offices for furniture design, Freudenstadt / Baden-Württemberg and Hemmingen / Lower Saxony

 

Industry insiders know Arno Votteler as an authority on office furniture. He started working with his son in the 1990s. Votteler senior, born in 1929, was shaped by a childhood in the “woodcraft workshop” of his father as well as by an apprenticeship as carpenter. Son Matthias, who studied business administration and is likewise a designer, prefers instead the constructional potential of metal – preferences that complement each other. Due to ever tighter budgets, designers increasingly have to take on the responsibilities of a producer, for example negotiations with suppliers, for which the son’s qualifications in this area proved to be helpful. In the early days of his career, Arno Votteler could rely on intellectual mentors like his professor Herbert Hirche or the furn i t u re-company founder Walter Knoll, the result being that the young boy from the Black Forest quickly developed a polyglot personality: first working for the London office of Gutman, then in 1957 running the Gutman branch in Stuttgart and finally in the early 1960s opening his own studio. Later on, he worked, among other things, as a university lecturer in Brazil, the USA, India and China. Hisclientele likewise became ever more varied. For instance, at the end of the 1960s he developed for the dockyard Blohm & Voss not only a system of modularly furnished cabins, but also an architectural grid for the deckhouse. During this phase Arn o Votteler won Planmöbel as client, for which he developed over the course of a quarter of a century various office series, among them the long-running hit Concept. Similarly intense cooperation began towards the end of the 1970s with Martin Stoll with the model S, the first swivel chair with active pelvic support. Parallel to this he developed a series of chairs for Bisterfeld + Weiss as well as furn i t u re for hotels and retirement homes. This was a period that witnessed a departure from pure functionalism, expressed for example in the posh Ponte line for the executive office (1985 for RTR), a furnishings system based on the bridge principle. At the same time, Vottelerheld the post of director of the Institute for Interior and Furn i t u reDesign he had founded at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, also known as the “Weissenhof Institute”. Father and son, as the firm Votteler & Votteler, are known for their persistent finetuning of every design, paired with a pronounced sense of what is feasible. The highly integrated Sputnik swivel chair and the lightweight plastic chair Bullauge (both 2005, for Interstuhl), which got its name from distinctive circular recesses that resemble portholes, are some of their newer products.