More than half a century after they were first created, the designs of the Pelican chair, the Poet sofa and the France chair still look strikingly modern.
Finn Juhl – the story continues Pelicans, poets and a hotel tucked away in the Japanese Alps – it sounds like the most unlikely fairy tale ever and, in the world of design, it is. With three magic ingredients – passion, a pinch of daredevilry, and a treasure chest of spectacular designs – House of Finn Juhl has created one of the most remarkable Danish design stories in recent times. By Signe Hansen | Photos: House of Finn Juhl
“It started as a fun idea,” says founder Hans Henrik Sørensen about the newly opened Finn Juhl Hotel in Hakuba, Japan. For those who know a little about the history behind the brand, that probably does not come as a great surprise. In 1998, Ivan Hansen and Henrik Sørensen, the founders of Onecollection and 24 | Issue 107 | December 2017
House of Finn Juhl, received the rights to reproduce the designs of the iconic Danish designer Finn Juhl – a great honour but also a great challenge. The truth was that due to the designs’ characteristically organic shapes, most had never been produced in large numbers, and hardly anyone believed that Finn
Juhl would ever become a commercially viable brand. Fortunately, commercial viability was never the main concern for Hansen and Sørensen. “We base a lot on our intuition, and that’s both our strength and our weakness. We get completely carried away with things, sometimes the wrong things because, of course, we need to be able to sell the items too; it all needs to add up. Still, we produce some items that we really love but don’t sell enough of to make it profitable; we keep them in our collection and hope that, at some point, people will open their eyes to their qual-