Vitra

Vitra is a manufacturer of office furniture and home furnishings. The Vitra headquarters are located in Biersfelden near Basel in Switzerland. On the other side of the Rhine, in Weil am Rhein, the furniture manufacturer maintains an area known as the Vitra Campus. Sales, logistics, production, training rooms, Showroom (Vitra Haus) and a museum (Vitra Design Museum) are housed here. There is also a so-called Verner Panton Trail, a field path lined with colored poles, and the Vitra Slide Tower, an adventure artwork for sliding and enjoying the view.

Vitra has been manufacturing the designs of designers since the 1950s. George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames were the first whose furniture was manufactured by company founders Erika and Willi Fehlbaum in Weil am Rhein. Fehlbaum had already taken over a store fitting business in 1934, which increasingly turned to furniture making.

During a trip to the USA, the Swiss couple met the American couple Ray and Charles Eames, among others. Designer-couple Ray and Charles Eames. The Fehlbaums obtained their distribution licenses from Herman Miller, whose furnishings were already well established in the States. At this time, they also crossed paths with Verner Panton. He was hell-bent on designing a visionary cantilever chair made entirely of plastic. The Fehlbaums believed in the idea and supported Panton in his development work. The Panton Chair was launched on the market in 1967. On this basis, a fruitful collaboration with Verner Panton and other progressive designers developed over the years. The range of furniture for commercial, public and private spaces grows.

In 1981, when Rolf Fehlbaum replaced his father in the company management, a fire destroyed a large part of the historically grown production buildings. Since then, buildings by renowned architects such as Frank Gehry, Nicholas Grimshaw, Zaha Hadid, Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron and SANAA have come together on this site to form the Vitra Campus. The Vitra Design Museum was Frank Gehry's first building outside North America. Tadao Ando immortalizes himself for the first time outside of Japan with a conference and convention building, which is completed in 1993. In the same year, Zaha Hadid also celebrates a premiere with Vitra. Her fire station is her first realized building and announces her spectacular style.

In addition to providing a breeding ground for contemporary design, Vitra is responding to the changing demands of everyday working life with "Net 'n Nest". "Net" sees the office as the center of communication and at the same time as a place of retreat, the "nest". With the ID-Chair, Vitra tried its hand at the office chair segment with its own product in 2010. According to the company, chair offers 8,000 configuration options.

All implementations should be based on ecological thinking and economic responsibility. Vitra emphasizes that this is not an externally imposed obligation. Rather, it is a design issue that has always been part of the company's own industrial culture. For Vitra, it was simply part of the utility value of a piece of furniture that its production, use and disposal did not cause any damage.

The longevity of the products is at the heart of Vitra's contribution. Short-lived styling or fashion is avoided. The best examples of this are the design classics, which remain young for decades and do not wear out. As is usually only the case with classic cars, some chairs, tables, sofas change hands several times and find their way into museums and private design collections. Because of their value, Vitra design classics are virtually predestined to be copied. Most copies reach Germany via Italy and Great Britain, for example, and are sold there on a large scale. If you want to be sure of getting an original, you should always buy from a specialist dealer.

"Sustainability is like morality: you should live it, but talk little about it. Our roots in modernist design make the first step easy: products that leave out everything superfluous and have a long life." Rolf Fehlbaum, Chairman Vitra. His niece Nora Fehlbaum has been managing the company since 2013.