As guest of honour at imm cologne 2017 (16-22 January), Todd Bracher, the New York-based product designer, has produced a distinctively spacious and architectural design for the design event “Das Haus – Interiors on Stage”.
Under a floating roof stand two interwoven, starkly different frames – one a large space surrounded by bookshelves as walls and a semi-transparent shell, the other a black cube over which a ball seems to hover as it emits a moonlight glow. In one corner is a showering and washing area. Bracher turns the traditional notion of 3-rooms plus kitchen, hallway and bathroom, indeed the very concept of a traditional sequence of rooms, on its head and into a vision of intertwining zones: one for dining, one for rest and one for hygiene.
“Das Haus” is the superlative design event at the international interiors show imm cologne. Each year a young, influential designer is given the opportunity to make a personal statement on contemporary living in a simulation of a residential house combining architecture, interior design and furnishings. US designer Todd Bracher has been nominated as the guest of honour for the sixth edition. “Das Haus” is a platform for experiments in living located right in the very centre of this divide: between installation and “real” life.
For Todd Bracher, “Das Haus” represents an opportunity to question the traditional perception of contemporary living. Because these are precisely the questions that occupy him when he is working on his enormously multifaceted range of projects, from product design, through brand refresh to strategic design. The design event at imm cologne now offers him the ideal platform for experimentation without commercial constraints.
“The home is an elementary synthesis of needs and functions that is very precisely directed toward supporting the people who live inside it in their daily lives and their growth,” is how Bracher understands the concept of “Das Haus”. The holistic project combines architecture, interiors and product design. For his “Haus”, he will follow his classical approach to design rigorously: reducing complexity to its simplest elements and functions. “Why do we choose a particular lifestyle?” asks the 41-year-old and sets out his intentions: “We want to question our conception of what makes contemporary living by rethinking the principles that define the home and asking ourselves if they meet the requirements of the world today.”
"Eating and reading, cooking and learning... those things don’t happen in separate places and at separate times. In Das Haus, everything happens organically, everything exists side by side" continues Bracher.