Hansgrohe to spnsor South African National Team

Hansgrohe awarded: Red Dot Design 2008

At a ceremony at the Aalto Theater in Essen, Hansgrohe AG (www.hansgrohe.com) was presented with this year’s “red dot: best of the best” award for outstanding design. With the award, the international 24-member jury recognized the merits of the wash basin mixer in the new “Axor Citterio M” bathroom collection made by the fixtures and shower specialist from Schiltach. This bathroom collection, developed in collaboration with the Milan-based star architect Antonio Citterio (with Toan Nguyen), already won two iF Gold Awards in the spring of this year. The Design Center North Rhine Westphalia, the organizers 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, during the award ceremony, “is something very special for Hansgrohe AG as one of the design pioneers in the sani-tary industry. It recognizes 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 emphasizing formal and emotional qualities as well as providing our customers with the highest standard in terms of functionality. Thanks to our close collaboration with ex-perienced 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 wash 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 AG became one of the first compa-nies 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 among 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 lead-ing designers like Philippe Starck, Antonio Citterio or Phoenix Design at an earlier stage than most of our competitors has paid off hand-somely not only for us, but also for our partners in the specialist sani-tary trade and in the project business. This is reinforced by the fact that – as Professor Peter Zec, Head of the Design Center North Rhine Westphalia, puts it – “awareness of good design has never been higher throughout the world”. He said there was an unmistak-able trend towards “good design becoming increasingly important in terms of positioning on the global market.”