Design Fix

When we first started planning our trip to Germany, I was a little sad we weren't going farther north so I could see more "designy" things. But, I did discover that there was a design museum in Weil am Rhine not too far out of the way between Munich and Bern, so I requested we make time to stop. It is the Vitra design museum, which specializes in furniture and interior design. I first fell in love with the Vitra collection of chairs when I was in college and a friend of mine brought me a poster of the collection.

The museum was built by Frank Ghery and fittingly while we were there they had a display of all the various models he made in creating many of his buildings around the globe.



The campus has other buildings designed by Ghery as well, but we only saw them from a far. But the part I liked the most was the showroom for the furniture collection. The building was created using the shapes of homes you might see in the region, but all stacked on top of one another.




The courtyard gave you a taste of what was inside by bringing some of the furniture outside.






Even the path lighting had a cool design. Plus they had elephant chairs for kids outside in a little play pen.




The inside did not disappoint. You were able to experience all the furniture in actual settings, and the views from the various windows were amazing.













There were even some fun interactive spaces, like this slide, and a graffiti wall.





Of course I wanted to leave with a miniature chair, but most were so expensive it was unreal! I did find one that was on sale. Yay!

While we were in Munich we went to the BMW museum. I was so, so about going...I thought it would be interesting but never imagined how amazingly cool it would be. The way things were displayed in the showroom and in the museum made you really want to learn about the cars.

The outside of the showroom. They had motorcycles you could try out.




Interior. These egg things followed you around, they were in German so I had no idea what they were for, but thought they were cool.




The cutest little car ever.








Across the street was the museum and the headquarters.




Around every corner there were amazing displays. Motorcycles hanging on the wall with graphics applied to glass, motion projections on walls, lighting that drew you in, even the path that led you to every exhibit without you feeling like a gerbil. I loved it! My office is doing more and more of this kind of stuff, and I'm slowly getting into it, so I felt pretty inspired after we left.















Another request of mine was to go to a tree museum I'd read about on a blog. A landscape architecture company has created this display highlighting trees by putting concrete backdrops behind them in different shapes. It took a bit to find the place, and we weren't sure we were really there when we arrived...but luckily we walked around the back of this industrial looking building and found what we were looking for.














Dan and I also found what we want to do for our backyard in our ideal home. Just enough grass and a huge entertaining area.




A few other design things we just happened across. One was a stop we made in Lichtinstein, a small country state like Monaco. They had a lot of public art, one sculpture Dan was particularly fond of...I liked their stamps so I bought a few to possibly frame.







We also saw a cool paper shop with TONS of colored pencils.



Lastly we stayed in the first modern building in Austria. This was our Dornbirn Hotel.






I'm so glad that our trip had these nuggets of design, it really made the trip that much more amazing for me.