NANNA DITZEL
Nanna Ditzel, the designer who became the ‘grand old lady of modern design’, established a design practice with her first husband Jørgen Ditzel in 1946, following an education that began with a cabinet-making apprenticeship, continued at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Kaare Klint, and ended at the School of Arts and Crafts. In a career that explored furniture, textiles, jewellery, tableware and applied art, she created many significant pieces. The egg-like Hanging chair, produced in 1957, is just one such example; it embodies the Ditzels’ experimentations with wicker, suspending the user in a cup-like embrace. Much later, Ditzel created the hotly admired and still widely coveted Trinidad for Fredericia Furniture. The chair’s strong-but-delicate fan shape ref lected the designer’s love of
In a career that explored furniture, textiles, jewellery, tableware and applied art, she created many significant pieces
Victorian colonial houses in the Caribbean. “In their fretwork and iron railings, the facades are broken up into light and shadow, giving them an almost lace-like feel,” Ditzel enthused in a film by Fredericia. “I thought I would cut out a pattern (in a chair) to make this light and shadow.” The commercial success of Trinidad continues to be spectacular. Having gone into production in 1993, and now a modern classic, the chair was this year updated by Lotte Wedel Storm, who presented nine new nature-inspired colours for it at the Stockholm Furniture Fair. The Ditzels were also admired for the children’s furniture they originally designed for their own family. Their stackable, up-end-able Toadstool was based on Nanna’s experience that “children never sit still for two minutes! They get up, stand on the chair and subsequently it tips over”. In her smaller-scale creations – the jewellery for Georg Jensen designed from 1954 – it was their simple interpretation of the elegant forms found in nature that saw the Ditzels awarded with gold and silver medals at the Milan Triennale. Georg Jensen continues to produce some of these pieces today. And finally, for her textiles, high acclaim comes from textiles manufacturer Kvadrat, which says it owes “a large portion of its success” to her Hallingdal upholstery fabric. Noted for its exceptional wearability, over 4 million metres of the fabric have sold since it was first designed in 1965. An insight into what was important to this energetic designer is best gleaned from Fredericia’s director, Thomas Graversen, who describes what started as a collaboration as later becoming ‘a fantastic friendship’. Says Graversen, “She wanted to inject artistic access into design. Although, no matter how ridiculously artistic things could be, they still had to be functional, they had to last and be usable in real life”.