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Hours away from my home, bins of tiny metal balls gleamed in the fluorescent light. These small orbs had brought me from New York City to Munsingen, Switzerland, a three-and-a-half-square-mile city with a population of 13,000 just outside of Bern. I’d made the pilgrimage to visit the factory of the midcentury modular furniture line USM Haller, where these spheres are the heart of the operation.
Even if the brand sounds unfamiliar, you’ve probably seen their products in stylish homes and stores: Rich-colored sheet metal panels surrounded by chrome joinery—the aforementioned metal balls!—have been defining elements of the design since the 1960s. Flash forward to 2025, when USM Haller furniture rapidly blossomed from design insider favorite to a heavily duped fixation taking over TikTok and Instagram. Google Trends shows a steady increase in search interest for USM pieces over six decades later, beginning in 2022 with continued growth into the present.
“When I first started at the company six years ago, the average client was around my age, 50, or older,” says Jon Thorson, the CEO of USM Modular Furniture North America. “Now, 25 to 35 is one of our strongest demographics.” The surge in interest isn’t random. “I’ve always loved a balance between design and function, and USM Haller really fits that description,” says Julia Dang, a 29-year-old content creator who first discovered the brand through an online auction platform. For her, it’s both a statement piece and highly practical for storage.
Dang’s reasons for loving the brand are shared by many, plus the popularity has clearly been bolstered by recent aesthetic trends. Nowadays, everybody loves chrome, and as we move away from austere minimalism, the company’s choice of 14 colors—from Golden Yellow to Gentian Blue—are a welcome sight. Their frequent crossovers with the fashion crowd include collaborations with Supreme and designer Armando Cabral, and their pieces have been installed in pop-ups for brands ranging from luxury sock company Comme Si to Nordstrom. Even Kris Jenner has a set of sleek black USM Haller cabinets behind the desk in her office.
As active as the past few years have been for the company, what’s most notable is how little has changed with their actual product. To this day, the standard Haller furniture line is entirely constructed in Munsingen, the same town where the company was born. In fact, every piece of Haller furniture has come out of that exact factory I visited. The company is still privately owned by the same family that founded it in 1885, the Schärers. And perhaps most importantly, the components made for the furniture today are still entirely compatible with those constructed in the ’60s.
An accidental design darling
All this consistency was borne out of one radical shift. USM wasn’t always a furniture company; it started as a hinge manufacturer. When I arrived in Munsingen, I first paid a visit to Kochwerkstatt, a restaurant housed in a 1920 building where USM operations were located from 1885 until 1965. The simple white building blends in with the Swiss town’s other older structures, with a shingle roof adorned with dormer windows.
In 1961, Paul Schärer Jr., the founder’s grandson, joined the company. A trained engineer, he had a taste for the modernist movement, and when it became clear that the company would need a new factory and office with far more space than its predecessor, he decided to hire one of his favorite designers, Fritz Haller, to create it.
The result? A series of low, cuboid-shaped buildings with flat roofs and glass curtain windows. As the story goes, once the office was complete, Schärer and Haller couldn’t find furniture that precisely suited their needs, so they developed what would become the Haller system. They envisioned furniture that would be easy to adapt and expand, using their patented ball joint that stably connects each piece of the furniture with minimal visible joinery. “I’ve already managed to rebuild [my pieces] into four different systems to fit my needs through the years, both at home and in my office,” says Dang, who has purchased pieces in grey, black, and ruby red all secondhand.
Though Haller and Schärer had no intention of selling the furniture, photographs of the USM offices were made public, and soon, potential clients began reaching out to order the designs for their own workspaces. The Rothschild Bank in Paris placed the first order in 1969, purchasing 600 USM workstations for their offices, and the Haller system has been available ever since.
It was several decades before the furniture would be advertised for the home in the 1990s, and it’s one possible reason why the pieces are just now experiencing their moment in the sun. USM Haller never reached domestic ubiquity stateside in the 20th century, and therefore doesn’t feel like our expected expression of midcentury-modern ideals. As classic as an Eames chair or a Knoll desk may be, they both carry stylistic baggage that USM Haller furniture doesn’t have. This isn’t furniture you’d find in the background of an episode of Mad Men. Still, for modular furniture especially, the fact that it’s been around for decades makes it feel like a prudent investment compared to some upstart. “People want to invest, but they may not want to invest in brands that are not for sure icons,” Thorson says. It’s easier to believe you’ll be able to expand your system 10 years down the road—or sell it to someone who wants to—if people have already been doing so for several decades.
USM Haller pieces in action
Mirroring the built-to-last mindset of the furniture design itself, many of the machines in the factory that make the pieces have been in use for several decades, even as newer robotics-assisted machines have been brought in. I touched just-produced, still-hot joinery and saw the panels fresh with color, slowly whirring by on a cable system overhead as they hung to dry. Workers ensured that the panels were bent properly, that the joints machines were humming along, and that the powder-coating process flowed smoothly. I was gobsmacked to think of how many decades this facility had been churning out the Haller furniture system, never outsourcing overseas for the benefit of the bottom line. Even if some of the machinery showed its age compared to the ultramodern-looking robotic machinery, the pieces being produced still looked timeless.
My walk around the factory revealed dozens of workstations built in a cacophony of colors from seemingly leftover pieces. There was a banquet made from white panels in a pseudo–break room, a bar and barstools in mix-and-match blue, black, and red near a bank of lockers, and a trash can on wheels made of four blue panels. Above one machine hung a panel covered with magnets to display ephemera. Numbers and hands affixed to another, fashioning a clock out of the metal sheet. Seeing them in this setting was a reminder of the sturdiness of these industrial materials before they enter the world as precious pieces with a price tag.
Later during my trip, I visited The Omnia, a hotel in Zermatt, Switzerland owned by the Schärer family. Its material palette is tightly controlled, with an abundance of white oak and chrome alongside felt rugs, layered sheepskins, and leather upholstery to add warmth. There are, of course, USM Haller pieces throughout the Ali Tayar–designed property, giving guests the opportunity to experience the furniture themselves. The check-in desk is a bright blue Haller, while my room featured a dusty green TV stand. Even the housekeeping carts are custom Haller designs. While the pieces might have been born for the office, today they can be used everywhere. The Omnia shows the breadth of configuration potential, while demonstrating how the pieces can also serve a purely practical purpose, rather than setting the aesthetic tone in a space. As Tayar’s pairing of chrome details with an otherwise natural material palette proves, metal doesn’t have to read cold.
The future of USM
Thorson says the brand has benefited greatly from the younger generation’s interest in buying furniture they can keep for the long haul—as well as a desire for pieces that hold their resale value, a reason Dang was drawn in. The brand’s collaborations have established an inroad for many young customers, and USM Haller intends to continue to think strategically to bring more people into the fold. “Even though there are so many people that do know USM, there are still a lot that don’t. We’re going to continue to work with creatives, because that’s who we are, and I think that will help growth as well,” Thorson says. “When you have a system that was so intelligently designed that lends itself to collaborations, then that’s kind of a no-brainer.’”
From the marketing to the end consumer, the system’s adaptability is its topmost strength. It provides building blocks that can become a desk, a closet, or even a bed—like the one on Display at the San Francisco outpost of Design Within Reach in 2024—and the pieces have a certain aesthetic pliability which allows them to adapt to a variety of spaces. This is true not only for different people, but for the same person as their style changes throughout their life. And dupes be damned, the fact that you can trust the Swiss-made quality to last is essential to its appeal too.
