Case furniture – a somewhat awkward term for something the layperson would call a wall unit – is a major theme in German furniture design. Important chapters in its history were written by Behr. Company founder Erwin Behr was an entrepreneur with a vision. Convinced that serial production was the wave of the future even before the First World War, he built his furniture factory on the railway line between Stuttgart and Tübingen. His ideas, which he shared with other reformers, were to deliver quality at a low price, and to unite the worlds of industry and art. The fact that he was inspired by the reform movement of the day is demonstrated by the founding of the purchasing collective with the programmatic name “Deutsche Werkstätten für Wohnkunst” (German Workshops for Domestic Art), today WK Wohnen, for which Behr was for years the main producer. It is therefore no surprise that the company hired architects as freelance designers and already sought contact with the Bauhaus in 1923. This led to a groundbreaking world premiere, the “ Aufbauprogramm” of furniture conceived by Franz Schuster, a combinable collection of pieces incorporating basic forms and stemming from similar concepts to Bruno Paul’s “growing home” (for Deutsche Werkstätten). Along these same systematic lines, the post-war years witnessed the development of the legendary wall unit construction kit BMZ (Behr Möbel Zerlegbar, 1955 by Johan A. Bus), in addition to designs such as the M 125 (p. 106) by Hans Gugelot and the In-Wand by Herbert Hirche, one of the early German add-on shelf classics, which was produced for three decades and changed the look of the wall unit forever. Another milestone was the system 1600 (by Jürgen Lange) with its 32-millimetre grid. Headline, a program by the same designer which came out in 1983, featured a “functional column” that likewise caused a sensation. This was the period when Behr began collaborating with Peter Maly, a working relationship that still continues today. Maly soon took on the post of art director and produced a whole series of extensive wall unit systems including Metrix, Menos, Alas and Mundus. The Menos cabinet series pays homage to the cube with an enhanced formal rigour. In the late 1990s, Behr was taken over by new owners and product development began to stagnate. After another change in ownership and relocation to Lower Saxony, the company managed to make a fresh start, assisted by both Maly and Werner Aisslinger, whose cabinet system Pure does without handles and displays a new kind of balance between horizontals and verticals.