David Glaetli only moved back to Zurich in April.

Also because his children are about to start school, he and his Japanese wife asked themselves the question: Where do we want to live in the future?

"Japan," says Glaetli, "feels a bit like the end of the world." In the island state, he lacked the multicultural character of his homeland, the possibility of simply crossing the border into another country.

In addition, Japan has a very old society and the population has been declining for years.

Glaetli lived in Japan for almost 13 years before returning to Switzerland.

This month he wants to open a new studio in Zurich.

Part of the office and an assistant are still in Tokyo.

Peter-Philipp Schmitt

Editor in the section “Germany and the World”.

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The Swiss, born in 1977, remains loyal to his main employer: as creative director of Karimoku New Standard. After studying product design in Milan and Lausanne, Glaetli started working for the designer Teruhiro Yanagihara in Osaka in 2008. In the same year, Japan's largest wooden furniture manufacturer, Karimoku, approached the studio with a request to develop products. “Karimoku wanted a more modern, more Scandinavian design,” says Glaetli. “But we suggested that the company found a new brand right away. Only a few new pieces of furniture would have been lost in the range. ”Karimoku, founded in 1940 in the Japanese prefecture of Aichi, agreed. A little later, nine designs were presented. Since there were no economic constraints, the brand has a lot of freedom. “We were able to experiment,” says Glaetli.

Minimalistic and multifunctional

That meant above all: Karimoku New Standard gave young, unknown and also inexperienced designers a chance.

The Swiss studio BIGGAME, for example, which Augustin Scott de Martinville, Elric Petit and Grégoire Jeanmonod founded in Lausanne in 2004.

And the designer duo Scholten & Baijings from Amsterdam, which existed for almost 20 years.

Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings have been going separate ways since 2019.

The German Christian Haas with his studio in Porto, Portugal, also joined the Japanese brand, as did Geckeler Michels from Berlin recently.

David Geckeler and Frank Michels designed the Panorama chair for KNS, as the Japanese label calls itself.

It is typical for the brand: minimalist in appearance, multifunctional, with references to Japan.

And of course it's made of wood.

The stackable family of chairs is made from Japanese oak.

The seat and backrest are slightly curved and are supposed to be reminiscent of sheets of paper that bend in the wind like in one of the woodblock prints by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Popular in the Far East

Geckeler and Michels, who met each other in the late 1990s while studying design in Potsdam, also created the Spectrum oak table with two tops, with space for storage space in between. Scholten & Baijings, on the other hand, designed the Color Wood series, in which thin oak strips are connected to one another in such a way that, for example, they result in a seat shell for a chair that looks like it has been folded. Since wood was a rare commodity in Japan even before Corona, KNS uses young trees for it, a surcharge that has to be felled in the forest and is otherwise usually made into paper.

The bestseller from KNS is the Elephant sofa by Christian Haas: thick cushions rest on a frame made of chestnut wood. Karimoku was also looking for new markets with his young brand, precisely because the population in Japan is shrinking sharply, says Glaetli. That is why European designers in particular have been commissioned. In the beginning, KNS was also very successful in Europe. In the meantime, however, the minimalist designs are enjoying greater popularity in the Far East - in Japan, China and Korea, but also in Australia.