office for product and furniture design, Stuttgart / Baden-Württemberg, founded 1994,

 

“The weather, the bars, the beautiful furniture. We wanted to move to Milan immediately.” Markus Jehs and Jürgen Laub still go into raptures when they talk about their first visit to the Salone del Mobile. As it turned out, they ended up firstcompleting their studies in industrial design in Schwäbisch Gmünd, wrote a joint dissertation in the early 1990s and then soon set up a studio in Stuttgart instead. But their experiences in Italy bore fruit, because the clientele for the lamps and chairs they were soon presenting at international furniture fairs included several big-name Italian firms such as Cassina, Nemo and Ycami. “The way the Italians work suits us very well”, explains Jehs. “Once a design has been chosen, no effort isspared to make the idea a reality.” The results include the sofa group Blox (for Cassina), a seating architecture in which the theme of the cube, one of the idioms of postmodernism at the latest since Peter Keler, has been reinterpreted in a masterful fashion. The S 555 chair (for Thonet) derives its appeal from the contrast between its rectangular surfaces and the threedimensional indentations at pelvis height. In the meantime, the Swabian designers’ fine reputation has also spread northward. For the well-known Danish manufacturer Fritz Hansen, the Stuttgart natives designed a shell-based easychair called Space Chair. Jehs + Laub demonstrate an amazingly deft touch when handling the basic three-dimensional shapes. This thoroughly “ German virtue” is something they put into practice in a way that’s all their own and on various scales, whether in their coat rack programs (for Schönbuch) or the Size series (for Renz) of office tables and cabinets of monumental simplicity.