Finn Juhl, Kaj Gottlob and Peder Moos

Chieftain from a Charismatic Textile Entrepreneur

Finn Juhl takes the centre stage at this auction with a number of furniture pieces that are rarely seen on the auction market. Some of them come from the charismatic businessman and textile manufacturer Percy von Halling-Koch. If anyone deserves the title of ‘personal branding guru’, he does, and many Scandinavians know him from a legendary advertising campaign for the Samarin antacid tablets from the early 1970s. Here, Halling-Koch appeared naked and with a belly full of laughs while holding a glass with the effervescent medicine against heartburn. In 1952, he founded the textile company Unika-Væv, and in 1965 he oversaw the design success of the famous woollen textile Hallingdal, which was created by designer Nanna Ditzel and is today produced by the textile company Kvadrat.

The Publisher’s Precursor to FJ45

We can present additional rare designs by Finn Juhl, such as a pair of Westermann’s Fireplace Chairs of Cuban mahogany and Oregon pine, the precursor to the more well-known FJ 45. The offered chairs were originally designed in 1943 as part of a furniture group commissioned by the editor and publisher Poul Westermann. He was a highly-skilled businessman who, with both foresight and targeted marketing, managed to make a fortune in publishing easy-to-read non-fiction. From 1943, we also find Finn Juhl's sculptural and rare sofa with matching unique easy chairs, which he gave as a wedding gift to the present owner's parents, who were close friends with the architect.

The Year 1943

The attentive reader may have already noticed that the year 1943 plays a key role in a significant part of this design auction. The year is representative of a time before Danish furniture design had had its breakthrough as "Danish Modern", and it was around this time that the architect Kaj Gottlob unfurled his artistic talent. He was a professor at the School of Architecture in Copenhagen and one of the first to introduce international modernism in Denmark. Gottlob is best known for his public projects in Copenhagen, such as the Knippelsbro bridge from 1935 and the Universitetsparken from 1939, but he also designed a number of furniture pieces. They were either made for the interiors of his own buildings or for cabinetmaker productions in very limited numbers.

At the auction, we can present Gottlob's rare and beautiful secretaire in the materials Brazilian rosewood, lemonwood, ebony, ivory and brass. This piece was also made in 1943 by cabinetmaker A.J. Iversen, and it is a variant of an earlier model that was displayed at the Copenhagen Cabinetmaker Guild’s Exhibition at the Designmuseum Danmark in 1938. Finally, it was also in 1943 that one of the greatest and most eccentric personalities of Danish design history, Peder Moos, designed and manufactured the auction’s equally rare Museum Table in Brazilian rosewood and boxwood. The furniture is a testimony to Moos' unique style, which both appears modern and still upholds the centuries-old traditions of the cabinetmakers’ craft.

When it comes to Danish design, it doesn't get any better than this!