Möbel Simmen

For much of the twentieth century, Möbel Simmen of Brugg was among the most distinguished names in Swiss furniture. From its workshops in the canton of Aargau and its showrooms in Lausanne and Zurich, it produced furniture and complete interiors of exceptional quality for a discerning Swiss clientele, and in the 1950s and 1960s it was regarded as the most renowned furniture maker in the country. Under its house designer Hans Buser, it developed an elegant, restrained modernism enriched by fine woods and luxurious textiles, and its pieces are today rediscovered as some of the most refined expressions of Swiss design of their time.

The firm was founded in 1886 by Traugott Simmen, born in 1864 in Schinznach. After a period in French-speaking Switzerland, he returned to Brugg and took over the haberdashery of his relative Daniel Leder, where he had completed his commercial apprenticeship in 1883. He added a furniture department to the business, evidently with success, for in 1893 he built new premises opposite what is today the town hall. The house later opened branches in Lausanne in 1925 and in Zurich in 1930, and by 1932 it employed some two hundred workers and staff across its three sites.

The firm's golden age was shaped above all by Hans Buser (1894-1965), a trained furniture draughtsman who worked for Simmen as designer and interior architect from 1924 to 1957. He was among the most celebrated and successful Swiss designers of the 1930s and 1940s, creating exclusive furniture and interiors for the house and known for his use of precious textiles. One of his sofas was shown at the Swiss National Exhibition, the Landi, in Zurich in 1939. His work is exemplified by a complete writing-room ensemble of 1930, comprising a desk with an adjustable typewriter shelf, a book and filing cabinet and a swivel chair, which he designed and Simmen made to order for Anna Weber, the wife of the electrical engineer Hans Behn-Eschenburg, for their house in Küsnacht on Lake Zurich. It was published the same year in the Geneva review L'Art en Suisse, and was acquired in 2013 by the Museum Aargau, together with the original plans, sketches and invoice.

After the Second World War, a growing number of furniture retailers and new, easier methods of production made life increasingly difficult for the firm, even as its reputation remained at its height. The oil crisis of 1973 brought a profound structural change to the region's economy, and the Traugott Simmen company did not survive it. Its legacy lives on in the furniture it left behind, and in the collections of the Museum Aargau, which devoted a volume of its series on Aargau industrial history to the canton's furniture industry in 2026.