The Dieter Rams Braun Collection at Vitsœ’s NYC Store Is Pure Design Brilliance

Collector Tom Strong spent 50 years assembling and using this incredible 250-piece collection of Braun appliances, designed by the great Dieter Rams—and on display for a limited time at Vitsœ in NYC. Here, Brad Dunning celebrates Rams’s indelible influence, and we interview Strong about his obsession with industrial design’s great minimalist.
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There is little doubt Dieter Rams is the most famous living industrial designer in the world, and certainly the most influential and appreciated. You may not know his name but you know his look. You probably have something he influenced in your pocket or on your wrist, something somewhere in your life. As the head designer for the classic Braun products, his minimalist style—Rams is famous for saying “good design is as little design as possible”—has been hugely influential, most notably on the Apple products designed by Jonathan Ive.

Born in Germany in 1932, Rams is the son of an electrical engineer and the grandson of a wood worker under whose gaze he learned joinery and hand shaping. Shunning the use of electric tools, the grandfather instilled in his progeny that things should be “plain, straightforward.” Rams would eventually mold a career and lifelong philosophy around that simple advice.

Dieter Rams, in 1979.

Martyn Goddard/REX/Shutterstock

After he ran away from a totalitarian military academy, Rams eventually ended up in architecture and interior design school, aspiring to be a town planner as he considered the urban landscape to be “far too uncoordinated.” But, perhaps realizing the futility in organizing towns and parks, he eventually fell into industrial design working for Braun. His name is now synonymous with the company’s. Rams and his associates designed over five hundred products—functional, artistic, surprisingly popular and profitable products including electric shavers (a device they practically invented), coffee makers, juicers, radios, stereos, and clocks to name but a very few. They are items that are perfectly balanced with equal parts functionality, aesthetic beauty, intuitive consumer interfaces, and peak technical output. A hallowed bevy of highly refined, museum-worthy designs for the smart set in their smart homes. Rams presented consumers with a choice of well designed “tools,” necessary items which would grace our kitchen counters and bathroom shelves. In a well curated home, why shouldn’t the objects on our shelves and bedside tables be as carefully chosen and considered as our sofa, lamps, and chairs? File Rams’ legendary collaboration with Braun on the same shelf of successful collaborations with Eames and Herman Miller, Saarinen and Knoll, Jordan and Nike, and Salt-n-Pepa.

In fact, Rams defined an entire company just as Jonathan Ive has come to define the core and consistent look of Apple. Ive, the Chief Design Officer of Apple paid his due respect by writing the foreword to a comprehensive monograph on Rams’ work published in 2011. In it, he wrote of the famous Braun products, “No part appeared to be hidden or celebrated, just perfectly considered and completely appropriate in the hierarchy of the product’s details and features.”

Eventually, Rams brought his refined aesthetic to Vitsœ, a small modern furniture manufacturer, and in 1960, the 606 Universal Shelving System was introduced to great acclaim. To this day, it remains one of their biggest sellers and the backbone of the company. Jasper Morrison, the esteemed British designer, called the system, “the endgame in shelving—as close to perfect design as it is possible to get.” Rams’ beautiful and well-made 601 and modularly expandable 620 chairs—midcentury in origin but not time-stamped—are also enjoying a well-deserved surge in popularity.

Rams’s design genius is that nothing he makes is superfluous, nothing not completely necessary. In a word, the products are complete. Their triumph is their clarity. With a consistently resolved direction and strict conviction, Rams has followed his distilled vision of simplicity and perfection for decades, and has influenced design forever.

A supreme collection of over 250 of Rams’ designs for Braun and Vitsœ is currently on display at Vitsœ at their Bond Street location in Manhattan. Each item in this collection was acquired over the years by dedicated Rams collector and graphic designer Tom Strong. Many of them are displayed on Vitsœ's famous 606 Universal Shelving System. It’s a rare opportunity to view so many of these classics all in one place, like "being in an Apple store in the 60's" quipped an editor friend, and it's well-worth a visit while it's still there (through May 24). If you can't make the show, see a selection of our favorite items below and read our conversation with the collector himself on why he loves Braun, how to spy on the Russians, and why food mills by Rams make the best Christmas Cookies.

—Brad Dunning

GQ Style: So, before we talk about Braun and Rams, please tell me about yourself.
Tom Strong: Briefly: Born in 1938 in Hanover, NH; Public schools; Up to college at Dartmouth. Faced with a low draft number, I volunteered for Uncle Sam and they sent me to Bavaria and Turkey to snoop on the Russians by radio. In Germany I fell—at a distance—in love with a Braun TC 20, a budget version of the much more expensive record players at that time. My friend in barracks had one. I never played it, I never asked him about it, I just saw it, but it left an impression.

I returned to New Haven, went through the school of art and architecture at Yale, and then met and married Marjorie Gordon who had been buying kitchen Braun material for herself for some time. Marjorie had, and brought to the marriage, the kitchen mills, the grinder thing, the toaster, the personal weight scale, the egg beater. Things which she admired and which I came to take for granted and enjoyed using. And then something happened.

