Kurt Merki Jr. was born in 1978 in Accra, Ghana, as the oldest son of Kurt Merki Sr., a Swiss master joiner, and his Ghanaian wife, a fashion designer who studied in London in the 1960s. He trained as a joiner in his father's furniture factory. He moved to Switzerland in 1997, and it was here in Lucerne that he passed his examination to become a master furniture joiner in 1999. From 2001 to 2008 he worked as an interior designer for a variety of architectural firms in Zurich, after which he went to Milan in order to expand his knowledge of design at the Scuola Politecnica di Design. After receiving his master's degree in interior and product design here, in 2009 he worked at the Studio Antonio Citterio in Milan before soon returning to Zurich, where he opened his own design studio in 2010. For Duravit, he has designed the bathroom furniture range for the Vero ceramic range and the tap fittings for the C.1 range.