Zet Storage System

From lighting and furniture, tabletop to bath, the wide offerings of Menu speaks to this Copenhagen-based company’s guiding quest for functional originality. “It’s about creating aesthetically pleasing designs that evoke true feelings as well as improving processes in people’s daily lives,” says Menu founder Bjarne Hansen. This is also reflected in its stable of influential creatives including Norm Architects, Afteroom Studio, Jonas Wagell and Krøyer-Sætter-Lassen among others standouts.

Menu is just as dedicated to responsible manufacturing as innovation. Working to locate new partners in developing countries around the world, the company searches out local factories or small private co-operations to turn out high quality goods and also provide a better economic foundation for the people involved in that production.

The expressiveness of restraint. A symbiosis of straightforwardness and beauty that toes the line between function and formal severity. Traditional craftsmanship techniques coupled with the disruption of new technologies. These are among the mandates undertaken in the furniture and lighting design and art direction of Kaschkasch, the studio helmed by Florian Kallus and Sebastian Schneider and located in a charming backyard building in Cologne that was once a saddlery and adjoining horse stable.

The two arrived at their hands-on approach, initially having both trained in cabinetmaking, and then product design at Münster University of Applied Sciences. Soon after partnering in 2011, Kaschkasch design studio was nominated for best newcomer at the German Design Awards. The studio has since scooped up international prizes, including the prestigious Red Dot Award in 2019 for the Ani Lamp for Blomus, just one of 2 dozen international design houses realizing Kaschkasch’s work—including Menu, Marset and Normann Copenhagen.