Nørgaard Design: From paper to production – making quality design accessible

By Signe Hansen

With more than 30 years of experience, Nørgaard Design has developed an in-depth insight into the production of furniture. Alongside a portfolio of highly successful designs, this knowledge enables the company and its creator, Anders Nørgaard, to innovate and create designs that excel in functionality, beauty and accessibility.

“Anyone can create a beautiful sofa with a price tag of 120,000 kroner. The real challenge is creating one for just 25,000. Achieving that requires a good grasp of production, especially fabric consumption,” stresses Nørgaard and goes on to specify how efficient and exact use of fabrics can significantly affect the production price of a sofa.

Graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1989, Nørgaard established Nørgaard Design in 1994. Today, the company has grown into a recognised design studio, with four designers working with Danish and International clients in both the home and the contract markets. In the years in between, Nørgaard designed some of the best-selling sofas in Denmark, redefining what a sofa is meant for.

Nørgaard Design: From paper to production – making quality design accessible

Table SM140 – Skovby.

A pragmatic approach

As a young kid, Andes Nørgaard got a prototype set of chairs in his room, designed by a friend of his parents, Ove Rix, owner, partner and head of furniture design at Friis & Moltke Design. Immediately fascinated by the process and potential of architectural work, Nørgaard soon started dreaming about turning drawings into reality. When he was 18, an introduction to a furniture producer intensified this ambition, and Nørgaard soon applied to The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

From the beginning, Nørgaard’s relationship to architecture and furniture design was defined by a pragmatic approach, an approach that focused on the practicalities necessary to turn an idea into reality. “When I graduated, my step-grandfather said to me; to succeed, you have to dress like the wolves in your pack, otherwise you’ll be eaten. Then he took me to a menswear specialist and bought me a suit, tie and shoes,” explains Nørgaard. “Wearing that, I went to furniture fairs in Copenhagen, Köln and Milano to create a network.”

Dining chair SM 842 designed by Nørgaard Design and produced by Skovby.

The decision to found his own company also arose from practical considerations as unemployment amongst architects was, in Nørgaard’s own words, “rife at the time.” His practical approach turned out to be a distinct advantage in the furniture industry. “What I wanted to do was to create high-quality products that were accessible to people. A lot of things can be made at reasonable prices if you produce enough of them. One chair might be expensive to produce, but if you make 10.000 of them, it won’t be that costly anymore.”

It was, however, not just quantity that enabled Nørgaard Design to create high-quality designs at accessible prices but also an extended insight into design production, ensuring smart constructions and highly functional solutions. “If you design things with a specific production in mind, you can actually produce a carpenter chair, made in Denmark, at 600-700 kroner,” says Nørgaard. “Designing in a dimension that requires discarding half of the wood does not work; you need to use standard dimensions. Moreover, you must consider labour costs, especially if you aim to produce in Denmark – machines should handle the majority of the work, with human hands involved only when essential.”

Following this ethos, the studio recently created the SM 842 dining chair (and table) for the Danish furniture producer Skovby. “Creating a chair like this with a Danish carpenter like Skovby is fantastic – we know the production so well that the design we started with is very much like the product we ended up with. We’ve not had to cut a heel and a toe, but still, we managed to create a chair in solid oak, in Denmark, selling at approximately 2,500 kroner, something people can hardly believe,” Nørgaard enthuses.

Photo: Skovby

A sofa not for sitting but for lounging

But although Nørgaard loves chairs, a sofa first made his name. Early in his career, Nørgaard talked to a furniture producer who told him that a well-run furniture store got over 50 per cent of its revenue from upholstered furniture. “Then I thought – I need to make sofas,” says Nørgaard. “Back then, not a lot of Danish designers were making sofas. Now, many do, but not back then, so what I became known for were sofas and armchairs.”

One sofa in particular garnered attention in Nørgaard’s early days, the model 100. Unlike most other sofas at the time, this sofa was not designed for sitting neatly on but for lounging. “In reality, people only sat properly on their sofas about 10 per cent of the time, you know, when they were having coffee with their mother-in-law. The rest of the time – 90 per cent – they slept, ate, watched TV, or even had sex in it. That was the theory. That’s why I made my sofas a bit deeper, not as comfortable for sitting, but better for reclining.”

Model 100 designed in 1996.

The first to reflect this theory was the model 100, which was initially criticised for being too deep and too reclined but eventually took off. Soon after, Nørgaard met the owner and director of BoConcept, one of Denmark’s leading design store chains. For BoConcept, Nørgaard designed Indivi2. Still in production, the sofa is one of BoConcept’s best-selling sofas, as relevant today as it was when it was launched in 1999. “It is a modular sofa, one of the first modular sofas in the world designed with that approach. That’s probably also why it has become a classic,” explains Nørgaard.

The Indivi sofa has become one of BoConcept’s best-selling classics, originally designed in 1999. Photo: BoConcept

FourPeople – green and flexible

With three decades of experience crafting sofas, it is perhaps not surprising that Nørgaard’s most recent major creation also redefines what one can do with a sofa. Designed for the contract market, the modular sofa FourPeople is crafted as a complete system that enables effortless customisation to foster creativity and teamwork. “We’ve never spent so many hours on one product before. We spent the entire time working on this system during COVID lockdown, a total of 3,500 hours, creating a host of technically complicated solutions,” says Nørgaard. “When you have to be able to assemble and modulate something, everything has to be connectable without too many screws and tools, and for that, we developed a special mount which you cannot see, but which is the key to the system’s stability and clean lines.”

The Nørgaard Design team. Photo: Jacob Mark

The design for the sofa was created through the collaboration of all the Nørgaard Design team, something which Nørgaard stresses is often the case. “We rely on each other all the time. I don’t do 3D drawings, but my colleagues do. When I create something the old-fashioned way on paper, with a triangle, compass, and pencil, they model it up, and then the process starts with a meeting about where we want to end up.”

Another special feature of the FourPeople Modular is that it is EU ecolabel certified, something which requires all components and materials to be deconstructable. As such, it is one of the first green-labelled lounge series on the contract market.

Fourpeople Work Hut & Sofa Hut – Ocee & Four Design.

Indeed, three decades in the industry seem to have only fuelled Nørgaard’s creativity rather than slowed him down. “Did I mention we also occasionally design single-family houses for special clients?” he asks toward the end of his conversation with Scan Magazine.

Of course, they do – and naturally, one of those houses is currently featured on the website of the iconic Italian lighting design company Flos. But while these homes are, Nørgaard admits, only accessible for the few, fortunately, his furniture remains accessible to everyday people who appreciate high-quality design.