When two powerhouse design companies join forces, it's a done deal that they're going to conceive a new cult classic. This year, Danish furniture design company Republic of Fritz Hansen and Japanese design studio Nendo (led by superstar designer Oki Sato) have come together to create the N01, Fritz Hansen's first all-wooden chair since Arne Jacobsen's Grand Prix model 61 years ago.
A sublime mix of Japanese and Danish design traditions, the N01 (pronounced "N-zero-one") emphasises both countries' focus on aesthetic purity, functionality, highly detailed craftsmanship and, most important of all, comfort.
The N01 is made from 23 wooden pieces assembled by hand. The structural elements -- the legs and arms -- are made from solid wood, while the rest -- the shell -- are crafted from Fritz Hansen's signature layering of veneer formed using their unique plywood moulding technique. With its puzzle-like assembly, the chair's joints were designed to look like they're barely touching, creating a pure and noiseless appearance.
"It's like Japanese architecture," explained Sato, who looks a decade younger than his age of 40. "You don't use metal parts or glue. It becomes very flexible and you try to use the characteristics of solid wood as much as possible. So ultimately, you end up with a very light, flexible and solid chair."
Fritz Hansen, a company that's not known to work with designers outside their talented team, decided to collaborate with Sato after a casual and unexpected meetup in Milan two years ago.
Below N01 Chair comes in three colours of Oak, Black Coloured Oak and Beech.
"It's the first time that I've incorporated a new designer into the family by myself," said Christian Andresen, head of design for Fritz Hansen. "All the other designers in Fritz Hansen have been there for many years, and it was my predecessors who brought them in. We have a tendency -- and I still hold to that idea -- that we think of the designers as part of our family and part of our ongoing life. We need to understand each other. The better we understand each other, the better the products will be."
Wanting to challenge Sato -- a multiple-award-winning designer who juggles 400 projects at the same time and whose portfolio includes the Siam Discovery facelift, Camper, Starbucks, Kenzo and Louis Vuitton -- Andresen decided to give him the assignment of designing an all-wooden chair.
Oki Sato sitting on his N01 Chair. Photo courtesy of House of Fritz Hansen
"I didn't tell him it was 60 years ago that we did one," he said with a hearty laugh. "No pressure."
With the company producing one simple, timeless quality product per year, Sato, with a very open-ended brief, felt quite a bit of pressure on him.
"[The brief] specified that it should be a totally wooden chair," he said. "But the rest was kind of open. The more the brief is open, the more difficult it is for the designer to work. There's a big risk as a designer, but it's really exciting. It means that the company is expecting something from me. They're looking forward to me, so I'm very happy to work on a project like that."
Inspired by the heritage and history of Fritz Hansen which, for the past 145 years, has created revolutionary, timeless and durable designs which stem from the Danish culture of "hygge" (a mood of coziness and comfortable bliss), Sato worked closely with the team to conceive the best possible solutions for the simplest and most comfortable chair.
"Sometimes you don't understand when you visit a showroom or look through magazines," he said. "But when you live with it, and when you start to sit in different ways or use it in different ways, you start to understand that all these things are considered in the design."
Sato, for example, designed the armrests to be shorter than average, taking into consideration that when used in the dining room, diners are able to bring the chair right up to the table. The armrests also slope in order to correspond to the ergonomics of our sitting positions, making the overall chair surprisingly comfortable -- and if necessary, the short arms allow the N01 to be stacked up for easy storage. Everything was tested and retested again to the smallest detail with up to 10 prototypes made for just one single puzzle piece. The amount of puzzle pieces used was also reduced to the minimum amount, with the first few prototypes consisting of more than 70 pieces.
"This is a Nendo chair and it is a Fritz Hansen chair as well," said Sato, "It's very important that you're empty, and then you meet a client or a company, and then you start to find interesting ideas and let it grow within that company. I think that way of working makes something that is typically part of that company and it shows a lot of yourself within that process."
So will this collaboration lead to another in the future?
"N01 makes it feel like there's going to be N02," Sato joked.
Limited edition N01 Chairs signed by Oki Sato himself.
The 23 pieces that make up the N01 Chair. Fritz Hansen
