NUMBERS
Winning This Danish company is dedicated to turning on your bathroom’s style factor with its hand-assembled, timeless designs tapped with digits not fancy names.
It is easy to forgive Vola, producers of premium Danish tapware and bathroom fittings, a touch of vanity. At their striking headquarters – a bold contemporary structure located on the fringes of the small Danish town of Horsens – a double-height, light-filled corridor leads visitors into the heart of the building. Set into the concrete wall is a series of round display cases, each featuring an item from Vola’s range.
It wouldn’t work for every company, but Vola’s sculptural designs are works of art in their own right. Take the ‘060’, a wallmounted shower which has its nozzles recessed behind a stainless steel plate. Not only is it a major style statement it is also much easier to clean than a standard showerhead. At Vola – a company that favours product numbers rather than names – practicality counts just as much as style.
The company’s best-selling item is the ‘T39’ heated towel rail, which accounts for almost 10 per cent of the company’s sales. Using cantilevering to great effect, the rack’s technical elements are buried within the wall, its rails floating free at one end. Customers can choose how many rails they want, as well as dictating the distance between the rails, to ensure that they line up with the tiling on their walls.
That customisation is one of Vola’s trademarks. “Flexibility is at the heart of what we do,” explains Carsten Hartmann, Vola’s area sales manager – Asia Pacific. Every component of the company’s modular designs can be customised. One tap alone has an astonishing 1.2 million variants. Some options are more popular than others, of course. Although Vola’s colour palette includes 14 different shades, its most popular finishes are a range of metal options, which include copper, natural brass and brushed stainless steel. “[Our designs] let the materials communicate; we let the stainless steel be the product,” says designer Torben Madsen.
Vola’s minimalist approach extends from materials and designs to the product development process itself. It releases just one new product a year, often in response to customer requests. Products
are designed to be timeless rather than trend-driven; Vola even guarantees spare parts will be available for a purchase for 30 years.
It is not surprising then to learn that Vola’s very first product – the elegantly curved ‘ KV1’ mixer-and-swivelling-spout combination – is still on the market. It was created in 1968 after Vola company founder Verner Overgaard, who had previously produced tapware for hospitals, approached Denmark’s most influential designer, Arne Jacobsen, with a challenge. Overgaard had a vision of a mixer where all the mechanical parts were invisible, leaving only the spout and the handle on display. Did Jacobsen think it was possible? Jacobsen did, and the ‘KV1’ was born.
Like Denmark’s other design classics – Arne Jacobsen’s ‘Swan’ and ‘Egg’ chairs, Poul Henningsen’s ‘PH’ lamp, and Verner Panton’s ‘Panton S’ chair – Vola’s products have stayed in style. As the company heads towards its fiftieth anniversary next year, its products are found right across the globe: in Berlin’s Reichstag and Abu Dhabi’s Louvre, in the Qatar National Museum and in the bathrooms of the world’s best-known design museum, London’s V&A. In Australia, they can be seen in Perth’s Como The Treasury hotel and – for those lucky enough to score an invite – in the new home of White Rabbit Gallery founder Judith Neilson.
Yet the family-owned company remains anchored in the small town of Horsens, where 200 staff work three shifts a day. The combination of mechanisation and a highly-skilled workforce has resulted in an extraordinary turnaround time. “If we get the order on Monday, you will have the product on Friday,” says Hartmann.
One of the keys to Vola’s success is that it has stayed true to its essential mission of offering streamlined solutions. Many of its most recent designs, from showerheads to paper-towel holders, are focused on the bathroom, reflecting its changing role. Not merely functional spaces, bathrooms are increasingly seen as wellness spaces.“today, the plans of houses are very open and the bathroom has become the only place where you can retire and lock yourself away,” says Madsen. en.vola.com/vola/australia