HeartFelt® a design collaboration between Schmidt Hammer Lassen and Hunter Douglas has won the highest distinction in the Product Design category of the Red Dot Award 2017. HeartFelt® is a new modular linear felt ceiling system with unique design and sustainability qualities made with Cradle to Cradle-certified felt, a natural and soft material with a warm appearance and excellent acoustic properties.
The Red Dot Award is a prestigious international design recognition dating back over sixty years. This year, the award attracted more than 5,500 submissions from 54 countries. A jury of 40 independent designers, design professors and journalists evaluated the entries, nominating those with a 'groundbreaking' design as winners of the coveted award.
"We came across the idea of using felt as a ceiling material due to its excellent sound absorption qualities", says Founding Partner Bjarne Hammer. "Schmidt Hammer Lassen approached long-time collaborator Hunter Douglas, a global leader in window coverings and a leading manufacturer of sun control systems and architectural ceilings, and the process of bringing an attractive and sustainable ceiling solution to market began."
"Felt is like a textile and its texture awakens your senses, the softness gives you a relation to where you are - a sense of place. Together with Hunter Douglas, we aimed to transform the felt material into a clever ceiling solution that would provide not only improved acoustics but also a feeling of warmth and an aesthetics that could appeal to both architects, interior designers and end-users. We also wanted to design a product that was highly sustainable, a solution that can be used and re-used."
In addition to its aesthetic qualities, felt has excellent functional qualities for (interior) architecture, such as light reflection and sound absorption. The felt used for HeartFelt® is Cradle to Cradle-certified, making it the kind of sustainable solution many architects are currently looking for. The modular system of felt panels offers designers many design possibilities; they can play around almost endlessly with panel size, joint width, mounting height and colour. HeartFelt® conforms to all the required building certifications and the European Indoor Environmental Standard (EN 15251) making the ceiling system particularly suited to offices and other functional properties, schools and healthcare facilities. The linear felt ceiling panels that comprise HeartFelt® are made of non-woven, thermoformed PES fibres. No finishing coat is applied, making the panels 100% recyclable. The carriers (aluminium) and hangers (galvanised steel) are also 100% recyclable.
