Deep-seated quality: COR

COR, the East Westphalian expert for upholstered furniture, has been satisfying and delighting its discerning customers with its heart-and-hand philosophy for more than 60 years. The heart has been in the family company’s coat of arms since its founding in 1954, and hand-produced quality is valued just as highly in Rheda-Wiedenbrück today as it was back in the early days. Leo Lübke is the second generation of his family to run the business and has always remained true to its guiding principle of combining quality craftsmanship and innovative design to create supremely comfortable upholstered furniture.

But Leo Lübke, himself a qualified designer, has set a lot of new ideas in motion at COR as well. “We embrace both the zeitgeist and the future without turning our back on tradition,” says Lübke, who has been guiding the company’s fortunes since 1994. The collaboration with French designer Pauline Deltour is a prime example of COR’s visionary thinking. It came about through what started off as an experimental design competition to make workspace more liveable. The project – entitled COR LAB – involved inviting four creative teams to translate their visions of the fusion of living and working environments into reality. Pauline Deltour’s contribution, the modular furniture concept Floater, is now very successfully privatising the world of work as we’ll experience it tomorrow. And her second design is also ideal for temporary seating: Drop is a stackable pouf that already has its own fan community.

“The lab idea is definitely something we want to pursue,” says Leo Lübke of the successful design experiment. “After all, we work in all kinds of places and ought to be able to decide how we do it.” All the participating teams’ designs are in keeping with this trend and will enable offices to be used more flexibly in future.

But it’s not just the world of work that has changed – a new, casual approach is making itself felt in the living room as well. And for this development too, COR has come up with some fantastic comfort zone solutions that meet every imaginable need. The new Moss sofa, for instance, comes with a downy-soft snuggle factor. Its “inventors”, Jehs & Laub, turned the traditional sofa shape upside down and gave the upholstery plenty of volume to guarantee maximum seating comfort and pure relaxation. “Because we’re one of the few manufacturers who still make everything themselves, we’re perfectly positioned to implement this kind of idea,” says Leo Lübke. That has all sorts of benefits for COR’s customers, because the company’s high internal production capacity is part of the reason why it’s able to create such individual and exquisite sofas and armchairs that meet the highest standards of quality right down to the last detail.

Whether it’s leather, woollen fabrics, synthetic fibres or wood for the furniture frames, COR only sources its materials from the best suppliers – preferably local ones. The renowned Blue Angel (Blauer Engel) ecolabel is evidence of just how seriously the Rheda-Wiedenbrück firm takes its responsibility for both our present and our future. Leo Lübke: “We want to do things better. And that goes for every single detail!”

Text: EB
Photos: COR, Heiner Köpcke (portrait)

COR Sitzmöbel
Helmut Lübke GmbH & Co. KG
Nonenstrasse 12
33378 Rheda-Wiedenbrück
Tel.: +049 (0) 5242 41 02 0