5 classic designs from Germany

No other chair was built as often as this classic Viennese coffeehouse model, which was introduced in 1859. It has been produced for five generations in the Hessian town of Frankenberg. The beech wood needs to be exposed to steam for five hours in order to be bent into shape. The Thonet chair company has not changed anything from the original design of the No. 14 chair to this day.

Walter Gropius' name is tightly associated with the Bauhaus School of design, which he founded in Weimar in 1919. Functionality was the guiding principle of the Bauhaus designers. While Gropius is most famous for his architectural works, his last design one year before he died was a tea service created in 1969 for the Rosenthal Studio-Line dinnerware company. It is still sold worldwide.

The WA24 table lamp even lights up the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The German silversmith Wilhelm Wagenfeld produced a few models of this lamp in 1924. It didn't sell well at the time, but when it was reissued in 1980 according to Wagenfeld's original plans, it became a worldwide classic of design.

Club chairs were usually well padded before this piece wrote design history. Furniture designer Marcel Breuer wanted to break with all traditions, and his club chair with steel tubes remains an icon of industrial aesthetics to this day. The Wassily Chair was conceived as a commodity for everyone — but the designer model is far too expensive for that nowadays.

This classic design is impressive for its ingenious simplicity, as the shelving system does not need any screws and can grow with a book collection. An FNP shelf can be set up in 15 minutes; with sections joined by inserted aluminium rails, no tools are needed to build it. The skilled carpenter Axel Kufus designed the first shelf in 1989. He has since produced over 50 kilometers of shelving.