Great design but I'm clearly not a stylist

Our current house is a new build, all big windows and open-plan living, which sounds like a nice problem to have until you try to work out where a television is supposed to go.

There was exactly one wall in the living room that could actually take one. We nearly went with String again, but we already have so much String around the house at this point that another piece would have started to look like a showroom rather than a home.

Then, in the way these things tend to happen, a very stylish neighbour turned out to have Vitsœ shelving. I'll admit we may have been peering slightly through their window rather than just walking past. It looked brilliant in their space, so we looked into it properly and thought it would work well in ours.

Why the 606 is a design classic in the first place

Dieter Rams designed the 606 Universal Shelving System for Vitsœ in 1960, when he was 28, and it's been in continuous production ever since. Vitsœ still sells it only directly, with no retailers in between, and every order is planned around your actual wall by a dedicated in-house designer rather than picked off a shelf. Ours was planned that way too, and it's genuinely one of the better buying experiences we've had, personal in a way that a lot of far cheaper furniture isn't.

What it's actually like, four years in

It holds our TV, on the one wall in the living room that could take it, and four years on there's no wear, no loosening, nothing to report on the shelving itself. It's genuinely excellent in that respect. I particularly like the small curved lip on the front edge of each shelf, a tiny detail that makes the whole thing feel more considered than a plain flat shelf would.

I do wonder if the 606 seems to reward people who enjoy arranging objects properly, managing cables, rotating what's on display. I don't, particularly, and ours has always ended up looking more functional than beautiful as a result. Four years in, I've come to think that's a fact about us rather than a flaw in the shelving.

The one thing worth knowing before buying

Vitsœ also makes cabinets for the 606 system, closed sections that sit alongside the open shelves, and they're genuinely lovely, adding a finished look the open shelving doesn't quite have on its own. We didn't buy them. They were a meaningful jump in price on top of what we'd already spent, and we couldn't justify it at the time. If you're weighing up the system, it's worth knowing the open-shelf version and the version with cabinets are almost two different looks, not just a minor upgrade.

Was it worth £703?

Our configuration was fairly modest, three uprights and six shelves in two sizes, for a plasterboard wall a little over four and a half metres wide. £703 felt like a real investment at the time, more than we'd have spent on a standard TV unit without much of a second thought. Four years on, I think it was a fair price for what we got. The build quality is excellent, it's shown no signs of ageing at all, and the design and ordering process alone made it feel like a considered purchase rather than an impulse one.

Would I say I love it, the way we love some of the other pieces on this site? Not really, and that's the honest answer. It's done everything it was supposed to do. I'm just not sure the fault for the rest of it lies with the shelving.

The next chapter

The 606 is coming with us to the new house, though we genuinely don't know where yet. Vitsœ's own line is that it suits a nineteenth-century townhouse as readily as a modern one, and I'd like to believe that, but our new house is eighteenth-century with proper wonky walls, and I honestly don't know if something this crisp and modern is going to sit right against them. We'll find out.

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Things Worth Keeping is about items we saved up for, lived with for years, and can now say plainly whether they earned their keep. We'll also start writing about things we're hoping to buy, before we know how they'll hold up. We'll always be clear when a link is affiliate. It never changes the verdict.