Karl Lagerfeld combines forces with German luxury safe producer Döttling to design the world's most expensive safe.
WORLDTEMPUS - 4 March 2010
Elizabeth Doerr
“I am not interested in what people want. I've designed a safe that I would like to own and which will stand in my home. Markus Döttling built it for me,” said Karl Lagerfeld.
Markus Döttling is the current managing director of the company bearing his family's name, one that started out in 1919 as a small locksmith shop founded by Markus's great-grandfather, Ernst Döttling. The century-old building located just outside Sindelfingen, Germany, has passed through three generations, transforming along the way to become the successful international business it is today. Döttling specializes in making safes to provide a beautiful and unique place of comfort and security for timepieces and other valuables — more often than not designed specifically for its owner.
Döttling's newest creation was developed throughout 2009 on paper in Paris, designed by Lagerfeld. Then the Narcissus was made by Döttling's specialists. Seeming much like a purist room installation at first glance, it reveals its true spirit when it identifies its owner upon activation — at which point two handcrafted interior cabinets containing watch winders and jewelry drawers automatically emerge from the steel body sheathed in high-gloss, chrome-plated aluminum weighing 800 kilos.
The Narcissus — 1.8 meters high and 1 meter wide, but 30 cm deep — breaks with aesthetic and technical conventions: such a svelte high-security safe has not existed before according to Döttling. Narcissus also represents a very personal statement by an innovative public figure of fashion and photography. Naturally, the first model is reserved for its creator: Karl Lagerfeld. The most modern and — at 250,000 euros — probably the most expensive coffre-fort in the world is limited to thirty units.
