You either need very good stamina to be able to sit in a chair for seven hours.

Or the chair itself is so comfortable that time seems to pass on it in a flash.

However, Richard Lampert was initially skeptical about this model.

"When I saw it for the first time in the mid-nineties, I was certain: It can't be comfortable." The opposite was the case.

And Lampert went in search of the designer immediately after the night of partying.

Which wasn't easy.

The chair had previously stood around unnoticed in the Italian restaurant in Stuttgart for two decades.

Even the then owner of the "Santa Lucia" was initially unable to help.

Peter Philipp Schmitt

Editor in the department "Germany and the World".

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It was only months later that Lampert found out who had designed the chair: Herbert Hirche.

A little later, the up-and-coming furniture manufacturer met the much older furniture designer.

Lampert got the rights to the chair that the former Bauhausler Hirche had designed specifically for the restaurant in 1969.

Since then, Lampert has had the Santa Lucia rattan chair in its range.

As in Hirche's time, the chair is made in Indonesia.

The special thing about it: The backrest is so curved that it also serves as an armrest.

Richard Lampert now offers the design not only in natural rattan, but also in a version made of weatherproof polyethylene.

"I was totally naive"

And he has other, long-undiscovered works by Herbert Hirche manufactured under license: the Frog chair, the two armchairs H 55 and H 57, the DHS 10 shelf, the lounge chair and the bar trolley.

Herbert Hirche has become a constant for Richard Lampert and the brand named after him.

It is a strange coincidence that after the war Hirche also worked for a while for the even more important and only slightly older architect and designer Egon Eiermann.

Because Lampert's story began with Eiermann almost 30 years ago, when he became self-employed.

Lampert, born in 1950, was already involved with furniture as a child in Bruchsal.

His father was a furniture dealer.

The great-grandfather had a carpenter's workshop, and the grandfather turned it into a furniture factory. "My father ended production in 1965 and set up a Musterring furniture store." That in turn was taken over by the son in 1977, after first studying in Milan and then at the European Business School in Offenbach had studied business administration with one compulsory semester each in London and Paris.

But Lampert was no longer able to stop the decline.

Almost five years later he had to file for bankruptcy.

He then went to the Mann Wertkauf Group and worked as a branch manager for the first high-quality residential department stores in Europe, Mann Mobilia.

After another five years, he moved to VoKo, the largest office furniture manufacturer on the continent at the time, as export manager.

But even then he wasn't happy.

“At some point I had enough of these soulless worlds of office furniture that were only geared towards organization and where aesthetics hardly played a role,” says Lampert.

In his late 30s, he left the managerial life and big companies behind.

And dared to make a new start in Stuttgart, where he had moved because of his wife, the artist Sabine Reuter, who died in 2005.

"I was totally naive," says Lampert.

"I thought designers have drawers full of designs, someone just has to come and take them out of there." But his search for contemporary designers whose products he could make and sell was initially unsuccessful.

However, he met two like-minded people who co-founded the Stuttgart store Magazin.

He also has young designers in his program

“It was already a good 20 years old at the time and downright revolutionary.

I just went in and asked Otto and Antje Sudrow if they didn't want to invest in a company that offers well-designed products by designers.” They did, and so the three founded Lampert + Sudrow in 1993, which eventually became the Richard brand Lampert became.

In the magazine he also discovered a table whose cross-shaped frame he found ingenious.

It was from Egon Eiermann, who died in 1970.

Although the table was produced by several manufacturers, no one had previously taken care of the rights.