As many of you know, I have been researching design ideas for my living room and have already started collecting together furniture, art and soft furnishings for my new room. Here’s a reminder of my original mood board:
In my research travels I have recently come across Danish architect and designer Finn Juhl - one of the leading designers in the creation of “Danish design” in the 1940s. Oddly enough there was a decline in interest in Juhl’s designs in the 60s and 70s – I would have assumed that this would have been the period that he was most prolific in, judging by the ‘futuristic’ shapes in his furniture. Evidently, I’ve been looking to the wrong eras for inspiration - I’ve enjoyed looking at Juhl’s designs and realised that I actually prefer his 40s & 50s furniture. One of Finn Juhl’s famous quotes is “One cannot create happiness with beautiful objects, but one can spoil quite a lot of happiness with bad ones” and I completely agree – and cannot understand why people would fill their homes with things that they don’t absolutely love. I can honestly say that I would be pretty upset to lose any of my pieces of furniture because they are not just storage, they are important to me. In fact, I’ve had the conversation ‘what would you save if your house was on fire’ with my friends recently and as my list of essential ‘saves’ grew, I realised I’d need a moving-van to get everything out that I’d want to keep. I think it’s because I have spent much time sourcing my furniture and, as many of them have been thrifted or found, I have added personal value to them by cleaning, sanding and renovating them.
If I were lucky enough to one day own a piece of Finn Juhl furniture I think it’d have to be something like these, and I’m pretty sure they’d make the list of things to save!
What do you think? What would you save from your home?
