Vitra for the Home

Vitra for the Home

Two Sofas & a Table for Home or Office

When design innovation meets sustainability and Swiss precision, you get Vitra, which for seventy years has been manufacturing and distributing contemporary furnishings worldwide for the home and office. Vitra collaborates with well-known and up-and-coming designers and architects for its product lines. Borrowing from the design and manufacturing ethics of Charles and Ray Eames, Vitra maintains an eco-conscious philosophy whose core is product longevity. The company avoids trendy or short-lived styling, aiming instead for tomorrow’s classic designs – high-concept, practical pieces that owners will cherish for decades and pass on as collections.

Widely known as a quality source of office furniture for commercial interior designers, Vitra branched out several years ago into residential furnishings. In February of this year, the company opened the doors of VitraHaus, an unusual five-story showroom in Basel, Switzerland, designed by the award-winning Swiss architecture firm of Herzog & de Meuron Architekten to look like a pile of houses.

Vitra’s philosophy for furnishing a home involves a gradual process of assembling and arranging furniture and objects in what the company’s literature calls a “collage interior.” Vitra believes it’s important for an individual’s sense of style and taste be reflected in his or her home even as fashion changes. One way to achieve this is to select favorite items that remain constant while gradually updating the rest of the furnishings and finishes. In this way, residential interiors stay vital and vibrant, in contrast to a more conventional approach where an interior design captures what is popular at the moment.

We have chosen three lines of Vitra’s extensive collection – which includes a special line just for kids – to show you. Like most Vitra furnishings, they are suitable for both home and office.

The Suita sofa family, introduced this spring at the Milan Furniture Fair, is the latest design in a twenty-five-year-long collaboration between Vitra and Italian designer Antonio Citterio. The Suita collection combines Citterio’s signature style of clean, upholstered lines with an elegant steel frame and a bit of caprice. Suita is not just a sofa; it’s a system. It can be configured and sized from a simple seat for one or a sofa for two to a seating system that can wrap around an entire room. It has an assortment of single seats, corners, sofas, and lounges with soft or firm seating to suit all comfort levels. The “platform” is a cross between an ottoman and a coffee table – comfortable enough for supporting tired feet but firm enough to hold books, trays, magazines, etc. Two add-on features extend the function of Suita and set it apart from other modular seating: attachable headrests for added comfort or visual and audible privacy and shelves that hook on to the back for storage or display or to serve as a narrow desk where space is at a premium. The Suita sofa is available in a wide choice of fabric and leather upholstery and a variety of colors; the frame comes in either a chrome or steel finish. You can see examples of Suita by clicking on Suita by Vitra.

French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec designed Vitra’s Alcove sofa to be “a room of its own within a room.” It features a steel frame supporting a box-like sofa that is softly upholstered and cushioned. The flexible, wrap-around sides and back are at a perfect height for resting one’s head. The “highback” version has, as the name implies, a higher back and higher sides, which turn the sofa into one’s own private domain. The Alcove line comes in three sizes: a loveseat, a two-seater, and a three-seater. Matching ottomans are sized for the two smaller couches. For more information, please go to Alcove by Vitra and Highback Alcove by Vitra.

Italian designer Alberto Meda wanted to design a simple, well-conceived manager’s desk. ArchiMeda is certainly that, and then some. With a steel-scissor lifing mechanism, the large, wood-veneer top adjusts electronically from coffee-table to desk to standing-table height in just nine seconds. You can choose between light or dark oak for the tabletop and chrome or steel for the frame. Because of its generous size, the desk can serve as a small conference table in the office or a dining table in the home. Wherever you use it, the multipurpose ArchiMeda can adapt to a changing lifestyle and could easily become one of your favorite and most indispensable pieces. To learn more, go to ArchiMeda by Vitra.