Kaare Klint - Scandinavian furniture designer

In the field of furniture design over the years there have been names considered true landmarks, whose vision and achievements have influenced the furniture field. Names such as Thomas Chippendale, George Nakashima or Sam Maloof will go down in history for the way they influenced woodworking and furniture production. One such name is Kaare Klint, a Danish-born furniture designer who made the transition from a classical view of furniture, emphasizing aesthetics and decoration, to a modern one, based mainly on functionality. Klint is considered the father of Danish modern design and the man who taught those who made Danish furniture known worldwide in the second half of the last century.

He was born in 1888 in Copenhagen and grew up in a creative environment as the son of a well-known Danish architect. As a child he worked as an apprentice in a furniture factory and also attended technical, furniture and art schools. He was 26 when he designed his first piece of furniture, a chair that became famous. As a young employee of architect Carl Peterson he was asked to design a chair for the Faaborg Museum in Copenhagen. He began to study how to make it as comfortable and functional as possible, so that it could be easily moved by people who wanted to study the paintings in the museum.

The result is a chair perfectly adapted to the human body, the proportions of which have been carefully analyzed. The chair was very practical, but that didn't mean compromising on quality. The best materials were used and processed as close to perfection as possible. The chair immediately caught the eye with its great sense of space and proportions, perfectly combined with knowledge of architecture and design. It was the piece that established him as a furniture designer and "legitimized" him as a trailblazer.

In 1933 he made another chair that became famous, the Safari chair, considered one of the first pieces of do-it-yourself designer furniture. The chair can be easily assembled and disassembled even without tools. Klint was inspired by British officers' camp chairs. This chair has created a real revolution by being made of leather or canvas, in different types of quality wood (mahogany, oak, ash).

Klint designed several pieces of furniture that have now become benchmarks for those working in the field. In 1917 he designed a bed, made in only 2 examples, one in Cuban mahogany and the other in corrugated oak, which is a perfect blend of simplicity and elegance.

All the pieces he created - wardrobes, tables, sofas - have functionality in common. The unnecessary decorations of the past, made solely to embellish furniture, disappear, giving way to a simple, functional elegance. The style is clean, with straight or curved lines kept as simple as possible. The idea is that the pieces should take up as little space as possible, so that everything around is airy and weightless.

His pieces are the embodiment of what we today call Scandinavian design. In fact, they're the originators of the style. The tables don't occupy the center of the room, and if needed they can be simply and sometimes surprisingly extended.

Sofas are comfortable and simple without the sumptuousness of classic furniture. Everything is functional, simple and elegant.

His passion for furniture and his new vision for furniture design led him to establish the School of Furniture Design at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen in 1924, where he taught until the end of his life in 1954 and where famous names in Danish furniture design were educated.

The Faaborg chair has a special place in the history of Danish modernism, so in 2015, the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Faaborg Museum, Danish furniture manufacturer Rud Rasmussen, for whom Klint has created designs that are still being made today (including the Faaborg chair), wanted to mark the occasion with a special edition of the chair. The 18 chairs made 100 years ago for the museum were made of corrugated oak, a very precious material. Now they are no longer made of this material, but for the anniversary it was decided to make 10 Faaborg chairs from corrugated ash.

What makes this series even more special is that the ash came from the factory yard, where it had stood for 100 years. It was felled 25 years before and put in the basement awaiting an event to match the beauty of the wood. In addition to these 10 chairs, another 100 were made from oiled walnut.

Kaare Klint will go down forever in furniture history, his name associated with functionality, simplicity and elegance. In addition to furniture, he also created other objects for interior decoration, including fabrics, but the principles remain the same.