Kaare Klint may not be a name we hear much of these days, but in Denmark, at least, he remains revered. ‘He was the father of Danish furniture design,’ says Niels Strøyer Christophersen, creative director and founder of multi-disciplinary design brand, Frama. ‘As a furniture designer and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, he was crucial to Danish design and shaped an entire generation of famous designers who, in the 1940s, put Denmark on the world map.’
According to Christophersen, one of Klint’s enduring contributions to the oeuvre was to introduce simplified editions of historical pieces. Frama’s new Atelier Collection is, on every metric, a homage to both that creative process and to one of Klint’s very early works – a box couch designed in 1916.
The new collection – comprising a couch, a chair and shelving, all handmade in spruce by a Lithuanian cabinet maker – is Frama’s first foray into a couch and easy chair series. Taking cues from Klint’s original unornamented design, Frama created a semi-encapsulated form whose otherwise severe silhouette is balanced by rounder, softer edges. Each piece features visible joints, a Frama MO, and is finished with a natural oil.
The cushions, meanwhile, are swathed in customised merino wool called Éire, a tribute to the Irish spinners and weavers who handmake the fabric in natural hues ‘inspired by the natural greys of the Nordic landscape’.
By creating simplified editions of historical pieces, Klint embraced the past without being shackled by it. For Christophersen and his studio designers, the Atelier Collection is just a millennial iteration of that approach. ‘Frama is essentially based on a constant evolution of ideas and interventions. We embrace what history offers us as an archive of functions and forms which we, as Klint once did, then re-interpret within a modern context in which simplicity and longevity of each piece is foundational.’ §