PP Møbler | Danish Cabinetmakers

Scandinavian Design | Nordic design inspiration

In 1953 two newly qualified cabinetmakers, the brothers Ejnar and Lars Peder Pedersen, bought a piece of land in Allerød north of Copenhagen and built a workshop on it. They put up the building during the day and made furniture in it at night. It measured 150 square metres. It is 1 800 today, after seven expansions, and it is still on the same plot, still owned by the same family, now in its third generation.

PP Møbler is the workshop that makes Hans J. Wegner‘s most demanding chairs. That is what it is known for and it is accurate, but it was not the plan — the Wegner collection arrived piece by piece over forty years, and mostly because other people gave it up.

Allerød, 1953

The brothers divided the work between them: Lars Peder in the workshop, with the hands; Ejnar outside it, building the relationships with architects that would decide everything afterwards. They took on eight young cabinetmakers in the first year and worked as subcontractors — for Bovirke, for William Watting, for A. P. Stolen.

Subcontracting is where the reputation started. PP built the wooden frames for A. P. Stolen’s upholstered Wegner chairs, including the Papa Bear, and Wegner came out to inspect components that would be permanently hidden under leather. Ejnar’s position was that a journeyman has to be able to take pride in the part nobody sees, and that PP made first-class work or none. Wegner remembered it.

The Wegner years

Through the 1960s the workshop developed prototypes with him, the Ox Chair among them, and between 1962 and 1968 made pieces that went into production elsewhere. In May 1969 the pp203 became the first chair Wegner drew for PP Møbler itself, followed by the pp201. He encouraged Ejnar to stop subcontracting and build a name of his own, and then drew the logo for it.

In the mid-1970s PP took over a large part of Wegner’s table collection from Andreas Tuck. In 1990, when Johannes Hansen’s workshop closed, PP took the collection that had made Wegner internationally known — the Round Chair, the Peacock, the Chinese Chair. The Flag Halyard followed from Getama in 2002. The Circle Chair of 1986 was drawn there from the start.

The result is that a single workshop of about thirty-five people now holds most of the Wegner catalogue, including the pieces no factory would attempt: the Round Chair’s three-part top rail with its exposed finger joint, the Peacock’s flattened spindles, the Flag Halyard’s hundred and twenty metres of rope.

The workshop

Søren Holst Pedersen, Ejnar’s son, joined in 1977 and spent his working life putting modern wood technology into a traditional workshop — moisture control, CNC alongside hand tools, steam bending done to measured tolerances rather than by feel. Kasper Holst Pedersen came in as the third generation in 2001. All three generations have worked in the building at once.

Material development continues. TannicTint Black colours oak by reacting with the tannin already in the wood instead of covering it with pigment, which means the grain stays visible and the surface can be repaired rather than replaced.

Beyond Wegner

The workshop has never been only an archive. Experimental work with the artist Gunnar Aagaard Andersen began as early as 1955. Nanna Ditzel‘s Seashell Chair of 1996 pushed veneer folding as far as it goes. Søren Ulrik Petersen and Thomas Alken have both designed for the collection.

PP Møbler also funds and awards the Wegner Prize, and supplied much of the material knowledge behind Museum Wegner, which opened in Tønder in 2026.