Words and images Patrick Kasingsing
Additional images DUOE&Objects for Röthlisberger
House of curiosity
In a quiet Makati neighborhood, a restored post-war home plays host to DUOE&Objects, the furniture purveyor and design objects arm of Cagayan de Oro and Makati–based Edwin Uy Design Office (EUDO). Reworked with care and restraint, this two-story, white-washed house of wood and concrete serves as the Philippine nest for a legacy brand nearly 7,000 miles away: Swiss furniture maker Röthlisberger (Rö).
Uy calls the 80-square-meter space in Teka Street a guest house. Visits to DUOE&Objects are strictly by appointment. Artful furniture tableaus animate the cored-out interiors, with the second floor reconfigured into a mezzanine-like space to increase space and imbue the house’s modest volume with height. Furniture pieces bask in natural light, framed by timber beams and plaster walls. Except for the reprogramming of the space, Uy’s renovation preserved the house’s age: original stairs, floors, and beams remain, the shell restored only to keep them sound. “The house already has a story of its own,” Uy says, recalling the family it fostered and who had outgrown it. “And the furniture is here to keep it going.”
It is fitting that the Swiss brand found its first Southeast Asian outpost in a Filipino heritage home—both of which found grounding in family, memory, and material care. Röthlisberger is a fourth-generation company from Gümligen, near Swiss capital Bern, known for precision woodworking and a collaborative design culture. What began in 1927 as a humble carpentry workshop has grown (relatively speaking) into a small, tightly curated furniture house with pieces recognized in museums and prize programs, thanks to its fruitful collaborations with the day’s brightest designers, a practice Röthlisberger kicked off when it launched its maiden Kollection in 1977. As a vote of confidence in its design pedigree, Uy proudly carries around 60 percent of the Röthlisberger catalogue in Manila, making DUOE&Objects the most convenient point of access in Southeast Asia for a brand that introduces only a handful of new releases—just two since 2022.
Swiss challenge
Uy first encountered Röthlisberger in 2020, when Covid put civilization on a standstill and left the itinerant designer marooned for months in Switzerland. A chance sighting of the Schubladenstapel by Ueli and Susi Berger caught his attention. “I found it really clever and honest,” he recalls. His encounter with that iconic stack of drawers led to a meeting with Rö co-owner Jan Röthlisberger, and eventually, a partnership that brought the collection to the Philippines. Uy’s resonance with the brand rests on the time-tested precision and pursuit of perfection it espouses, a rigor that has only deepened since its founding. Röthlisberger’s approach combines precise joinery, veneer discipline, and in-house engineering; nearly every stage of production is conducted in Gümligen, supported by sustainability measures that include the use of only certified timber and waste-reducing processes, such as sourcing raw materials with the smallest possible carbon footprint.
Over time, Uy noticed a shared pattern among the brand’s distributors worldwide: “We all seemed to come from a design background—architects like myself, interior designers…There’s a heightened fascination and appreciation for the precision and artistry behind the woodcraft that distinguishes Rö from its peers. They really are masters of wood.”
Polish meets patina
The 50-plus-year-old abode at Teka Street has evolved from a family home into a veritable house of design. Rö icons both new and old anchor the house: Atelier Oï’s bi-level Hommage sideboard recalls the classic 1977 Rolladen by Trix and Robert Haussmann, a sight to behold both as a static piece and an object in action. Two finishes of the iconic Schubladenstapel are also on display, the new specimens finished in sumptuous Santos rosewood and Swiss walnut. Going toe to toe with the classics includes Tomoko Azumi’s cheeky At-At writing desk, whose slender cantilever and A-frame playfully recall Star Wars; her Stabellö chairs, a modern riff on the Alpine region’s stabellen stools, exude warm welcomes with their apple-shaped, ergonomic backs and twin apertures to ease furniture movement.
“I’d like you to meet Fächermann,” EUDO principal Edwin Uy excitedly beckons as he leads me face-to-face with the iconic man-shaped profile of a Swiss furniture classic from 1977 by design duo Ueli and Susi Berger. Thirty-four compartments add dimension to the plywood ‘body’ of the ‘containerman,’ whose wildly sought-after silhouette was fished out of the Röthlisberger archives, available in a limited edition of 15. The piece forms part of Rö Editions, a program of limited-batch reissues that reduce waste, streamline production, and maintain precision at a collector’s level.
I could see the appeal; the furniture piece, finished in ebony, both stood out and blended in, a feat in a heritage space already teeming with equally striking pieces. To underscore the importance of the specimen and the challenge faced in securing one on Philippine shores, Uy shared that one other proud owner of a Rö Edition Fächermann is fashion designer Paul Smith.
Joining the Fächermann as a limited-run piece is Moritz Schmid’s Ovolo Edition Verde (Uy has the non-limited edition colorway on display), a verdant version of the Swiss designer’s acrobatic table featuring a deep-green linoleum top crafted in Gümligen.
“We all seemed to come from a design background—architects like myself, interior designers…There’s a heightened fascination and appreciation for the precision and artistry behind the woodcraft that distinguishes Rö from its peers. They really are masters of wood.”
Furniture movement
Another aspect of woodworking that singularizes Röthlisberger is its embrace of movement and modularity, imbuing the stiff, solid constitution of wood with the grace and elegance of ballet. Pieces like the Bank, Leuchte, and Paravent Plus by Atelier Oï allow sliver-thin wood laths to bend and flex, making for a bench that varies in height, a lighting fixture that morphs into various shapes, and a chameleon-like divider. The Etage by Moritz Schmid can seamlessly grow in height according to storage space (“Our only specimen got snapped up even before display,” Uy shares) while the Venus trunk cupboard by Ubald Klug’s seamless aviation plywood build deftly organizes and hides clutter.
The realm of lighting design is not spared Rö’s innovative and acrobatic touch. Modular lighting models, such as Uy’s personal favorite Block 2 by Henry Filcher, are equal parts lighting fixture and reconfigurable sculpture. Customization is encouraged, with the lamp’s timber icosahedron frame offering a plethora of possibilities that allow it to be used as a floor lamp, desk lamp, or ceiling lamp. Uy opted for a dramatic five-pile, ceiling mounted configuration that amplified the double height ‘atrium’ that greets visitors as they set foot in the home, an arrangement that he had to communicate to Switzerland for feasibility checks—down to wiring paths, supports, and ceiling heights.
Home away from home
It’s a bit of a challenge not to gush about the furniture attractions at DUOE&Objects’ Makati home, as a designer myself. A large part of why the Swiss pieces really communicate their polish, precision, and panache is the stage they’re on. The house’s timber bones and time-honed imperfections make the pieces feel at ease, Swiss precision tempered by Filipino warmth, a harmonious contrast that arguably wouldn’t have been as intriguing in a sleek showroom. More than a year in at the Teka outpost, the newest arrivals to the Röthlisberger family have only amplified the brand’s ongoing negotiation between restraint and imagination, a beautiful tension Filipino design cognoscenti are now privy to. As if mirroring the home it inhabits, now on its second lease of life, the Röthlisberger Kollektion is an ongoing conversation rather than a conversation piece, with DUOE&Objects its willing host. •
