Building Instructions
Cross Chair by Pearson Lloyd for Takt (images: courtesy of Takt).
This may be one of the more controversial opinions I have committed to print, but I love furniture that comes with instructions.[1] I am the person friends call when they have a pile of bits and pieces that needs to be assembled by following a baroque series of pictograms. I will actually read the booklet and spend many happy hours manoeuvring it all into position. Scoring second-hand bargain Ikea furniture on Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace, then carting its component parts home to reconstitute on my living
room floor is my idea of a fun afternoon. There is a heart-deep satisfaction in making something out of, if not nothing, then nothing that resembles anything useful at the start.
If you’ve built something with your own two hands (and the odd allen key) you can’t but love it. The high-brow interpretation of this fetish for self-assembly furniture is that I
am channelling the impulse, if not the letter, of Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione, the 1974 manual for building basic furniture from wooden boards and nails. Mari believed that only by making an item of furniture yourself could you genuinely relate to it. I realise that if Mari could read this, he would probably yell at me, then revoke my communist card for buying readymade flat-pack furniture instead of building it all myself from pre-cut timber.
Spoke sofa by Anderssen & Voll for Takt.
And anyway, if I’m honest, my impulse to build-along with the instructions is actually rooted deep in my childish id. I am a child of the 90s, and the 90s were halcyon days for toys that came with an instruction manual; if you wanted to play, first you had to build. My Barbie Travellin’ House Trunk (1995) and Barbie Feeding Fun Stable (1995) required assembly, plus the judicious application of stickers to the correct location. I have vivid memories of my dad spending an entire Christmas morning delightedly[2] putting together my brother’s Playmobil 3781 Hook and Ladder Fire Engine Truck (discontinued in 1996, according to Klickpedia: the definitive Playmobil-pedia), while my prized Playmobil Camper Van (1997) also required a fair bit of meticulous snapping together. Lego, of course, is the ur-building toy, with its colourful step-by-step manuals that become more like books when you get into the really large, serious sets. We were a big Lego household.
So, with these happy memories of childhood so close to the surface, I was thrilled when I got the opportunity to try my hand, literally, at putting together a piece from Takt. This Danish furniture brand launched in Copenhagen in 2019 with three core chairs: the Soft Chair by Thomas Bentzen, Tool Chair by Rasmus Palmgren, and the Cross Chair by Pearson Lloyd. They’ve since branched out with more chairs, tables, a coat rack and, next up, a sofa. (Remember Chekov’s sofa, we’ll be coming back to that.) Takt wants to make designer furniture that is as sustainable as possible, and the flat-pack model is baked
into that. Not only is shipping a piece in the smallest box possible the most energy-saving way to distribute furniture, but learning how to interface with your chair by putting it together yourself is key to Takt’s Perpetual Sustainable Design (PSD) system, which aims to keep the furniture in circulation for as long as possible. As Takt founder and CEO Henrik Taudorf Lorensen says: “If you put it together yourself, then it’s also quite easy to fix it yourself.”
This perpetual-ness is the key to PSD for Lorensen, who founded Takt out of a sense of injustice at how the furniture industry had been responding to the climate emergency in the mid to late 2010s. “I felt it was not being taken very seriously,” Lorensen tells me over Zoom from Copenhagen, where he is sat in front of three large framed portraits of Takt chairs. “I was personally a bit upset at the sustainability collections that were being launched back then, which were really just the same pieces but with a fabric [made of] 10 per cent recycled something.” Rather than trying to score points for repurposing waste from other industries, he believes that furniture needs to get its own house in order first: “The amount of furniture being thrown out is just staggering.” A 2017 report from the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) estimates that over 10m tonnes of furniture is thrown away annually in EU member countries, ending up in either landfill or incinerators. The EEB identified lower quality materials, poor design, and high costs of repair and refurbishment as some of the main barriers to creating a circular economy of furniture. “The challenges for furniture are not so much about how can we help other industries get rid of their waste, but how do we make sure we don’t generate waste,” says Lorensen. “That needs to be the starting point.”
