged 86).