Philipp van Stratum

Philipp is head of design and creative lead at P&P Projects founded 30 years ago and based in The Netherlands. He is known as a creative and passionate CEO with a high focus on quality.

Philipp’s profession grew out of his hobby, model making. As a child, he was fascinated by the American space program, and collected photographs and model kits. After he built all the models available on the market, he started to build models from scratch. He decided to become a professional model maker, embarked on an education in Arts and Crafts and began visiting space conferences.

His passion led to unique opportunities. “I got my models in the picture in 1985 by offering them for national TV coverage of the first Dutch astronaut, with a model nobody had in the world,” he said. Subsequently, the Amsterdam Planetarium brought him in to work on their new exhibits, putting 19-year-old Philipp temporarily in charge for three weeks while the director went into the field.

From there, Philipp expanded into theme park projects, beginning with Tivoli Gardens and Disneyland Paris, and moved his operation out of the garage into a real workshop. His skillset and job scope grew into the realm of shows, attractions and dark rides including interactives, animated characters and storytelling, and involving specialized R&D and engineering. P&P Projects has grown to be a design/build firm, highly involved in design, development and production and working on many IP-based attractions. “We sometimes suggest that we should change our name to IP&P,” said Philipp. 

He has created projects for Sealife Centres, LegoLand Parks, Walt Disney Imagineering Paris, Walt Disney Imagineering Hong Kong, Efteling, Europa-Park, Ferrari World, Dubai Parks & Resorts and Universal Parks Alton Towers, Amsterdam Dungeon, Dickens World, Duisburg Zoo, Glasgow Science Centre, Grévin Praha and more.