A house built on collage
VitraHaus, the Herzog & de Meuron–designed flagship on Vitra’s architectural campus, is a cathedral to furniture, design, and architectural experimentation. My role was to collaborate with Vitra’s in-house architecture team to create the environmental graphic system for the building’s public spaces, ensuring the brand’s eclectic Home Collection lived within a visitor experience that felt both functional and delightfully unexpected.
The approach drew directly from Vitra’s philosophy of collage. We layered understated wayfinding with playful interventions that injected warmth into the stark architectural setting: oversized Eames push pins became wall features, and tactile ceramic number prototypes hinted at homely craft traditions. Even the RFID-enabled ‘HausKey’, a personalised tool for visitors to collect product information, was imagined as a symbolic key to the stack of pitched-roof houses that define the building’s silhouette.
Every decision was about striking a balance: functional enough to guide 300,000 annual visitors through a complex space, but whimsical enough to embody Vitra’s spirit of design as joy.
Wayfinding as storytelling
The environmental graphics transformed VitraHaus into more than a showroom, they made it a layered experience that revealed itself in moments of both clarity and character. The signage system became a conversation between architecture and brand: subtle where it needed to disappear, surprising where it could delight.
The result was a space that guided, entertained, and embodied Vitra’s ethos of collage. For me, it was proof of how environmental graphics can go beyond functional wayfinding to become a form of storytelling, one that reinforces brand identity not through logos, but through lived experience.
