Designed as a series of furniture elements in 1961, the Principal collection has a modern appeal. Your eyes are drawn to its lines: delicate and strong at the same time, with a mathematical precision that stems not from a desire for a form but rather from a robust investigation of structure and strength.

Architect Bodil Kjær, then aged 29, designed Principal for a furniture competition held in Denmark, imagining a series for a young couple’s first home. Hers was a precocious talent that transcended the borders of Denmark where she was raised and educated towards a more European expression.

"I chose to research and design a series of elements of an indoor landscape of furniture that might be enjoyed by a young couple in their first home in a rented apartment or a small house,” says Kjær. The series included a dining table, dining chair, stool, bench and sideboard, plus wall-hung, round and soft back rests, and a wall-hung deep frame for displaying a beloved object or picture. Her drawings, showing the crisp clear form including a distinctive three-dimensional joint are precise and considered.

The Principal dining chair is open, its round backrest comforting and enveloping but with a sure pure line. The distinctive cross-shaped joints repeated across the collection provide strength and act as the only adornment. 

“I choose to make the upstanding parts of the structure cross-shaped to provide strength of wooden parts. It offers a three-dimensional form rather than the conventional flat or smooth form of much furniture,” says Kjær, 92 and still active in architecture, planning and education.

“Young people today seem to like the pieces. Maybe because they can so easily understand how they are constructed, how easily they may be taken apart for repair and maybe they like the idea of a landscape of furniture rather than the individual furniture objects they grew up with.”

The Principal collection, is named in honour of Kjær’s leadership in ideas and as a woman in a mostly male world, as well as for its strong design and construction principles. The collection comprises a dining chair, dining table, bar stool, counter stool and bar chair.