On Permanence

There is a useful thought experiment in furniture design: would you be embarrassed to have this object still in your home in forty years? Most contemporary production fails this test immediately. The finishes will look dated, the proportions will feel of their moment, the materials will have degraded.

Permanence is not about timelessness in the aesthetic sense — it is about the quality of thinking and making that goes into an object. An object is permanent when nothing unnecessary has been added and nothing necessary has been removed.

Dieter Rams understood this. His objects from the 1960s are not impressive because they look contemporary — they're impressive because they never looked contemporary. They looked correct. There is a difference.

The materials that age with dignity share a common property: they are honest about what they are. Solid walnut is solid walnut — you can see the grain, the figure, the heartwood transitions. You cannot mistake it for something it is not. A copper forging is a copper forging. The evidence of how it was made is present in the surface. This honesty is what allows these materials to age without embarrassment.

At VERTES, permanence is the standard. Every decision — material, proportion, finish, construction method — is evaluated against it. We ask whether this object could exist in twenty years without apology. If the answer is no, the design needs more work.

This is why we produce in limited quantities. It is not scarcity as a strategy. It is that permanence requires time and attention that cannot be scaled.