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There’s a sense that we’re tiring of design taking itself quite so seriously. Recent fairs and launches suggest a palpable pushback against the algorithmic sameness of pixel-perfect, beige interiors, alongside a renewed appetite for decoration that’s playful, satirical and a little subversive. It makes this year’s Verner Panton centenary feel perfectly timed. Best known for his exuberant use of colour and pattern, and for swooping, futuristic forms, Panton approached interiors as complete environments: spaces to inhabit, not simply admire.
'The main purpose of my work is to provoke people into using their imagination,' said Panton. 'Most people spend their lives in dreary, grey-beige conformity, mortally afraid of using colours. By experimenting with lighting, colours, textiles and furniture and utilizing the latest technologies, I try to show new ways to encourage people to use their phantasy and make their surroundings more exciting.'
The centenary is being marked in 2026 by a major exhibition and year-long programme of events at the Vitra Design Museum
The centenary is being marked in 2026 by a major exhibition and year-long programme of events at the Vitra Design Museum in collaboration with Verner Panton Design AG. But it also feels like a timely reminder of just how radical – and how unapologetically fun – Panton’s vision really was. Long before ‘immersive’ became a marketing buzzword, he was building total environments: rooms where colour, light, furniture and textiles fused into a single sensorial experience, designed to be lived in as much as looked at. Here's everything you need to know about this design legend.
Who was Verner Panton?
Born on the Danish island of Funen in 1926, Panton trained as an architect at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, coming of age in a culture that revered restraint. Even then, he was drawn less to Danish modernism’s quiet discipline than to the new possibilities emerging through industry: moulded plastics, synthetic textiles, mass production.
In the early 1950s he worked briefly in the studio of Arne Jacobsen (who became a lifelong friend and mentor), contributing to the era’s defining experiments in furniture – but his own instincts were already pulling him in a different, altogether more animated direction.
Verner Panton, Key Projects
Kom Igen restaurant
The restaurant at the 'Kom Igen' inn was designed by Verner Panton in 1958
Panton's breakthrough came not through a showroom, but a restaurant. In 1958, Panton was asked by his father to redesign and extend the family inn, Kom Igen. It was an early glimpse of what would become his modus operandi: a project approached not as an interior, but as a complete world.
Marianne and Verner Panton seated in the Cone Chairs
The result was theatrical and all-encompassing. Drenched in five shades of red, it encompassed lighting, textiles, furniture and graphics. Among the pieces developed for the project was the Cone Chair, an inverted upholstered funnel perched on a slender base: a design that signalled his emerging language of geometry, sensuality and provocation. The chair caught the eye of Percy von Halling-Koch, who established the company Plus-linje in order to put it into production. Soon after came the Heart Cone Chair, and a whole series of cone-shaped furniture.
The Panton chair
If Kom Igen was the start of Panton’s world-building, the Panton chair would become his emblem. In 1956, he produced an earlier S-shaped bent plywood design – the S Chair – for German manufacturer Thonet. Over the following decade, Panton continued refining the concept, eventually realising it for serial production in collaboration with Vitra, which launched the Panton Chair in 1967. A single, continuous S-curve, moulded in one piece, it was a technical feat as much as a piece of furniture – and one that quickly came to symbolise a new era of design optimism. It was also a landmark for Vitra itself: the first product the company developed independently, born from a partnership willing to embrace risk, time and industrial trial-and-error.
Visiona
Verner Panton's 'Fantasy Landscape' (Part of the Visiona II, 1970) remains one of the 20th century’s defining statements on interior as experience
Panton's true ambition lay not in isolated objects, but in atmospheres – environments where furniture became part of a larger landscape. That approach reached its fullest expression in Visiona, the series of experimental interiors he created on a Rhine excursion steamer in 1968 and 1970 during the annual Cologne furniture fair. Commissioned by Bayer as a showcase for the company’s latest synthetic materials, the exhibitions felt like alternate realities: saturated landscapes of colour, soft sculptural forms and synthetic surfaces, where visitors could lounge, recline and drift through light.
