This piece is produced to order by the maker. Production usually takes about 6–8 weeks, after which we despatch it from London.
Because it is built for you, cancellation is limited once production has started on a configuration you specified. Please check the timing before you order — and ask us if the date matters.
In the 1960s the Swiss manufacturer USM asked the architect Fritz Haller to design a building for its own works. What came out of that job was not a building but a way of putting one together — and then, with Paul Schärer, the same logic applied to furniture.
Haller's brief to himself was clear: make furniture that can grow, change and adapt alongside the lives of the people using it. Rather than designing individual pieces he drew a language of components — a chrome-plated steel tube, a brass ball joint, a powder-coated panel — that could be combined in almost any configuration.
That is why one system can furnish a student's room, a corporate office and a family home without changing anything but the count of parts. Sixty years on it has not been redesigned. The ball, the tube and the panel are the same ones.
Left, the same system as an orange bedside unit. Right, as a wall of storage and a desk in a study. Nothing changed but the count of parts.
Paul Schärer Jr. joined USM in 1961 as an engineer, the third generation of his family to lead the company. He had studied engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and he commissioned the architect Fritz Haller to design a new factory and office pavilion — a steel modular system flexible enough to absorb changes in how the company manufactured.
From 1962 the two extended that thinking to the furniture. Rather than designing individual pieces they developed a system of steel modules that could be reconfigured for needs that had not arrived yet. The part that made it work was an elegant ball connector, patented in 1965.
The system was built for USM's own offices first. Series production began in 1969 with an order for 600 workstations for the Rothschild bank in Paris, and USM Haller has stayed in production, unchanged in principle, ever since.
A Swiss family firm since 1885, USM builds the modular Haller system: steel, glass and chrome, endlessly reconfigurable.
The company began in 1885 as a metalworking shop in Münsingen, near Bern. In 1961 Paul Schärer Jr. asked the architect Fritz Haller to design a new factory; a furniture system followed, and its ball connector was patented in 1965.
Series production started in 1969 with an order of 600 workstations for a Paris bank. The system is still made in Münsingen by the same family, and has been in the permanent collection of New York's MoMA since 2001.