In order to design furniture that people want to keep, Takt had to be the opposite of
the 10m tonnes of furniture that is decidedly not kept each year. “What are the reasons why people throw stuff out? Something breaks, you can’t afford to fix it. So you just throw it all away,” says Lorensen. “How can we create furniture that doesn’t end up in landfill?” The ready-to-assemble furniture movement, born out of convenience and cost-effectiveness, has directly fuelled our addiction to fast furniture. There were several predecessors, but it was, of course, Ikea that brought it into the mainstream when it began selling flat-pack furniture in 1956. Like the other FFs – fast food, fast fashion – flat- pack furniture’s compartmentalised production and cheap ingredients make it convenient but disposable. Flat-pack fast furniture’s lifespan is limited by the low quality of its composite materials that means it breaks faster, while simultaneously making it harder to repair. Takt wants to design flat-pack furniture that can offer a direct counterpoint to the destructive tendencies the typology spawned.
Despite the fancy name, Takt’s PSD is a fairly simple concept. You order, receive and assemble your Takt furniture, then go about your life using it. If it gets a little dinged up, you can order a Care Kit to re-oil the wood (which has been sourced from FSC-certified forests, natch). For bigger issues, you can order a replacement part – say, a new seat or backrest. Takt encourages you to keep your piece in the family for generations, or, if it no longer fits with your lifestyle, give it away to friends and family. If you struggle to dispose of it, they’ll take it back off your hands, fix it up and give it a new lease of life. Pieces are deliberately made of mostly mono-materials such as wood and steel, so that if it’s truly beyond salvaging,[3] then each component part can be easily recycled at a municipal level. Takt also has a dedicated product support hub (taktcph.com/product- support/) where you can find resources for care and recycling options, as well as get access to all its Building Instructions, the title Takt gives its instruction manuals. If you are as much of an instructions nerd as I am, then it’s a delightful piece of internet to click around.
Encouraging your customer to keep and repair your product completely upends the dominant business model of contemporary design. Usually, the brand commissions a designer to create something beautiful and useful, markets it to the consumer, and then the relationship is over. Profit is made, on to the next product. What subsequently happens to that design is entirely in the consumer’s hands, whether they cherish the piece for a lifetime or leave it out on the curb in the rain. What Takt aims to offer with PSD is an interface – two separate entities, consumer and brand, invisibly connected by a piece of furniture. If I drew you an instruction booklet diagram for PSD, there would be a line drawing of very tasteful chair with a figure representing its owner on one side, and Takt’s logo on the other, connected by a big circle.
When the chair arrives at the Design Reviewed offices, I’m shocked at how compact the box is. Takt has sent me the Cross Chair designed by Pearson Lloyd, a design studio that’s based right around the corner from where I live. This chair has had a much longer journey, though, from Takt’s factory in Latvia via their office in Copenhagen and finally
back to east London, where its form was first sketched. A plastic flex handle turns the brown cardboard outer layer into a carry case; you could easily take it home on the bus, if you haven’t skipped arm day as often as I have.[4] Inside, the four pieces that will form the chair are nestled in practical cardboard and that grey foam pipe packaging that resembles depressed pool noodles. Resting on top is a handwritten note from the Takt team. “This Cross Chair has been assembled and disassembled (and used) quite a few times,” it reads. “Hope you relish the assembly process and find it enjoyable.” I have clearly found my people, because I am indeed relishing this prospect of assembly.
I set a timer, and dive in. Of course, I check the instruction manual first. It’s minimalist, with line drawings of the individual pieces on one spread followed by pages of step-by-step instructions. Under the heading ‘Important Notice’, which of course I read first, because I am afraid of breaking the rules and need an unblemished record of gold stars, it tells me: “Only use the listed tools. Do not use power tools. Tighten in accordance with the building instructions. Avoid over-tightening. There is no need for strong force.” I do actually have a power tool that accepts Allen keys, because that is how into furniture assembly I am, but I didn’t bring it in to my workplace, where there is an ongoing cold war over noisy power tools during business hours.[5] Anyway, I shall follow instructions and use only gentle force.
