What Germany learned from Schöner Wohnen - A congratulation from KUNSTWERK BILDER

For over 60 years, a single magazine has shaped what Germans consider beautiful when they return home. "Schöner Wohnen" (Beautiful Living) – the title is as simple as it is brilliant, as memorable as a good floor plan. No frills, no overblown promises. Just an invitation to do better. Better than yesterday. More beautiful than necessary.

The magazine first appeared in 1960 – no coincidence. Germany had put post-war reconstruction behind it. The worst wounds were healed, the rubble cleared. The economic miracle was in full swing: GDP grew by an average of 8 percent per year in the 1950s, and real wages almost doubled between 1950 and 1960. For the first time in decades, millions of people could again think about something beyond the necessities. About taste. About beauty. About how they actually wanted to live.

"Before, many people didn't care where they lived. The main thing was that they could crash somewhere."

Josef Kremerskothen
20 years editor-in-chief of "Schöner Wohnen" – interviewed by the Süddeutsche Zeitung in April 2025 on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

"Schöner Wohnen" captured this moment precisely. The first edition in 1960 sold out immediately. In the following decades, circulation grew to over 800,000 copies – for a time, Europe's most widely read interior design magazine. It taught generations that a room is more than four walls and furniture. That light, proportion, and material speak a language. That living is an attitude.

The magazine brought Bauhaus aesthetics into German living rooms – and by that, we mean the design school, not the DIY store that later usurped its name – when the word "Bauhaus" still sounded like avant-garde and not IKEA. "Schöner Wohnen" popularized Scandinavian design long before Finn Juhl or Arne Jacobsen were available in every decent furniture store. It showed that a chair is not just a chair – but a decision about who you want to be.

Then came the book. "Furniture That Makes History - Modern Classics" – long the bible for anyone who wanted to understand why a chair becomes a classic, a lamp from a Castiglioni fishing rod an icon. Why Arne Jacobsen's "Swan" or Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair are not just furniture, but ideas cast into a form. The book democratized knowledge that previously belonged only to insiders: Which manufacturer is the original? What is it worth? Why was it built in the first place?

All of this was avant-garde. Not simple, sometimes barely understandable. And expensive, as avant-garde always is. Yet, over time, it had a broad impact.

This was also fostered by a kind of "Big Bang" in the furniture industry. IKEA suddenly appeared on the scene. One could conclude: 'Schöner Wohnen' prepared the way for IKEA. The magazine awakened an awareness for a new furnishing style, detached from the past – IKEA delivered it in a domesticated, self-assembly form for everyday use: grand design ideas, copied, smoothed, the radical edge of the design softened, the ideas attributed to Swedish designers, and made affordable for everyone.

"Schöner Wohnen" changed people's homes. And what about art in all of this?

Why Art on the Wall is Not a Luxury

Before we answer that, a brief look at the "why" is worthwhile. Residential psychologists – a field that has systematically researched how spaces affect people since the 1980s – agree on one point: the walls of a home are not a neutral surface. They are both a mirror and a stage.

Studies show that people in rooms with art on the walls exhibit lower stress levels than in identically furnished rooms without pictures. The explanation is simpler than it sounds: the eye needs a focal point. A place where it can land. Art provides stability for the gaze – and thus gives the mind a brief pause from the noise of everyday life.

Then there's the question of identity. A home without art is like a face without expression. What we hang on the wall says something about who we are – or who we want to be. British environmental psychologist Colin Ellard, who has researched for decades how spaces control emotions, puts it this way: People need spaces that respond to them. An empty room does not respond. A room with a picture you have chosen yourself responds with every glance.

This is not a superficial thought, but a deeply rooted human need: the desire to mark one's own space, to design it, to make it a home. Anthropologists call this "place-making" – the transformation of a location into a place that belongs to you. Art is not merely decoration in this context. It is a tool.

Beautiful Living with Art

Art on the wall was long the weakest link in home decor. Not because people lacked taste – but because the offerings failed them. The poster market of the 70s and 80s was a mass business with little genuine substance: millions of prints, but hardly any choice. Poor print quality, faded colors, paper that warped after a year. And always the same motifs. Van Gogh's Night Cafe. Monet's Water Lilies. Klimt's Kiss. Reproductions of reproductions, printed millions of times, in every student room, in every shared flat kitchen.

That wasn't home decor. That was wallpaper with a frame.

The reason for this monotony was economic: anyone printing posters had to produce them in advance. Large print runs, warehousing, minimum quantities. Only motifs guaranteed to sell hundreds of thousands were profitable. Everything else remained unprinted – not because no one was interested, but because the system did not allow for variety. Taste was not a criterion. Sales certainty was.

What was missing was what "Schöner Wohnen" had achieved for furnishings and design: variety, background, inspiration. The opportunity to find something that suited you – not everyone.

Print on Demand – a Silent Revolution

Print on Demand – in English: Print on Demand – changed that. The principle is amazingly simple, yet successful: an image is only printed when someone orders it. No warehouse, no pre-production, no minimum stock. What used to mean: only the safe classics would be printed because everything else was too risky – that no longer applies with Print on Demand. A motif that excites a hundred people can exist today just as much as one that millions know and want. Or one that only you order.

Technically, this was made possible by the combination of high-performance printers that deliver museum quality on canvas and photo paper, and digital platforms that seamlessly connect ordering, production, and shipping. What was a niche technology in the early 2000s is now standard – and has democratized the art market like only book printing had democratized literature before it.

But Print on Demand can do more than fill walls. The same motif that hangs as a canvas above the sofa in the morning can lie on the sofa as a cushion at noon, stand on the table as a mug in the evening, and define the floor as a rug on the weekend. Art enters everyday life – not as decoration that you hang once and forget, but as a creative attitude that permeates a space. A visual language that runs through the entire apartment gives a home what interior designers call "coherence": the feeling that everything belongs together, that someone thought before they decided.

That is the difference between a furnished apartment and a designed home.

What KUNSTWERK BILDER Does Differently

KUNSTWERK BILDER utilizes precisely these possibilities. Not to print the Night Cafe for the thousandth time. But to offer works that did not exist before – based on the great styles of art history, but rethought. Rococo without dust. Baroque without a museum. Pictures that fit into a 21st-century apartment, not a depot.

The motifs are created as independent works – inspired by the masters, but not copied from them. What Van Gogh brought to painting in terms of intensity, what Klimt brought in terms of sensuality, what Monet brought in terms of light, what Chagall brought in terms of dreaminess – these are not styles that died with their creators. They are visual languages that can continue to be spoken. And which, on a wall art, a cushion, or a mug in a 21st-century apartment, function just as well as in a salon of the educated bourgeoisie.

Living with art is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of attitude. Anyone who chooses an image that suits them – and not everyone – turns four walls into a home.