House of Finn Juhl: A Design Vision Beyond Convention

Finn Juhl wished to be an art historian and became, by his own account, a self-taught designer of chairs. House of Finn Juhl still makes them by hand in Denmark: sculpture one is permitted to sit in.

A self-taught sculptor of chairs, a Copenhagen cabinetmaker, a United Nations chamber and a house in Ordrup. House of Finn Juhl keeps Danish Modern alive.

In 1952 the United Nations Trusteeship Council took its seats in New York in a room few diplomats would have expected: bands of warm wood, a ceiling of coloured boxes strung through a grid of rods like an abacus, and chairs that looked carved rather than assembled. Its designer was a forty-year-old Dane who had never finished his architecture degree, and the room did much to introduce his distinctive approach to furniture and interior design to an international audience. His name was Finn Juhl, and House of Finn Juhl has spent a quarter of a century making sure his thinking survives the journey from drawing board to drawing room.

Juhl was born in Frederiksberg in 1912 and wished to become an art historian; his father would not hear of it. He enrolled to study architecture, joined Vilhelm Lauritzen's office in 1934 to work on the interiors of Radiohuset, and never quite found the time to finish his degree. Furniture he taught himself, approaching it with an artistic freedom that set him apart from many of his contemporaries. Rather than following established cabinetmaking conventions, he explored furniture as a form of sculpture, creating organic shapes and unexpected constructions. "Art has always been my main source of inspiration," he said. "I am fascinated by shapes which defy gravity and create visual lightness."

In 1937, he began exhibiting with the master cabinetmaker Niels Vodder at the Cabinetmakers' Guild Exhibition, and for twenty years the pair worked closely together to realise Juhl's unconventional designs, often challenging the boundaries of traditional cabinetmaking. Together, they created pieces in numbers so small they now read like editions: the Pelican Chair of 1940, the 45 Chair of 1945 with its seat floating free of the frame, and the Chieftain Chair of 1949, a throne in all but manners. America took notice. Edgar Kaufmann Jr. of the Museum of Modern Art championed him, Baker Furniture of Michigan put him into production, and in 1951 Denmark chose him to furnish its gift to the United Nations.

His own house at Kratvænget in Ordrup, completed in 1942 when he was thirty, is the fullest statement of the idea: a functionalist home designed from the inside out, its walls hung with Vilhelm Lundstrøm and Asger Jorn, every chair placed as deliberately as a painting. It now belongs to Ordrupgaard museum, and the Chieftain is still there.

The revival began in 1982, when a twenty-year-old Hans Henrik Sørensen met Juhl at a retrospective in Copenhagen. Years later Hanne Wilhelm Hansen, Juhl's partner from 1961 until his death in 1989, invited Sørensen and Ivan Hansen to recreate one of his designs, and in 2001 entrusted them with the rights to all of them. Their method is almost archaeological. A piece is relaunched only after the original drawings have been studied and surviving examples measured, in museums, private collections and the Ordrup house itself; where the drawings fall silent, the question is simply what Juhl intended.

Today, House of Finn Juhl continues the tradition of Danish cabinetmaking in its Danish workshops, combining skilled craftsmanship with a deep respect for Juhl's original designs. Joinery and upholstery happen in the company's own workshops at Ringkøbing and Vejen, with a small partner workshop in Yamagata, Japan, for frames too intricate for most hands. Particular attention is given to the sculptural shapes, materials and finishing details that are so essential to Juhl's furniture. Solid wood is chosen to age with grace, leather is cut from selected hides, and untreated brass is left to darken under the hands that touch it. In the Japanese Alps at Hakuba there is even a five-room hotel furnished in nothing else.

The collection now runs to more than 50 pieces. Juhl, who could turn a sentence as neatly as an armrest, once explained why any of it mattered: "One cannot create happiness with beautiful objects," he observed, "but one can spoil quite a lot of happiness with bad ones." It remains a sound brief for a chair, and a fair description of the work still going on at Ringkøbing.

Discover more at House of Finn Juhl.

Buttoned cream and grey Finn Juhl sofa and a charcoal wool armchair before an arched leaded window | The Aficionados

Finn Juhl Pelican Chair in white sheepskin by a steel window, beside a Poet Sofa in brown sheepskin | The Aficionados