123 through the publication gave him great aesthetic delight but also some moral irritation, “because it evokes a dream world which tempts us to forget that there is another world: a world of the struggle for survival… and everything becomes twice as difficult when you consider that the people who are behind the book probably have a greater social conscience than the smooth boys who advertise their ‘social furniture’ day-in, day-out.” — 12 — Elno hit a nerve. It wasn’t so much the contrast between beautiful furniture and the less than perfect outside world that mattered – few designers, let alone furniture companies, have ever managed to close this gap in any way, whatever their high-flying ideals. The nub of the matter is those “smooth-talking boys.” The apparently unbridled growth of the furniture market, which continued well into the early 1960s, attracted countless fortune hunters. The sector was beset with cowboys, both in production and in retail. For companies like Pastoe it gradually became more difficult to set itself apart from a huge range of mediocre companies. More than ever, allies were needed to become sufficiently distinctive for potential buyers. — 11 — K.-N. Elno was a pseudonym of Karel Horemans, who was also a lecturer at the Academy for Industrial Design in Eindhoven. See: F. Huygen, Visies op vormgeving. Het Nederlandse ontwerpen in teksten (Visions of design. Dutch design in texts), part 2: 1944 – 2000, Amsterdam 2008, pp. 110 – 11. — 12 —
K.-N. Elno, “Meesterlijk maar niet voor de massa” (Masterful but not for the masses) Het Parool, 23 January 1965.
Shopping as entertainment Pastoe found a strong ally in the Artifort brand that was managed by the Wagemans family and consulted on aesthetics by the interior designer and architect Kho Liang Ie. Artifort, based in Maastricht, produced some striking chairs by French designer Pierre Paulin and had gained quite a reputation. In about 1963, Pastoe & Artifort combined forces in joint campaigns and presentations, as for example at the Cologne Furniture Fair. A brochure dating from 1964 shows combinations of seats from Maastricht and storage units from Utrecht. To mark their relationship the two companies described each other in a brief text. The consumer could read that its partner saw Pastoe as “the greatest revolutionary in interior design” in post-war Netherlands and as “an intelligent searcher for industrial solutions based on an honest feeling for quality.” — 13 — The collaboration developed on the basis of a shared conviction that the two manufacturers did not simply sell furniture. They sold the progressive consumer a concept, as is evidenced by an advertisement in which the customer claimed: “There are so many furniture manufacturers who want to sell me a modular system! I don’t want that – I want an idea, a philosophy of furniture design.” — 14 — Both companies expressly worked with shapes, materials and constructions that could stand the test of time and supported both a formal and informal lifestyle. According to Pastoe, its “deceptively simple” tables were suitable for both rustic earthenware and Sèvres porcelain.
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