It is with great sadness we have been informed that Bang & Olufsen designer David Lewis has passed away after being ill only a very short time. David Lewis has worked as a freelance designer for Bang & Olufsen for now more than four decades. He was educated as industrial designer in the UK, but met his wife Marianne early on and moved to Denmark where he has lived ever since. He started as a designer at Henning Moldenhawer, who was a Bang & Olufsen designer in the 1960s. After some years working for Henning Moldenhawer he started up his own design studio in Copenhagen, where he continued to work with Bang & Olufsen designs.

David Lewis has had a significant impact on Bang & Olufsen over the years and he has become known for thinking in unconventional directions. His design process was his own - he did not ask why, but why not.

This led to a number of innovative designs such as BeoVision MX TV - the first TV where the loudspeakers were placed below the screen. BeoSound Ouverture, the first upright music system with glass doors opening up when the hand approaches. BeoSound 9000, a CD changer with a magical glass lid and six CDs and a vast number of ground breaking features. BeoLab 8000, the speaker icon that found its inspiration in an organ pipe on a flea market.

Over the years, many of David Lewis' designs have been awarded with international awards, and several of them are part of the permanent collection at MOMA in New York. Also a vast number of designs have become world famous for their appearance in many of the big Hollywood blockbusters.

David Lewis had an incredible design talent and a very humble yet persistent approach to the task as a designer. He enjoyed the interaction he had with technicians and engineers. He was always looking for the perfect solution and was relentless in his demands to the Bang & Olufsen engineers. He challenged conventions, and it was not important to him that people liked his designs, as long as they were not indifferent to them.

He loved a good discussion, felt a great responsibility as a Bang & Olufsen designer." We have to surpass ourselves again and again", was one of his mantras. He often turned things upside down and sometimes that included himself as well. In his studio you could find him underneath a TV looking at it from below to see what it looked like from that angle. Not even the smallest detail was left to chance, if he had his way.

He had great ambitions for Bang & Olufsen's design, while being a modest and very private person himself. He was very much alive with a great sense of humour and an almost 'West Jutland' approach to things. Maybe this was one of the reasons he felt so comfortable in the far West of Denmark, where Bang & Olufsen is located. He once said with a wink in his eye that one of the reasons why Bang & Olufsen was still successful was that it was placed so far out West. "In Struer they have a tradition for hard work and they need to find their own solutions to problems, and quite frankly, what else is there to do in Struer!"

With the death of David Lewis and era is ending. He will be duly missed by both colleagues and retailers from all over the world, but his designs will remain. The David Lewis design studio in Copenhagen will continue, and with it the co-operation with Bang & Olufsen as well, under the charge of Torsten Valeur, who has been head of the design studio for a number of years now.

Bang & Olufsen a/s