Tough Love

Combining contemporary design with Alpine tradition is one of the most demanding – and exciting – challenges facing the furniture-maker of today. When the designer does manage to reconcile modern forms with traditional materials like felt and wood, the best-case result is a tremendously liveable, exceedingly functional piece of furniture – a thing of timeless beauty. Dauphin Home’s "Little Perillo" chair, which is now also available in an upholstered version in a motif inspired by the Austrian ski resort Kitzbühel, is a good example of this.

The core of the design by Martin Ballendat is the cast seat shell, which is seamlessly combined with the back and armrests to form a single, expressively fluid unit. A zip fastener in a contrasting colour on the backrest adds a touch of variety. Tapered wooden legs give the chair a delicate look, in striking contrast to the comfortable warmth of the woollen fabric covering the seat. The "Little Perillo" is so comfortable that you could sit in it for hours after dinner, making it suitable not only for use at the dining table but also as a stand-alone item in the hall or the living room. This chair is available in a wide variety of high-quality fabric coverings, and also in supple leather in many different colours, ensuring that there is a version to suit any interior style.

These chairs offer so much Alpine comfort that one would hardly suspect that Dauphin Home grew out of an office furnishing environment. Operating under the umbrella of the Dauphin HumanDesign Group, an international specialist covering the whole range of office furnishing and interior design, the Dauphin Home brand launched its first collection of home furnishing at the 2010 imm cologne interiors show. Its roots in the office furnishing field gives Dauphin Home the real advantage of ensuring that it can take advantage of experience and know-how that other manufacturers have to spend years of effort acquiring: reliability in day-to-day use, uncompromising quality and a wide choice of different options – all things that are taken for granted in office furnishing, and which Dauphin Home can now offer its private customers too.

This is particularly true of the integrated approach that is so characteristic of office furnishing nowadays, the benefits of which Dauphin Home now offers to private customers in their own homes by designing furniture as flexible systems that can be used in different ways in different domestic situations. The best example of this is the new "Module Space" furniture system, with solutions for every part of the home – including the home office, study, dining room, bedrooms, dressing room and wardrobe. The system is based on a set of simple, timeless chromium-plated tubes that can be joined together like units of a construction kit and combined with various front, side or bottom panels. Since these panels are available in a wide variety of painted, glass or natural wood veneer finishes, a whole range of colour and material combinations can be realised to meet individual requirements and give an attractive appearance in every case. The availability of different tube lengths and connector types enables the system to provide the right solution in practically any domestic situation.

Such flexible furniture that can be adapted to meet individual requirements has been playing an increasingly important role in the furnishing world in recent years, and this trend is likely to become even more marked in the future. The housing supply in the hotspots of the big cities is shrinking, and as a result more and more people are having to live in limited space – a situation that would only have occurred in emergencies 20 years ago. There is a big demand nowadays for smart furniture that makes the best of restricted space. “Adaptable furniture plays a decisive role in the micro apartments that are so much in demand these days,” said Steffen Reim, project manager and product manager at Dauphin Home. “As a joined-up home furniture supplier, we can offer an integrated but flexible approach to the furnishing of such apartments on an exclusive, sustainable basis.”

The next logical step would seem to be for Dauphin Home to apply its ambitious “Module Space” concept to the kitchen as well. It can no longer be taken for granted that people will buy a house and settle in it indefinitely. Frequent moves are the rule rather than the exception, and as a result it is seldom worth-while investing in expensive fitted kitchens. Dauphin Home has therefore developed a sturdy modular mobile kitchen that can be expanded at any time and can serve as a flexible, high-quality alternative to the traditional kitchen. It is built up of basic elements such as work surfaces, drawers, storage space and functional modules (sinks and cookers) that can be combined to suit the user’s requirements.

Dauphin Home now offers this new range to customers throughout Germany through some 180 approved dealers. Potential buyers who would like to see the chic, space-saving “Little Perillo” chair or the flexible “Module Space” furniture system with their own eyes can visit Dauphin Home at Stand P002/Q001 in Hall 11.3 at the imm Cologne interiors show from 18 to 24 January 2016.