One idea per object
Each piece resolves a single formal question — how a seat can hang, how a top can float, how a light can become a line. Second ideas are kept for second pieces.
The practice
Founded 2014 · Copenhagen & Lisbon
Studio
Two designers, eleven workshops, four new pieces a year.
OBJECT/FORM was founded by Ines Marto and Anders Kjeldsen after a decade spent between architecture offices and cabinetmaking benches. The studio has stayed deliberately small so that every drawing can be followed through to the workshop floor.
Philosophy
Design is a way of paying attention to material.
We begin with a material and a constraint rather than a concept. A stack of storm-felled elm; a workshop that can fold steel to 1 mm but cannot weld it; a client's room with one window facing north. The object emerges from those facts.
That method makes our work quiet. There is very little in a piece that is not doing something — carrying load, resolving a joint, catching light, receiving a hand. What remains is proportion, and proportion is where we spend most of our time.
We are not interested in novelty for its own sake. A piece is finished when nothing else can be removed from it, and when we can imagine it still being wanted in thirty years. If it only makes sense in a photograph, we stop.
“We would rather make one object that outlives us than twelve that outlive a season.”
Approach to form
Four
rules
Working principles we return to on every project. They are not a manifesto; they are a way of making decisions quickly.
Weight where it belongs
Mass is not hidden. Stone reads as stone, timber sections are honest to the load they carry, and lightness is achieved by removing material rather than disguising it.
Joints as punctuation
Where a connection can be visible without becoming ornament, we show it. A well-cut joint tells you how something was made and how it can be taken apart again.
Surfaces that age
We choose finishes that record use. Soaped oak lightens, unlacquered brass darkens, oiled walnut deepens. The object should look better in year ten than in year one.
Full-size drawing
Every profile is drawn 1:1 before a prototype exists. Screen renderings flatter; a full-size section on paper, pinned to a wall for a week, does not.
Made to be repaired
Nothing is glued shut that could be pinned, and nothing is finished in a way that cannot be renewed on site. Longevity is a design decision, not a promise.
Collaboration
We design with makers, not for them.
Every piece is developed inside a specific workshop, with the people who will build it. A drawing arrives, and within an hour it has changed — because the joiner knows how that oak will move, or because the folder can hold a tighter radius than we assumed.
Those conversations are the studio's real method. We spend roughly a third of the year travelling between benches in Denmark, Portugal and northern Italy, and we credit the workshop on every piece it produces.
The relationships are long. Our first cabinetmaker has now built seven of our editions; the glassblower who makes the Column diffuser has refused two of our drawings and was right both times.
Partner workshops
Where the
work is made
A selection of the small workshops we produce with. None employs more than nine people.
- Værksted HaldCabinetmaking, solid timber framesAarhus, DKSince 2014
- Oficina SáUpholstery and hand-stitched seatsPorto, PTSince 2016
- Marmi BassanoStone cutting, honing, hand finishingVicenza, ITSince 2017
- Fold MetalværkSheet folding, blackening, brass patinationSkanderborg, DKSince 2015
- Vetreria LuceHand-blown opal and reeded glassMurano, ITSince 2019
- Elm & AdzeCarved and hollowed one-off timber piecesVejle, DKSince 2018
Limited production
Small editions, held open only while we can make them well.
Editions are sized to the capacity of the workshop that makes them, not to a sales forecast. When an edition closes, the drawings are archived and the piece is not reissued — though we continue to service every object we have ever sent out.
- New pieces per yearFour, at most. Two of those are usually developments of an existing family rather than new objects.
- Edition sizesBetween 20 and 60 for repeatable pieces. Carved and stone works are numbered unique pieces.
- Stock heldNone. Everything is made to order, which is why lead times are honest and long.
- CommissionsSix to eight private or architectural commissions accepted each year, alongside collection production.
- ArchiveFull-size drawings, material records and offcuts retained indefinitely for every edition.
Selected history
Ten
years
Exhibitions, editions and the occasional useful mistake.
- 2014
The studio begins in a borrowed workshop
Ines and Anders share a bench in Aarhus and produce the first Kettil prototype, which is still in daily use in the Copenhagen studio.
- 2017
First stone edition
A visit to a quarry outside Vicenza leads to the Vein family and a working relationship with Marmi Bassano that continues today.
- 2019
Lisbon second studio
A small drawing and upholstery studio opens near Rua da Boavista, closer to the Portuguese workshops.
- 2021
Meridian shown in Milan
The walnut table is exhibited in a bare apartment during design week — no styling, one object per room.
- 2023
Gallery representation
The studio begins working with two European galleries on collectible and one-off works, including the Ridge series.
- 2024
Column Floor Light
Four years of drawings resolved into a single drawn steel column and a hand-blown opal cylinder.
Work with us
Talk to the
studio
We take on a small number of commissions each year and are glad to discuss a project long before it is defined.