Doris Dietschy’s (b. 1934) professional path has been anything but conventional. Born in Basel, she began an apprenticeship as a jewellery draftsperson in Geneva in 1951. Following the death of her mother, however, she returned to Basel, where she completed the preliminary design course before enrolling in the Fachklasse für Innenausbau (FFI Basel) in 1954 as the programme’s only female student. After graduating, she worked for Paul Artaria, travelled extensively in Italy, and briefly established herself as an independent interior architect.

Fascinated by American modernism and eager to broaden her horizons, Dietschy enrolled at the Pratt Institute in New York in 1960. She quickly embraced the city’s atmosphere of innovation and creative experimentation. Her curiosity and openness led to short appointments with the renowned architect I. M. Pei and the influential designer Alexander Girard. Before returning to Switzerland, she travelled through Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Egypt, Greece and Italy, experiences that would leave a lasting impression on her work.

After spending three years at the renowned Basel furnishing store Hofstetter, Dietschy established her own business in 1965: Dietschy Hausmann & Hausmann AG. At the time, it was one of Switzerland’s very few retailers dedicated to contemporary living, offering furniture by leading Swiss designers and manufacturers alongside Zurich’s Wohnbedarf. Between 1973 and 1978, she also collaborated with the interior architect Alfred Senn.

A spirit of curiosity and continual renewal has characterised Doris Dietschy’s career throughout her life. Extensive travels across Europe and North America, her teaching activities, and numerous residential and exhibition projects developed in collaboration with Swiss designers—many of whom became close friends—have continued to shape both her professional practice and her outlook to this day.

Alongside running her own furniture store, Doris Dietschy also designed and oversaw residential interior projects for private clients. Her ambition extended far beyond creating aesthetically pleasing interiors. Instead, she sought to encourage new ways of living, believing that well-designed spaces could positively transform everyday life. For Dietschy, the design process was rooted in empathy, imagination and dialogue. As she put it: “Living is not a state, but an activity—a process.”

From the very beginning of her career, Dietschy was fascinated by the design process itself. She regarded physical models as an essential tool for exploring and communicating spatial ideas, making architecture tangible long before it was built. As a lecturer at FFI Basel, she encouraged students to engage directly with materials and spatial experimentation—an approach that was remarkably forward-looking for its time.

In the late 1950s, uncertain about the long-term prospects of interior architecture as a profession, Dietschy trained in the Alexander Technique, whose holistic understanding of body, movement and spatial perception strongly resonated with her own thinking. Yet her enduring fascination with the emotional qualities of space—and with the possibility of change through design—remained the driving force throughout her career.