In the idyllic Swiss village of Immensee, Andreas Reichlin’s house is difficult to miss. Fabulously located on Lake Lucerne, the impressive steel edifice – and the smoke rising from its Feuerring grill – can be seen for miles around. This is where this native of Central Switzerland and his partner Beate have made their home, just a short distance from the famous Hohle Gasse of the Wilhelm Tell legend.

Andreas comes from a family of artists: his uncle had a studio in the same building that Andreas works and lives in today, and his father ran a gallery. Reichlin Senior was a strong influence on young Andreas’s thinking and actions, too. He taught his son from an early age to focus not on problems and challenges but on how they could best be solved. And it was this same attitude and approach that brought Andreas to the Feuerring (‘Fire Ring’) idea.

“It came to me in the middle of a barbecue evening,” Andreas recalls. “Whenever I grilled my meat, the juices would drip onto the embers. That made smoke, which got onto the food; and that just didn’t agree with my stomach.” A solution was clearly needed. “So I started looking for a means of grilling food healthily, and also in an aesthetic and artistic way. And after a lot of searching, tests and trials, I hit upon the ‘Feuerring’ form.”

A challenging start…

The road to the finished product was initially far from smooth. It took Andreas four years to settle on the best solution. The grill – or Feuerring, as Andreas consistently calls it – had to be shaped and welded in a particular way to ensure that the food was cooked as gently as possible and that the bowl was not distorted by the fire’s high heat. Just as important to Andreas, too, were the new product’s form and spatial credentials. But in 2009, after sizeable further adjustments, the Feuerring was born: a bowl with a welded ring and a ‘golden’ centre for the fire. It was in the same year that Andreas met Beate, too. “So it was a good time all round,” he adds with a smile.

… with a happy ending

Beate proved to be the driving force behind today’s Feuerring company. Initially, Andreas was far from comfortable with founding their own firm. He was an artist, after all, and he valued life’s more unforeseeable and unplannable dimensions. “I’d never been attracted by fixed working conditions,” he explains. Today, Andreas and Beate are proud owner of their own company to pass on the joy they have with the Feuerring. And with sizeable and evident success: the Feuerring has proved a hit with customers and their guests both in and beyond Switzerland. Unfortunately, that success has attracted a number of imitators, too. Unlike these, though, the Feuerring is more than a grill. It’s also – and even primarily – a sculpture that retains all of its impact and allure long after its embers have cooled.

So what has been Andreas’s most memorable moment with his Feuerring invention? He doesn’t have to think for long. “Back in 2008, I was sitting in my garden frying eggs on my prototype when two women cycled by,” he recalls. “As my friends and family know, that’s not an unusual sight today. But back then, nobody had heard of this grilling technique. So the two ladies were intrigued – so intrigued, in fact, that I invited them to join me. They were really taken by the Feuerring idea. But, living in an apartment in the middle of Zurich, they didn’t think it was very practical for them.”

“Eleven years later I got a letter from those same two women: did I remember them and that fried egg lunch?” he grins. “They’d written to tell me that they’d now bought a Feuerring for themselves. It was the very first thing they had acquired for their new house. That story has stayed with me to this day. Because the sooner you get yourself a Feuerring, the longer you’ll enjoy all the pleasure it gives you.”

And what does Andreas personally recommend for a Feuerring meal? “A freshly filleted fish grilled directly on the glowing wood, with celery and beetroot under the embers. That’ll really get the tastebuds working!”