The History of Streng

An in-depth look at our firm's origins

Daniel Streng will joke that the Streng brothers started way back in 1968, but as the brothers of Streng Design, Daniel and his brother Christopher are just getting started. Though theirs is a relatively young firm, the brothers have nevertheless managed to build and orchestrate a dynamic collaboration of designers, whose impressive repertoire of design capabilities is a direct result of their varied professional and personal experience. In little more than a decade, the name Streng has taken on a life of its own, and continues to grow in significance and momentum. Today Streng Design capabilities have grown in strength; it is a team of five to six designers, all of whom are the cream of the crop, both in terms of their concentrations and their ability to cover gray area and common ground. This is the story of how the initial efforts of two Strengs have transformed into the collaboration that constitutes the current Streng Design.

Schooling and Education

From small town Wisconsin, the brother Streng attended the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Having diverged in interests from an early age — Chris began as a tinkerer while Daniel was always a natural storyteller — this apparent schism actually proved to be a parallel evolution converging around their passion for Design. Coming together as Streng Design from careers as individual designers just made sense: "You're the Streng brothers," an advertising colleague told Daniel, "That's what you're known as, that's what you should be. There's a strength in that."

In design school, Christopher and Daniel's situation began to make them uneasy: "We sat through 6 semesters of design history, and we wondered, where are all of these people we're reading about?" The brothers agreed, "The people we were learning about in Design history and the people we read about in Design magazines, that's who we had to learn from." Realizing what kind of education they needed in order to be pertinent in the world which they had thence far only known as spectators, Chris set out to Italy to meet the masters and learn their trade.

The Fine Italian Hand

"That same year I wrote a letter to Alberto Alessi," says Daniel, "I wrote it in English (I paid a couple of guys at an Italian restaurant to translate it for me), and lo and behold, he wrote me back. It took him three months to write me back, but he did. And I thought, if the guy who owns this company is going to write me a letter, it means that he cares. It means that he gives a crap." Chris and Daniel started to see a way, through reflecting on their reception into Italian design circles, to combine the art of narrative with the craft and the culture of design: The human face of craft work.

Upon returning from Europe, the brothers started showing in the States. At first, the Streng collaboration began accidentally. Design shows began soliciting work from the two, separately, and then clients began calling for the other brother, which became such a frequent occurrence, that the brothers finally realized they were already perceived as a team, and might as well be one. When their collaboration officially began, Daniel was working in consumer-story testing and developing a line of emotional interiors, and Chris was busy emboldening the look of Kohler and designing furniture, but both had consistently maintained private studios, and decided to consolidate waste and combine strengths to form the foundation for Streng Design.

Streng Mise en Scene

Shortly after coming together on paper, they came onto the scene de facto as Streng brothers making their major American debut, as they received an entirely new volume of attention being named among the design avant garde each winning coveted TAG Team awards and making a huge splash at the Inside Design Now the 2003 Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial. These affirmations of their place in the design world convinced Chris to scale back on furniture design, which had become more quality control than anything else, and Daniel to stop taking advertising jobs, so that they could focus on directing the rapidly growing potential of their design partnership and consultancy. Since then, the brothers have been gradually adding to Streng Design as a firm. Focusing on creating a creative climate which has allowed the firm to transform from the darling of the media's spotlight to the trusted creative secret weapon of practically any design department within the larger industry, a development which has served them well, evidenced by the fact that they now cater to companies that, just a few years ago, only trusted their projects to bigger consultancies.