I’m a shameless collector and I said there’s a much larger story here and I want to pursue it with limited means, i.e. follow the progression of each product as it got better or cheaper or both and I would do that by going to the mass merchandisers (Macy’s, Bloomies, and smaller shops that would have the harder to find things). Then I became aware of a fan magazine called Design Plus Design published in Hamburg. I saw that there were collectors in West Germany who wanted to sell or trade, and I followed up some of those offers for things I would never find in stores here. And that led to meeting another wonderful collector, who really knew the Braun line—he was a technical writer for Bose. The short of this is that if you start a collection your friends will help you and you will make friends who will help you. And 45 to 50 years later Vitsœ has what I put together!

Let me go back a little bit. How old were you when you first saw it?
In Germany? I would have been 22, 23.

What was it about that first item that grabbed you?
It was gleaming white and had a clear cover. Braun had already made waves by doing the first exposed record player—it came to be called Snow White’s coffin. For some reason it just… gleaming white, plastic cover, wonderful. I’m not sure I even touched it! But it’s like seeing the Holy Grail and being pulled away, OK?

Had you had interest in design before that?
Art history. But I hadn’t decided until that point, until I left the army that I wanted to pursue graphic design at the professional level. And that’s what I was able to do across the street from my office at Yale’s School of Art and Architecture. Without Yale, without Germany I would not have been sensitized to the graphics of Braun.

If you study restraint in typography, for example, you learn you don’t need 3 typefaces, you don’t need 4 sizes. That was already in evidence in what I would see in the Braun propaganda and packaging. It programmed me to collect without spending too much money.

And you were able to because they were everyday items?
Yeah you could find them new, and in most cases they were under $100 or $50 dollars in the stores. At that point they had no equals in America.

How did you keep them in such good repair?
Probably not by using them a lot! In fact, we use the kitchen mill most heavily to slice and dice and to grind and to shred and to make bread dough. Or in my case, I could pour in pecans and out would come a fine mesh grinding to use for Christmas cookies or what others would call a pecan puff.

Do you think that Braun is as functional as it is beautiful?
Probably like a good parent, I would overlook some failures but there were very few! I never really put them to the test, though. The fact that they looked great and felt great in the hand would compensate. You follow me? If you’re a true believer you make allowances.

Were the things you bought very precious? Were you reluctant to use them?
I bought the appliances to use them, but by the time I had maybe six or seven coffee makers... But I was more interested in seeing the evolution, how things changed, how they got better. I used to say Braun will not bring out a new model unless they make some improvement in performance or some new feature that hasn’t been considered before. They won’t just make a styling change and say it’s a new model. And I think that’s what Rams would have urged anyone to think: you don't just change the style to make it more salable. You can only change the appearance if you’re improving the function. Sounds like I’m a salesman for the company!

Do you have other collections?
Liberty prints—I collect that in depth, I’m fascinated by that. A ball collection of 70 plus, gradated by size, going from bb pellet to bowling ball. They’re in a glass cabinet. And model trains from Switzerland and Germany. Quilts. Political buttons, books, Swiss posters. I’m really incorrigible. If I’m interested, I want to pursue it!

How did the lending to Vitsœ come about?
Unalloyed generosity! I had no intent other than to give it to someone that could keep it and use it hopefully for instruction. I long envied the Vitsœ 620 chair design by Rams and I finally could afford to buy one. Amanda Jones [who works at the Vitsœ store] eased me into it, then she made me feel like I was making a decision although I took large hints from her. At the conclusion, I told her I was downsizing and said out loud to 3 or 4 people who were there What can I do with this collection, I don’t want to give it to a museum they’ll pick three pieces they think they want and dump the rest. And they said, "hmm, hmmm let me think about that." They have plans for a new factory in Royal Leamington Spa [in England] and one of the goals is to make it attractive to design students so they can come in and be hands on with the furniture and stuff by the same guy.

They realized it was a gift outright, that they were doing me a favor because having spent that time and money I did not want to see it become junk. Within 10 days there was a truck outside and off they went.

Did you hold on to anything?
I kept the radio, the black box slide projector, some cigarette lighters, one iron, the kitchen mill, a toaster.

There were about 250 pieces in the collection, right?
Yes, but as any collector knows there are some things you never get. You should hope you never get it! You should long for it. There's more fun in desiring or scheming to get it.

Do you have something like that?
[Instantly] Yeah! In every book about Braun it’s the composite pocket radio and the 45 record player which locked together. Many say it’s the CD before CDs were even thought of. When you turn it on, the needle comes from below and engages with the record in ways you can imagine but can’t see. That’s the Holy Grail. I saw people at the swap meet bidding against each other to buy it.

The MOMA in New York has one and my dream is to go in one day with my record and my batteries and to say please here are my batteries would you please play that for me once? [laughs]

—Interview by Lili Goksenin


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