The most famous of these installations, 'Fantasy Landscape' (Part of the Visiona II, 1970), remains one of the 20th century’s defining statements on interior as experience – a psychedelic topography of upholstered forms that blurred floor, wall and ceiling into a continuous domestic terrain. It encapsulated Panton’s belief that design should be felt physically, not merely appreciated intellectually: an insistence that the home could be a space of play, sensuality and even escapism. Vitra, among other licensees of Verner Panton Design AG, continues to produce designs developed for Visiona, including Amoebe seating and the Living Tower, a vertical upholstered structure that turns furniture into a kind of inhabitable sculpture.
Der Spiegel Headquarters
The pool at the Hamburg headquarters of Der Spiegel, designed by Panton in 1969
From there, Panton’s work moved into an unlikely arena: the corporate office. In 1969, he was invited to redesign the Hamburg headquarters of Der Spiegel. The brief demanded seriousness and dignity, but Panton delivered something far stranger and more ambitious – a total interior of integrated lighting, coloured panels, reflective surfaces and boldly zoned floors, including an otherworldly fitness facility and swimming pool. It was a reminder that his approach was not merely decorative, but psychological: colour as a tool to shape behaviour, mood and attention.
A meeting room at the Hamburg headquarters of Der Spiegel, designed by Panton in 1969
‘Choosing colours should not be a gamble,’ he once said. ‘It should be a conscious decision. Colours have a meaning and a function.’ Even comfort, for Panton, was inseparable from atmosphere: ‘One sits more comfortably on a colour that one likes.’
Restaurant Varna
Restaurant Varna in Aarhus was designed by Panton in 1971
A similar spirit animated his redesign of Restaurant Varna in Aarhus in the early 1970s, another landmark in his lifelong pursuit of the gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art. Here again, Panton treated interiors as a kind of immersive theatre, layering textiles, lighting and furniture into a choreographed whole. The aim was not subtlety but transformation: to walk through the door was to enter a new world.
Private House at Binningen
Panton pictured with his daughter Carin and wife Marianne in his 'Living Tower' furniture
That world was not limited to public commissions. In Basel, where Panton settled in the 1960s, his Binningen townhouse became a living laboratory for his ideas – a domestic environment that doubled as a showroom, blurring daily life with design experiment.
His daughter, Carin Panton von Halem, has described growing up ‘inside a world of colour and imagination’, in a house that felt like ‘its own universe… an unusual landscape of forms, colours, lights and unexpected details.’ As a child, she recalls, it was ‘the perfect playground, a place where your imagination could roam freely and where creativity felt as natural as breathing.’
Death and legacy
Panton passed away following a heart attack in 1998, aged 72. By then, he had partly returned to Denmark, having spent much of his career based in Switzerland, and was preparing to open the first major retrospective of his work, 'Verner Panton: Light and Colour,' at Trapholt Museum in Kolding, Denmark.
Some of the Verner Panton furniture that is now produced by Vitra
It is perhaps the sense of imaginative freedom that best defines Panton's enduring appeal. His work was futuristic, certainly, but never cold. It emerged from the postwar decades of optimism and experimentation, but it continues to speak to the present because it offers something increasingly rare. In an era of visual fatigue and algorithmic repetition, his interiors are a reminder that design can still be mischievous, immersive and unapologetically fun.
Shop Verner Panton's most famous designs
The Panton chair was the first polymer chair made in one piece with a cantilever design. Since its introduction to the market, it has advanced through several production phases. Vitra and Verner Panton worked closely together to develop a new version made of polypropylene, which was launched in 1999
Verner Panton initially designed the Cone Chair for Kom Igen in 1958, a restaurant in Denmark owned by his father. It caused a sensation, leading to production by Plus-linje and eventually Vitra.
The Der Spiegel offices were punctuated with clusters of Panton’s gleaming Flowerpot lamps. Designed in 1968 and later produced by Louis Poulsen, the lamps are still in production today through &Tradition.