Looking for a place to hang your hat? Or if you find that expression passé, how about your coat, your umbrella, your jacket, bag, or scarf? Even better, how about your pre-conceptions of the design imperatives of a coat stand? The latter is what motivated designer Leonhard Pfeifer to come up with the Eigen Coat Stand, distinguished for its “playful and undulating geometrical matrix-like form.”

Eigen Coat Stand. Designed by Leonhard Pfeifer.

Leonhard Pfeifer’s Eigen Coat Stand Offers Minimal Construction for Maximal Storage

Indeed, Eigen challenges the familiar concept of the aforementioned place to park your chapeau. In Pfeifer’s formulation, the often bulky and purely utilitarian throwaway confined to corners beneath the stairs becomes a compelling design element all its own, “with form following function to produce a striking and practical design with an intricate yet elegant form.”

In true Bauhaus fashion, Eigen’s structural members contain the piece’s selfsame aesthetic punch—vertical elements with adjoining horizontal members of FSC-certified solid oak create a simple criss-crossing relationship that keeps the piece standing while providing the bevy of options for hanging whatever personal accoutrements you wish to unburden yourself of, be they large or small, the heaviest winter coat or the merest wisp of summer cover-up.

The Eigen Coat Stand boasts excellent environmental credentials. In addition to the use of FSC-Certified lumber, Eigen is easy to assemble and even easier to ship, as it folds completely flat, thus “producing a compact package that can be carried home by car or public transport.”

About the Designer: For designer Leonhard Pfeifer, furniture is a central component of identity: “Design is a fundamental statement of life, ethics, and philosophy… furniture and in fact all our belongings create a context for our lives—a framework of values and choices that identify who we are.” The upshot of this philosophy is that good design reflects compromise, an easy alliance between individual aesthetic mandate and far-reaching function: “My work is motivated by the understanding that within this context the challenge is to develop appropriate solutions relevant to people, but where function and form, materials and manufacturing come together—elegantly.”