Less, but better. Dieter Rams meant it as a rule for design. I read it as a rule for buying.

To me, intentional living is buying once and buying well. Choose something you love, for the right reasons. If it's meant for the long term, make sure it can be fixed when it goes wrong. Look after it and recycle what it came in. Don't buy things that end up in landfill long before something better made would have worn out.

That applies to things meant to last. A candle or a hand wash is meant to be used up. There the question is whether the maker put heart and soul into it, and whether the result is any good. The best makers obsess over details most people never notice.

Both halves matter. Plenty of products are made by people who believe in them completely and still turn out badly. Belief gets a maker into the conversation. The object has to earn its place.

I didn't set out to live like this. I just did, for most of my life, and never sat down to think about it. An Alessi citrus bowl bought in 1990 is still on the counter. An Artemide Tizio table lamp from 1993 is still in use. The Bang & Olufsen stereo I bought in 2000 still gets comments from anyone who walks into the room.

Vitsœ is the clearest version of the idea I know. Dieter Rams designed the 606 shelving system in 1960. Mark Adams discovered it in a London design shop in 1985, started the UK business a year later and has run the company since 1993. I met Mark at the opening of the new Vitsœ showroom in London in October 2019, and got to meet Dieter Rams there too. Vitsœ's stated aim is to get people to buy less furniture and make it last longer. A furniture company whose mission is to sell you less furniture. I planned my first run of shelving with their designer in 2014 and added to it in 2018. It's never needed reconfiguring.

With Vitsœ you don't just buy shelves, you start a relationship that lasts for life. The customer service has been outstanding from the first conversation, and over the years my designer, Robin, has become someone I'm always glad to deal with. I've taken three other people to meet him since.

The shelving is delivered for Vitsœ by a company that delivers art, and everything it comes in is recyclable. A pouch holds everything you need to put it up, presented as carefully as the shelves themselves. The satisfaction of putting it up is something I've loved. That relationship is the thing I value most, and it's what I want to build with Laatu's customers.

Laatu is my attempt to put that into practice for more kinds of things, and it took shape in one week in August 2026.

On 14 August, Charlie and I flew from Gatwick to New York for my mother's 80th birthday and my parents' 60th wedding anniversary. We were there to surprise them at dinner. Laatu came second.

On the Saturday morning we went out to Bedford, New York, to meet Jon and Katie at Rivay. We'd read about them in Gents Cafe and wanted to see what they had built. Everything in the shop had clearly been chosen by someone who cared, and a morning in their company told us we were asking the right question.

Three days later we were in Bozeman, Montana, at the EVERGOODS office. I'd bought one of their bags in 2019 and it's been my work bag ever since. I wrote to them in July as a customer, not a retailer. Cody Henderson, their operations manager, replied that he'd been looking for a UK retailer "that fit the aesthetics and values that we build our products around", without success. We met at their office and had the real conversation at the bakery next door. We came home as their first UK retailer.

On the way back through Seattle, I went into a Japanese crafts shop and found a book on furoshiki, the art of wrapping gifts in cloth. I took a photo of the cover and thought no more of it. Back in London I looked up the author, Tomoko Kakita, and found she lives here.

We've tried to run the shop the way we'd want to buy from one. If something you buy from us needs repair, write to us and we'll deal with the maker. Orders are packed in recyclable paper and card, and from mid-November they'll be wrapped in cloth you can keep and use again.

Everything we stock comes from makers who put heart and soul into it, and the result has to pass our own test too.

Less, but better. Then look after it.

Gary Kershaw
Founder, Laatu.
October 2026