MyDecor

The contrast couldn't have been greater: shrill sofas, chairs with bare metal backs, cool plastic refrigerators – the designerhall challenged the public with off-beat experiments. And then, somewhere in the middle, this simple stand of barely 12 square meters – nothing but a oiled beech – no colour, no varnish, no extras. "Most people just stared unbelievingly and thought we'd made a terrible mistake". Birgit Gämmerler looks back to her first show at the international furniture fair in Cologne in 1991. "At that time solid wood furniture was considered about as sexy as a table, a cupboard, a chair and one spotlight. The material – woollen blanket".

A love of wood led Birgit Gämmerler to establish the ZEITRAUM company. This was in the year 1990. Birgit, who had studied industrial design, wanted to honour wood as a living material with her clear minimalistic designs, and create furniture that was well thought out and ecological but still sensual. Endless discussions followed about life and the environment, and about what sort of furnishings might have a future in our world.

It started up in an old flour-mill with loft-style rooms and with the waters of the river Loisach rushing through its underground turbines. The company still has its base here today. The first designs for chairs, tables, beds and small furnishings were drafted here and the pieces made by local joiners. The making of the furniture was always difficult, the designers prefering clever wooden joints to simple screwtogether solutions, or maybe even demanding the use of bone-glue as a natural alternative to conventional resinglues.