Hansgrohe Awarded ‘red dot: best of the best 2008’ Award

Hansgrohe, the bathroom fittings and shower specialist from the Black Forest, has received this year's ‘red dot: best of the best’ award for outstanding design. With the award, the international jury of 24 members recognised the merits of the basin mixer as part of the new ‘Axor Citterio M’ bathroom collection.

Developed in collaboration with the Milan-based star architect Antonio Citterio (with Toan Nguyen), this collection has already won two iF Gold Awards in the spring of this year. The Design Centre North Rhine Westphalia, the organisers of the internationally renowned competition for the ‘red dot’, only gave 50 of the ‘best of the best’ awards again in 2008. Some 1,253 businesses from 51 countries competed for this prestigious prize with a total of 3,203 submissions.

‘This award,’ enthused Philippe Grohe, head of the designer brand Axor at Hansgrohe, ‘is something very special for Hansgrohe as one of the design pioneers in the sanitary industry. It recognises our achievements in terms of the design of our products and of the bathroom as a whole as part of our living space. It endorses our strategy of emphasising formal and emotional qualities as well as providing our customers with the highest standard in terms of functionality. Thanks to our close collaboration with experienced top architects and designers such as Antonio Citterio, we continue to successfully break new ground and play an active role in the design of the bathroom of the future.’

As well as the award-winning basin mixer, the overhead shower and shower pipe in the Axor Citterio M collection, the Pharo SkyLine shower panel and the Hansgrohe Talis Classic fixtures each collected a ‘red dot 2008’ prize at the ceremony held in Essen. In the four decades since Hansgrohe became one of the first companies in the industry to tackle the challenge of pursuing excellence in design head-on, the collection of trophies earned by the bathroom and sanitary specialist from the Black Forest has grown to a remarkable 263 design and innovation awards.

‘This definitely puts Hansgrohe among the leaders of fixture and shower specialists worldwide in terms of design,’ says Philippe Grohe. ‘The fact that we started placing a high value on 'good form' and on working with leading designers like Philippe Starck, Antonio Citterio or Phoenix Design at an earlier stage than most of our competitors has paid off handsomely not only for us, but also for our partners in the specialist sanitary trade and in the project business. This is reinforced by the fact that - as Professor Peter Zec, Head of the Design Centre North Rhine Westphalia, puts it - 'awareness of good design has never been higher throughout the world’. He said there was an unmistakable trend towards ‘good design becoming increasingly important in terms of positioning on the global market.’

Web: http://www.hansgrohe.co.uk