Akiko Kuwahata & Ken Winther | ScandinavianDesign.com

Akiko Kuwahata and Ken Winther are a Japanese-Danish couple of cabinetmakers who design and make furniture, lighting and wooden objects under the name Akiko Ken Made. From their workshop in Kokkedal, north of Copenhagen, they combine Japanese joinery with the Danish cabinetmaking tradition. The result is pieces that appeal as much to touch as to the eye.

Background

Akiko Kuwahata was born in Japan in 1976. She studied Living Space Design at Nihon University College of Art and then worked as a cabinetmaker at Hinoki Kogei. In 2004 she moved to Denmark to study furniture and interior design at the Aarhus School of Architecture, and she later trained in the studio of Cecilie Manz.

Ken Winther was born in Denmark in 1973 into a family of furniture manufacturers. He trained as a cabinetmaker at PP Møbler, the workshop where much of Hans J. Wegner‘s furniture is still made, and worked there for more than two decades. Extended periods with Japanese master carpenters deepened his knowledge of traditional joinery.

The two set up their own design and making studio around 2010. Since 2014 they have been represented by Galerie Maria Wettergren in Paris.

Design approach

Wood is their only material, and they push it close to its limits. Ken Winther turns wood until it becomes almost translucent. Akiko Kuwahata adds small, understated details that make an object more useful. Light, shadow and rhythm recur in their work, often as moiré patterns that shift as you move around a piece.

Selected works

Facet (2018), a small multifaceted table in maple and glass, was acquired by the Danish Arts Foundation for the Danish Embassy in London. Kvartet, a drawing-room piece in ash and glass, was made for Sophienholm. The Sail room divider in Oregon pine and linen was designed for Andersen-Andersen’s flagship store in Arne Jacobsen‘s 1937 Stelling Building.

For The Mindcraft Project 2024 they created Cursive, a bench whose seat is woven from steam-bent ash ribs only 5 mm thick. Silhouette is a light sculpture in European cherry and Japanese washi paper, shown at Design Beyond Things at Expo 2025 Osaka. Their first exhibition in France, In Praise of Shadows, opened at Galerie Maria Wettergren in 2023.

Recognition

In 2026 Akiko Ken Made and Jonas Trampedach received the Finn Juhl Prize, awarded by the Wilhelm Hansen Foundation in the spirit of Finn Juhl. The duo has also received the Kunsthåndværkerprisen af 1897 (2016) and the Håndfuglen award (2017 and 2026), as well as grants from the Danish Arts Foundation. Their work has been shown at MINDCRAFT in Milan, Design Miami/Basel and PAD in Paris, London and Geneva.