PHOENIX: FROM CAMERA LENSES TO LUXURY BATHROOMS
PHOENIX is different from many of AXOR’s best-known collaborators in one important respect. It is not the vision of a single designer.
It is a design studio, founded in Stuttgart in 1987 by Andreas Haug and Tom Schönherr, and its work has moved through an extraordinary range of objects. Camera lenses. Cookware. Industrial machinery. Robots. And, over nearly four decades, some of the products that have helped define the modern bathroom.
That breadth matters. When PHOENIX designs a mixer or shower for AXOR, it brings experience from far beyond the bathroom.
The relationship with Hansgrohe began in an unusually personal way. According to PHOENIX’s own history, Haug and Schönherr discussed establishing a studio in 1986 while aboard Klaus Grohe’s sailing boat, Sweet Mama. Hansgrohe became a client the following year and remains one today.
PHOENIX itself has evolved. The studio now works from Stuttgart and Shanghai and describes its practice as spanning product innovation, industrial design, digital interfaces and user experience. It has received more than 1,000 design awards.
One of PHOENIX’s most recognisable contributions to AXOR is AXOR Uno.
Its logic is deliberately simple. Pipes curve or meet at right angles. Its proportions draw on the golden ratio, a mathematical relationship long associated with visual balance in art, architecture and design. Construction is clear rather than disguised. The collection draws on early Modernist Purism and the German design tradition associated with Bauhaus and the Ulm School.
Tom Schönherr described the thinking behind Uno through the ideas of “logic, morality and magic”. Logic concerns understanding the product. Morality refers to the responsibility designers carry, including environmental responsibility. Magic is harder to quantify. It is the part that makes someone want to live with the object.
That philosophy becomes more interesting when placed beside AXOR Montreux.
Montreux speaks an entirely different visual language. It looks to the Belle Époque and the early industrial age. Porcelain details, exposed pipework and historically influenced forms give it the character of a grand European hotel or spa. Yet it came from the same studio responsible for Uno.
The contrast says something useful about PHOENIX. The studio does not appear to impose one recognisable style on every project. It responds to the character of the brand, the context and the person who will eventually use the object.
When luxury became personal
With AXOR MyEdition, first presented in Milan in 2018, PHOENIX explored another idea: personalisation through material.
The mixer is restrained, with a broad, flat cover plate across its upper surface. That plate becomes the point of individual expression. AXOR offers versions in materials including Nappa leather, mirrored glass, black walnut veneer and white Lasa marble, with additional FinishPlus surface options.
The cleverness lies in leaving room for the material to speak. Marble changes the character of the mixer completely. So does timber or leather. PHOENIX created a place where architects and clients could bring something of their own into the fitting without changing its basic form.
More recently, the studio worked with AXOR on ShowerSelect ID, where the focus shifts from material to touch.
The concealed thermostat sits close to the wall. A central dial controls temperature, while surrounding paddles operate different shower outlets. The finely grooved edge of the dial gives physical feedback under the fingers, and the range is available in round, square and softsquare forms.
The technology is sophisticated. Using it is intentionally straightforward.
Look beyond AXOR and the scale of the studio’s thinking becomes clearer.
For ZEISS, PHOENIX developed a design language for camera lenses. The challenge was to give highly technical optical products a recognisable physical identity while keeping operation intuitive. An upward-opening contour, inspired by the path of light entering a lens, became a recurring feature. PHOENIX also worked on the ZEISS Touit range for mirrorless cameras.
For Fissler, the studio designed the Phi cookware collection. Wide handles were shaped around grip and heat protection, while functions such as pouring, stacking and lid storage were built into the cookware. It is an object made for work, but also for kitchens where cookware may remain visible rather than disappearing into a cupboard.
Then there is Care-O-bot 4, developed with Fraunhofer IPA. The service robot can move autonomously, detect obstacles and handle objects. Here, part of the design task was making advanced robotics understandable enough to exist around people in everyday environments.
PHOENIX has also worked with TRUMPF on the visual language of large industrial machines used for processes such as laser cutting and sheet-metal fabrication. Its relationship with the company began in 2012.
A tap, a camera lens and a factory machine may seem to have little in common. For a designer, though, they raise related questions. Where does the hand go? What needs to be understood immediately? Which elements deserve attention, and which should recede?
A long conversation with water
PHOENIX’s work with AXOR continues.
Its designs include AXOR ShowerHeaven, a large-format overhead shower that brings several spray experiences into one installation. It is a good example of the studio working at the point where engineering, interaction and the physical experience of water meet. The range is currently listed by AXOR South Africa.
What links these projects is less a particular shape than a way of thinking.
PHOENIX has spent almost forty years studying objects people touch, operate and live with. In the bathroom, that becomes especially intimate. The object has to make sense quickly, often with wet hands and without much thought. Proportion matters. So does movement and the feel of a control beneath the fingers.
That may help explain why the relationship with AXOR has endured for more than three decades.
PHOENIX approaches the bathroom with knowledge gathered from kitchens, workplaces, optics, technology and industry.
Sometimes the most revealing thing about a beautifully designed tap is everything its designers learned while designing something else.
AXOR. Form follows Perfection.
