In 1872 a carpenter named Fritz Hansen, a native of the village of Nakskov, travelled to Copenhagen to apply for a business license. Ten years later, in the Danish Capital, Mr Hansen became a renowned high-end furniture merchant. Not bad, right?
Two years go by. One night Mr Hansen comes back home, sits down at his table, a wooden beauty, and thinks: I want to design one of these. After dinner he calls his son in, sits him down and speaks man-to-man: Let’s open up an artisan workshop in the city centre, shall we?
It wasn’t a long-shot, but it was definitely a gamble. We don’t know how well the Danish craftsman and his son slept that night. We don’t know if Mr Hansen, hailing from the small town of Nakskov, dreamt of being an exclusive brand, rewriting Danish and International design history. What we do know is that it happened.
The idea of opening his own workshop humoured Mr Hansen’s intuition to focus on quality first and foremost. From that day on not a single one of the brand’s collaborators has ever dared betray his philosophy. This was a forward-thinking belief that led him to work with top-notch collaborators throughout the 1900s, such as Arne Jacobsen, Poul Kjærholm, Piet Hein, Vico Magistretti, Burkhard Vogtherr, Piero Lissoni, Kasper Salto and Morten Voss.
These are just some of the renowned designers that shined bright in the Fritz Hansen sky. Collaborations between brand and designer neared perfection, joining the forces of artisan expertise and aesthetic intelligence, which paved the way for a long series of iconic home design pieces. Luxury items, exquisite material and cutting-edge intuition: this is the past, present and future of Fritz Hansen.
Fast forward to the Roaring Twenties when Christian Hansen led vast luxurious experimentation on beech wood flexibility. In the following decade, the technique developed by Christian became so precise and reliable that the Danish brand worked its way to the top of the industry and, soon after this, would make a great contribution to the success of laminated wood in home furniture.
Fritz Hansen played its part in the rise of Scandinavian style. The brand managed to integrate the soft and thin lines of German functionalism into its work, choosing an extremely practical approach as the basis of its philosophy, marked by continuous research in materials and techniques.
At the dawn of the third millennium, Fritz Hansen has become a company that has always stayed up with the times. Despite moving beyond its father and son constitution, the brand has never contradicted the values of its founder. The Republic of Fritz Hansen is the message that the brand gives to its customers: a symbol for identity emphasized by an exclusive affinity.
This is the cornerstone of the Fritz Hansen brand philosophy. A pure, original, durable look; the rationale of a higher quality, of the details and beauty of aged material; genuine, serene and Nordic emotions.
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