The Man Who Loved Chairs

Vitra CEO Rolf Fehlbaum wasn't born loving chairs. Nor did he grow up loving chairs. "I didn't wake up at age 14 and think, 'Ah, chairs, what a wonderful subject!'" Fehlbaum, 59, readily admits. "I couldn't have cared less about chairs. But once I started to get involved, I had the urge to get at the subject in the deepest possible way. I wasn't born loving chairs -- I learned to love them."

Today, the furniture company's world-renowned campus is a monumental expression of Fehlbaum's passionate love affair with the chair. A grassy, four-acre expanse in the countryside just outside Basel, Switzerland, Vitra's campus -- and everything on it -- is a heart-felt celebration of chairs and design. Take a walk around the place and you'll see buildings that were designed by some of the best-known architects in the world: a fire station by the avant-garde architect Zaha Hadid, her first commission; manufacturing buildings by Nicholas Grimshaw and Alvaro Siza; a spare, Zen-ish concrete conference center by Tadao Ando, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect from Japan; and two buildings by Frank Gehry, including his very first European commission, the Vitra Design Museum, which attracts 50,000 visitors a year.

And then there are the chairs. Perhaps the most mundane element of the office environment, in this company and on this campus they are the most celebrated. Vitra's product showroom, on the second floor of one of the Grimshaw buildings, is itself a museum. Verner Panton's curvaceous plastic chairs sit near Jasper Morrison's stackable, square "Sim"; Ron Arad's "Tom Vac" chair and Maarten Van Severen's ".03" chair are steps away from Jasper Morrison's "Ply-Chair." Chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, the famous mid-century California couple, furnish a separate sitting area.

Zaha Hadid's Fire Station, too, serves as a showroom, but not for the chairs that Vitra sells. The Fire Station displays a selection of chairs from Fehlbaum's vast collection of landmark creations. There you can see Eero Aarnio's 1965 Ping-Pong ball-shaped "Ball Chair," Stiletto's 1983 "Consumer's Rest" (in the shape of a supermarket shopping cart), and Studio 65's 1970 "Bocca" (shaped like voluptuous red lips). Miniature replicas of these chairs are available for sale at the Vitra Design Museum. Just how much interest is there in designer chairs? Vitra sells 15,000 of the exquisite, tiny reproductions of chairs by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Frank Lloyd Wright each year.

The campus is a love song to the chair -- and yet the chair business is one that Fehlbaum was born into but initially rejected. After a series of careers that included academia, documentary filmmaking, and working for an architectural association, Fehlbaum took over the company when he was 27, succeeding his elderly parents, who had founded the company in 1950 and had handled manufacturing and distribution in Europe for Herman Miller. During his 30s, he devoted himself to chairs, developing the company's trademark approach of partnering with famous designers to create products for his company.

The result: Vitra is now renowned in the design community. As well as serving clients all over the world in all kinds and all sizes of companies (and even furnishing chairs that appear in IBM ThinkPad advertisements and the ads of other high-tech companies), Vitra's chairs sit in the European Commission offices in Brussels, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, and the conference room that is used by the G-8 in Cologne. When Pope John Paul II visited Zagreb in 1994, he waved to the adoring throngs while he was sitting on a Vitra chair. The company employs 780 people worldwide and, in 1999, had sales of about $260 million from its chairs and modular-office systems. As Fehlbaum's story demonstrates, even the most prosaic item can be the object of passion and the embodiment of great design. He explained his design principles in an interview with Fast Company.

If you weren't initially interested in the subject, how did you manage to make Vitra so well-known for its chairs?

I learned to love chairs. I studied them, gave my attention to them, and developed a passion for them. I believe in embracing whatever you have before you in order to make it a rich, worthwhile, and honest experience. You can put your energy into anything -- it can be wine, music, hats, or chairs. Whatever your focus, do your utmost to understand it. If you deal with chairs, make them the greatest chairs in the world. Be the biggest chair collector, and be the most knowledgeable person on the subject. Study chairs in different cultures. Learn the history of chairs. Give yourself the opportunity to idealize what you're doing. If you can't idealize what you're doing, why do it?

You've built a company around design. What is your secret for designing chairs?