GRAY No. 3

Creating a Market Written by Lindsey M. Roberts

Niels Bendtsen makes furniture design look easy. He spends half his days sketching out new ideas and uses his store, Inform Interiors in Vancouver, B.C., to test new things.

His minimalist bookshelves, coffee tables, and sofas even have that simple, why-didn’t-I-think-of-that quality. (“I’m not the outrageous designer that makes the big splashes,” he says.)

It’s likely that this sense of ease is exactly what makes his furniture internationally successful. Like the Meryl Streep of furniture, Bendtsen designs pieces that can be everything to everyone—fitting in with midmod, Craftsman, traditional—and wins awards while doing it. The Museum of Modern Art picked up his canvas-and-steel Ribbon Chair in 1975, Design Within Reach started selling his designs in the late’90s, and the British Columbia Achievement Foundation gave him its Creative Achievement Award of Distinction in 2006. Last year, he also designed his first piece for Poliform: the Tokyo

Chair, an elegant cross between Japanese style and Scandinavian lines made of oak.

It all may look easy to us, but the 68-year-old Bendtsen has been perfecting his business since his youth.

As a child, Bendtsen emigrated from Denmark to Canada, where he apprenticed for his cabinet-maker father. When he was 20, he started a retail store, Danet Interiors, to sell his father’s Scandinavian furniture designs as well as imported pieces. But frustrated with the quality of the imports in his 30s, he gave it all up to go to Europe and design goods for other factories. In 1981, he came back to Vancouver and established a retailand-manufacturing entity, naming it Inform Interiors Vancouver—which sprouted Seattle’s Inform Interiors in 2002. He later moved the manufacturing to BENSEN in 2000.

“We seem to have gotten a bit of a following in the Northwest,” Bendtsen says. He wishes that a similar following would catch on in North America, not just for his pieces but for well-designed furniture as a whole. But “our store in itself is education,” he says. “A lot of people that are buying from us are educated, well-traveled people. That’s what’s needed to rub off onto the next generation.”

In order to design well-made furniture, Bendtsen knew he had to control the manufacturing as well as the design process—which, together, form a design group called BENSEN. In 2010, he launched BENSEN Italy.

Bendtsen’s favorite designs are “what I’m working on tomorrow,” he says. “Sometimes, it takes a long time to get things right, but then the minute you get it right, it’s on to the next one.”

A new sofa called Edward with tufted seat cushions is currently selling well, in addition to Brix, a modular, stackingdrawer system: “a practical product that can be used in a lot of places.”

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GRAY ISSUE No. three