Kvadrat | Danish Textiles for Interiors

Kvadrat’s oldest and best-selling textile is older than Kvadrat. Nanna Ditzel designed Hallingdal in 1965, three years before Poul Byriel and Erling Rasmussen founded the company in Ebeltoft, on the east coast of Jutland. It is still in the collection, still specified for furniture, hospitals, airports and trains across Europe, and still recognisable across a room.

That is the shape of the whole business: a Danish textile company that sells almost entirely to architects and furniture makers rather than to the public, and that has spent sixty years treating cloth as a structural material rather than a finish.

Ebeltoft, 1968

Byriel and Rasmussen had been working together since 1965 and set the company up in 1968. What separated them from the Danish textile trade around them was where they looked: not to the weaving tradition but to Pop, to colour used at full strength, to the same argument Verner Panton was making about interiors at exactly that moment.

The founders sold to a Swedish company in 1992. When the new owners did not develop it, the families bought it back. Kvadrat has been in their hands since, and both second generations are in the business: Anders Byriel, Poul’s son, as chief executive from the late 1990s, and Mette Bendix, Erling Rasmussen’s daughter, running product development.

Colour as the product

Kvadrat sells the same weave in eighty shades, and the shades are the reason architects specify it. The company treats colour development as its central discipline and buys in outside eyes to do it — over the years Giulio Ridolfo, Peter Saville, Hella Jongerius, Alfredo Häberli, Raf Simons, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Tord Boontje, Werner Aisslinger and Olafur Eliasson have all worked on collections.

The results turn up in places that were never going to buy a fabric on looks alone. Topas, in cobalt blue, lines the debating chamber of the Reichstag in Berlin. Divina and Hallingdal cover a large share of the Danish furniture classics still in production. The Kvadrat/Raf Simons line, launched in 2014, put a fashion designer’s palette onto contract upholstery and has since been used to reupholster Poul Kjærholm‘s PK80 and PK91 in limited editions for Fritz Hansen.

The group

Kvadrat has grown from two companies to around twenty-five. Kinnasand brought a purist Swedish weaving tradition, Danskina hand-knotted rugs, Febrik knitted upholstery, Sahco the high-end European interior market, Innvik Norwegian yarn spinning, Wooltex British production. Kvadrat Soft Cells and Kvadrat Acoustics turned textile into wall and ceiling panels that absorb sound — a product line that exists because architects kept asking the company to solve a problem it had not been in.

Beyond upholstery

Really, majority-owned since 2017, presses end-of-life textiles — cotton and wool that would otherwise be incinerated — into solid boards that can be cut, drilled and used as a material in their own right. It is the most serious attempt any Scandinavian textile company has made to close its own loop, and it started from Kvadrat’s own offcuts.

Recent work has kept the same range: a textile made from recovered ocean plastic with the artist Kapwani Kiwanga, the Myr and Mylla knits by Note Design Studio for Kvadrat Febrik, rugs by Margrethe Odgaard, and Front‘s Design by Nature at the Stockholm showroom.

The showrooms themselves have been designed by David Adjaye, OMA and Peter Saville — which tells you what the company thinks it is selling. Not fabric by the metre. A position on how a room should look.

Kvadrat: Danish Textiles for Architecture and Furniture

Ebeltoft, 1968

Colour as the product

The group

Beyond upholstery

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