We moved our son into his own room, which was formerly our office. We needed to find a shelving system that worked in our bedroom. I really wanted to go with the Vitsoe 606, but ultimately it came down to price. Although, I love the quote, “I am not rich enough to buy cheaply.” How’s that for the justification to buy just about anything? Ultimately, our friend Ron at the Green Ant hooked us up with a nice walnut cado shelving system. Below is a great article about the 606.
From the Financial Times’ How to Spend It magazine. By Deyan Sudjic.
We all struggle to keep at bay the avalanche of shoes, books, newspapers, old toys, ancient Christmas tree lights and retired kettles that constantly threatens to spill out of every corner of the home to overwhelm us.
Turn your back on the domestic world for a moment, and the armed truce that we have with our possessions turns instantly into an open conflict. Yet there is salvation at hand, an evangelist has come amongst does, dispensing instant calm in the midst of domestic chaos. The Vistoe system brings with it such an air of sanctity that you could be forgiven for thinking that you were buying spiritual enlightenment, rather than a humble shelf.
But Vitsœ is not just any shelf. This shelf is a ticket that gains you admission to a better, gentler world. It’s a product of the legendary German designer Dieter Rams, the main who did all that matt black stuff for Braun, and a designer who has such a famously well-developed sense of visual order that he can’t bear to go on a country walk without picking up every scrap of litter he finds. His Vitsœ shelves are a study in refined less-is-more minimalism. With Vitsœ, he has created the visual badge of a secret society.
Walk into a living room, spot the tell-tale signs of the metal legs, and you know exactly the kind of people you are dealing with. This is the shelving that Richard Rogers has in his own home, for heaven’s sake. This is the kind of minimalism that doesn’t need to raise its voice to deafen you.
It consists of a set of skinny metal shelves, supported by deftly sculpted vertical aluminium extrusions. But Vitsœ offers so many permutations, bolt-on extras and high-performance competence that you simply know that it will suddenly transform your life. It encourages us to believe that we can win the essentially Canute-ishnature of our struggle with stuff.
Of course, Vitsœ does everything it says it will. What it can’t achieve is all of those implied extras. Fill every one of those shelves with neatly ordered rows of discs, video cassettes, books and lever arch files, and they are still there, staring down at you from the wall. You can put all your books on a shelf, but you still haven’t turned into a Zen Buddhist.
VITSOE





