FabrikantSwiss-German
Vitra
0 actieve items
A trip to New York in 1953 transformed a modest Swiss shopfitting business into one of the most important furniture manufacturers of the twentieth century. Willi Fehlbaum, who had taken over the shopfitting company Graeter in Basel in 1937, and his wife Erika visited a showroom and encountered the moulded plywood and fibreglass furniture of Charles and Ray Eames for the first time. The encounter was decisive. Fehlbaum negotiated a European production licence with Herman Miller, and by 1957 the first Eames designs were rolling off production lines in Birsfelden. The company took its name from "vitrine," the German word for display case, a nod to its origins.
In 1950, Erika Fehlbaum had inaugurated a manufacturing facility in Weil am Rhein, just across the German border from Basel. This site would grow into the Vitra Campus, one of the most remarkable concentrations of contemporary architecture anywhere in the world. A fire in 1981 destroyed much of the original factory, but the rebuilding programme that followed became an architectural statement in its own right. Frank Gehry designed the Vitra Design Museum in 1989, his first building in Europe, with its dramatic curving white forms. Zaha Hadid contributed a fire station. Tadao Ando, Alvaro Siza, SANAA, and Herzog and de Meuron all added structures to the campus, making it a pilgrimage site for architecture and design enthusiasts.
Vitra's product catalogue reads like a history of modern furniture design. Beyond the Eames collection, which remains the company's commercial backbone, Vitra holds production rights to designs by George Nelson, Isamu Noguchi, Jean Prouve, and Alexander Girard. The company's collaboration with Verner Panton produced the Panton Chair in 1967, the first single-form, injection-moulded plastic chair, a piece that has since become an icon of 1960s design. More recent collaborations with designers like Jasper Morrison, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, and Hella Jongerius have kept the catalogue contemporary while maintaining the emphasis on quality production that the Fehlbaum family established.
In 2013, Vitra acquired Artek, the Finnish furniture company founded by Alvar and Aino Aalto, further consolidating its position as a custodian of modernist design heritage. The Vitra Design Museum's collection, numbering over 20,000 objects, serves as both a scholarly resource and a cultural attraction, with exhibitions that travel internationally.
At Nordic auction, Vitra pieces appear primarily through Stockholms Auktionsverk, which handles the largest share across its Stockholm, Hamburg, and Dusseldorf locations. The Eames Lounge Chair with ottoman consistently commands the highest prices, with top results reaching 48,210 SEK and above. Eames office chairs and Noguchi coffee tables also trade actively. With nearly 200 items on Auctionist, Vitra's auction presence reflects the enduring secondary market for well-made modernist furniture, where brand provenance and design pedigree sustain strong collector demand.