The Principles

In 1955, in a piece on the frenzy for single-use objects and packaging among baby boomers’ parents, LIFE magazine coined the phrase “throwaway living”. These items eased the burden of household chores on their consumers’ hectic lives. At the time, Earth was home to 2.5 billion people. Thirty years later, when Santa & Cole was launched in Barcelona in October 1985, this way of life had filtered through from consumer goods to investment goods, and the low-priced proposals that allowed anyone a plastic and unengaged life-style had caught on a fun gimmick at the international furniture and lighting fairs of the time. By 2015, with 7.5 billion people on board, the concepts of waste, planned obsolescence, short life cycle or misleading materiality had taught us all the enormous price we pay for irresponsible superficialities. In today’s world, is it even decent to spend less than three euros on a lamp? What material culture are we building by manufacturing furniture produced under reprehensible working conditions? What does it mean to host guests in our home in today’s knowledge society?

From fast to slow living. From appearance to essence. To act rather than to move. In the wake of the first great pandemic of the 21st century, we look to ourselves with a greater yearning for truth. From stress to well-being. From quantity to quality. To choose rather than to accumulate. Fair food, verifiable information, loyal relationships. Objects that produce less waste, more intrinsic value, that accompany us for longer, that we make our own. When we were asked to offer spare parts for our products, we discovered that they were still in use decades later. That they had been adopted by people who recognised and cared for them and wanted to give them a renewed lease of life. There is no greater honour than to last and no greater banality than to be ephemeral.

Bauhaus taught us that the principles of constructive solidity, aesthetic sobriety and functional quality, applied to the production of any human object, signal the right path. At Santa & Cole we aim to balance a healthy economy of means, hand-crafted when necessary, mechanical when required, to offer well-designed, user-friendly products with a long life span. And it turns out that behind every good object there is an exemplary story, and we like to tell it. After all, we are editors.