Some Milestones and Inspirations

My parents ran an architectural firm in Fribourg where I was born on April 4, 1964. From a very young age, I was able to develop a sense for shapes, spaces, and materials. On our travels abroad, as a family we often visited outstanding architecture form various periods, and it wouldn’t have been surprising if I had also become an architect. But my inspirations at the time were Pinin Farina and Giorgetto Giugiaro: I wanted to design cars. I would have pursued this dream after completing high school, but my visual world was suddenly shaken to the core: on the one hand by the humorous objects of the Memphis Group and then there were the post-modern furniture creations of Trix and Robert Haussmann. It was suddenly clear to me: I had to become a furniture designer. 

At Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), I received a solid training in the Swiss tradition of good design, but my enthusiasm for new international currents was something not shared there. So after two years, I changed to the Art Center College of Design (Europe). At the latest during my exchange year at the Los Angeles branch of the school, I was confronted with a decidedly communicative and market-oriented attitude. These two currents, which I became acquainted with during my studies, still flow into my thinking and way of working. 

After receiving my bachelor’s degree in product design, I was drawn to Paris and Andrée Putman, the grande dame of design and interiors. I then worked at at Agence Anatome in a team that was commissioned with designing signage for the Louvre and embraced the atmosphere and the cultural offerings the city has to offer, just as I did later in San Francisco, where the fusion of West and East fascinated me and allowed me to discover a new life feeling.

Before opening a studio of my own in Zurich, I turned more to furniture design. Until today, together with interior design and exhibition design, one of the main areas of my activity. I see my profession as a combination of form, function, material, construction, and emotion, components that are given different degrees of importance and lead to constantly new forms of expression. 

As designer, I see myself as a service provider who seeks to fulfill the needs and desires of my clients, but also as an artist with a signature all my own. This stands in contrast to my experimental projects, where I explore my personal artistic interests. Of course, the two fields of activity influence and enrich one another, as I repeatedly discover. 

Photo: Marcel Koch, Zürich

Team

Current: Regula Büchel

Former: Jona Messerli, Noël Hochuli, Jacqueline Amacher, Jeremy Petrus, Gian Luca Hofmann, Benjamin Suck, Simon Baur, Anika Schultz, Daniela Gyger, Nicole Wyss, Steffen Kehrle, Diane Jäger, Nadine Tschudi, Pascal Klotz, Annemarie Nickel, Olivier Sottas, Gabriel Heusser, Nicole Jeanneret, Patrick Zulauf, Moritz Schmid, Ariana Pradal, Francis Rivolta, Michael Mettler, Stefan Stauffacher

Credits

Website: KOBEBEEF, Marc Rinderknecht, Webdesign & Development, Zürich
Texts: Liz Sutter, journalist, Zürich
English translation: Brian Currid, Zweisprachkunst, Berlin