I am almost disappointed by how little there is to assemble. Just six steel screws, four washers and four metal collars. The cross of the base slots together easily, although I am briefly bamboozled by which way round to turn the seat, not twigging from the isometric drawing that the narrow end points towards the back. To screw this on, the instructions visually illustrate I must flip it over onto a table to screw in the screws, before righting it to pop in the back. It clicks into position with a satisfying sound. Lorensen has thought a lot about that click. “When you click in the backrest, it’s got to feel like ‘Ah, that was well thought through,’” he says. “You want to create a nicely designed experience.” The final page of the Building Instructions instructs me to “enjoy your new chair,” and I do. For those keeping score, it took me all of 12 minutes to build.
I was getting heavy Lego vibes from the Building Instructions, and that’s not just me projecting. When I tell Lorensen that they reminded me of my childhood toys, he informs me cheerfully that he actually used to work at Lego prior to setting up Takt. He seems to have brought that spirit of self-made play with him. “When you open the box, and there’s the little booklet, that’s our nod to Lego,” he says. “If we can aspire to have that kind of fun with our furniture, I think that’s the right thing to go for.”
In flat-pack terms, chairs and tables are easy mode. A proper sofa that can be assembled
at home and easily repaired or reupholstered throughout its lifetime is a much harder ask
for designers, manufacturers and consumers. Sofas are high-traffic furniture that need to
be comfy to park oneself on, and contemporary lounge chairs usually achieve that via large quantities of polyurethane (PU) foam padding.[6] While this foam is flexible and squishy, it tends to make sofas a nightmare to integrate into any kind of circular economy system. “They’re a large combination of many, many types of materials that are glued and stamped and soldered together, and for that reason, they’re completely impossible to recycle,” sighs Lorensen.
Contemporary sofa construction also makes it difficult to pass these pieces along
to someone else without an expensive or potentially impossible reupholstering, or
at least a deep clean. Culturally, we’re pretty squeamish about second-hand soft furnishings. If they’re hard to disassemble, they’re hard to clean, and their upholstery provides the perfect warm and dark place for all manner of mites and bugs to hide. I am a big proponent of adopting street furniture, and have carted home many a bookshelf, chair and, on one memorable occasion, a basically new clothes rail I found next to the bins. But I would never take a street sofa in, for fear of creatures. Loath as I am to admit that I used to watch The Big Bang Theory, The Chair of Death from ‘The Infestation Hypothesis’ (which first aired in September 2011 as episode two of the fifth season) has always stuck with me. Penny retrieves a comfy armchair in red velvet from the street, prompting Sheldon to become increasingly paranoid about it bringing bugs into the apartment block. This is played for laughs, until at the final moment when Amy is bitten by what’s implied to be a rat nesting in the upholstery. Shudder.
Over a decade later, street sofas are still controversial. In May 2023, when TikTok user Amanda, who goes by @yafavv.mandaa, found what she believed to be a genuine Bubble sofa by Sacha Lakic for Roche Bobois, which retails for over $8,000, abandoned in the rain in New York, she grabbed it and took it for herself. Viewers were horrified, a minority of them furniture fans insisting it was actually a fake Bubble as closeups of the fabric didn’t appear to match the honeycomb-esque Techno 3D jersey and wool fabric developed for the original,[7] but the majority of them because, well, ew. You literally don’t know where it’s been and what could be hitching a ride into your home. As one commenter succinctly put it: “bed...bugs...”
But Spoke, the new sofa designed by Anderssen & Voll for Takt, is designed to be recovered and even reupholstered with ease. Lorensen set Torbjørn Anderssen and Espen Voll what he describes as an extensive set of “boundary conditions”. Not only did the sofa have to flat-pack, it needed to be as comfortable as a standard designer sofa. The covers needed to be easily removable so they could be put in a domestic washing machine, cleaned and put back on, and the upholstery foam panels had to be monomaterial and easy to replace once they eventually wear out. Lorensen approached the Norwegian design duo because, he says, they’re “arguably the most accomplished Nordic designers around” and he knew he was making a tough ask. Plus, flat-pack furniture adds an element of unpredictability, given that the piece doesn’t leave the factory in its finished form. “It’s a new way of making furniture. You don’t have the final piece that the manufacturing plant can look at and say, ‘Is it stable?’ Suddenly, you’ve got to make sure that all the different elements keep to the tolerances, because you can’t glue it all together at the end.”
