Design
Bathboat
Wieki Somers’s Bathboat brings bathing and boating together through a wooden vessel, changing the associations of an everyday activity.
Objects · people · ideas
Browse the Library
Discover the objects, people and ideas that shaped furniture, from historic pieces to modern designs.
381 entries
Page 2 of 16
Design
Benno mirror
Benno Premsela’s 1956 mirror lets a square remain visible inside a wooden circle. Spectrum’s simple slot-based description gives the two shapes a shared home.
Person
Benno Premsela
Benno Premsela connected display, interiors and small objects through clear human questions. His mirror and Lotek reveal an economy shaped by the room around them.
Design
Berlage Chair by Richard Hutten
Richard Hutten found a design starting point beneath an older chair’s upholstery. His 2004 Berlage Chair brings a museum-depot observation into everyday seating.
Design
Berlin Chair
Rietveld’s Berlin Chair arranges unequal black and white planes like a small building. Its 1923 conception and later full-size examples tell different parts of the story.
Historic object
Berlin Secretary Cabinet O-1962,24
Open one documented David Roentgen cabinet: a 3.59-metre machine of marquetry, clockwork, music, hidden compartments and royal performance.
Person
Bertjan Pot
Bertjan Pot’s material curiosity connects workshop experiments with patient product development, manufacturer knowledge and the surprise that remains in finished objects.
Design
Beugel chair
Follow the curved steel supports and shaped plywood of Rietveld’s Beugel chair, an open furniture family documented in distinct museum examples.
Design
Birza Chair
The Birza Chair asks how much a continuous fibre sheet can do. Rietveld’s experiment shifts attention from assembling members to shaping surfaces.
Design
Bisley MultiDrawer cabinet
A deep drawer hides things in layers. A Bisley MultiDrawer gives those layers separate handles. Its quiet usefulness grew from office paperwork, but the same idea makes sense wherever small objects accumulate.
Design
Black Beauties furniture
Ineke Hans’s Black Beauties turns a children’s furniture collection into a set of clear silhouettes, using black recycled plastic.
Historic object
Blanket Chest 66.10.15
Blue paint changes the familiar picture of Shaker furniture. Examine a pine blanket chest with a deep drawer and a surviving history of painted surfaces.
Design
Blow armchair
Discover the 1967 Blow armchair through its inflated PVC chambers, welded seams and the shared authorship of De Pas, D’Urbino, Lomazzi and Scolari.
Historic object
Bobbin Lace Lamp, BoijmansV 2350(KN&V)
Niels van Eijk’s Bobbin Lace Lamp connects textile organisation with a glass-fibre object. Boijmans’s 2002 record and a separately dated label keep the evidence precise.
Design
Bocca sofa
Follow Bocca from a Milan waiting room to a recognisable sofa, through Studio65’s visual joke, Gufram’s foam and a change of scale.
Person
Bodil Kjær
Discover Bodil Kjær’s furniture through the space around a freestanding desk and the weather tests behind an outdoor collection.
Design
Bone Chair
Joris Laarman’s Bone Chair connected growth-inspired computation to a cast object. The paper study and museum examples remain distinct.
Design
Bookworm
Read Bookworm through Ron Arad’s account of drawing an imaginary line on a wall, then turning flexible shelving into an industrial product.
Design
BR 02 sofa bed
Martin Visser’s BR 02 connects an open daytime sofa with a level sleeping surface. Follow the shift, its dates and the later armrest.
Historic object
Bronto prototype, Centraal Museum 28498
Richard Hutten’s 1997 Bronto prototype links rotational moulding with a variable surface. Two plastic types make difference part of a repeated furniture idea.
Historic object
Bronze Age Lounge Chair, CM 35822/Van Abbe 3852
Frank Tjepkema’s 2014 Bronze Age Lounge Chair gives bronze a delicate-looking furniture outline. One artefact is jointly held by Centraal Museum and Van Abbemuseum.
Person
Bruno Mathsson
Follow Bruno Mathsson from an unwelcome hospital chair to curved wooden frames, woven support and houses designed around light and the seated body.
Design
Bruynzeel kitchen
Piet Zwart’s Bruynzeel kitchen joined standard components to domestic work. Its efficiency also carried assumptions about who worked there.
Design
Bulb lamp
Discover the lamp inside Ingo Maurer’s Bulb, his remembered encounter with a bare bulb in Venice and the glassmaking behind a familiar enlarged shape.