The result is a minimalist sofa that has clear nods to mid-century Scandinavian design – without looking too retro. The spokes that give Spoke its name are slim bars slanted at
a roughly 45° angle, supported by a frame that cradles the cushions. Looking at it, you wonder why so many sofas need to go about the rigamarole of bolting PU foam to the frame in the first place. But behind the pleasing simplicity of Spoke, Takt found the devil was indeed lurking in the details. “You learn something when you get involved in a new category,” says Lorensen. “Spoke has taken longer than any of our other pieces.” Finding the right material for the washable cushion covers was a particular challenge. Wool would have been nice as it’s biodegradable, but it’s carbon intensive to farm and a pain to wash and dry quickly. But Lorensen was wary of a polyester mix with “a plasticky feel to it”. In the end they opted to use the Cura and Cyber fabrics from Gabriel, a Danish textile brand, which feel like wool but are made from recycled plastic bottles. Importantly, they can be put through a washing machine at 40°C.
Enthused, I tell Lorensen that Spoke is perfectly designed for the street furniture economy – you can leave it out and someone can take it, order new foam, and bung the covers in the wash! Wearing a politely pained expression, he informs me that you’re “actually not allowed to do that in Denmark.”
OK, so no furniture left out on the street in the land of hygge and work/life balance. But Takt also offers a product that won’t just look nice then quickly fall to pieces – something that has become increasingly hard to find in a globalised market full of any product you can dare dream of, but where quality of materials and designs are set on a race to the bottom. In a piece for Vox published earlier this year, Izzie Ramirez lays out that yes, ‘Your stuff is actually worse now’ thanks to consumer norms that have been shunted sideways by corporations. “We buy, buy, buy, and we’ve been tricked – for far longer than the last decade – into believing that buying more stuff, new stuff is the way,” Ramirez writes. “By swapping out slightly used items so frequently, we’re barely pausing to consider if the replacement items are an upgrade, or if we even have the option to repair what we already have.” To whit, that doyenne of flat-pack furniture Ikea has begun to cut serious quality corners. In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, Trefor Moss went behind the scenes at the Swedish furniture retailer to discover how they’re redesigning their mainstay pieces to keep costs low in the face of inflation, supply chain disruption, and rising material costs. Today, instead of wood veneer a Billy Bookcase is covered with paper foil, while a Rönninge dining table now has hollow veneer legs instead of solid wood.
Takt, on the other hand, has to promise quality, because its products remain as a portal between brand and consumer that can be activated whenever they need to refresh
a cushion colourway, or replace a worn-out part. The point of sale is the beginning of a relationship, rather than a single transaction. To this end, great attention has been paid to the user experience for the ‘Spare parts’ section of its website. Individual parts are denoted by technical drawings of each element and laid out on the shopping page with the clean simplicity of the Building Instructions. “When we look 20 years ahead, a substantial part of our business will actually just be about maintaining the furniture we already put out there in the world, selling these replacement parts and upgrading people’s furniture,” he tells me. This process is already in motion when it comes to the upholstery padding Takt offers for its dining chairs. “We are actually already seeing our first customers coming back, typically families,” he says. “When they first buy it, they’re worried about the kids with their spaghetti and tomato sauce and what have you, and now they’re coming back and buying replacement upholstery.”
There’s still risk and uncertainty involved, as there are when any two disparate entities interact. Customers have to trust that Takt will keep operating, that there will always be a system of repairs and replacements to plug into when the time comes. And Takt has to trust that people will keep and care for the pieces rather than discard them. For the circle to remain unbroken, people need to feel an emotional attachment to their objects. For Lorensen, the key lies in the flat-pack. “How do you fall in love with the piece you have at home?” he asks. “I think one of the elements is that if you actually hold the pieces and you value the materials and the craftsmanship, when you put it together, you’re a step ahead in terms of that connection.” When it comes to falling for furniture, perhaps it’s as simple as following instructions.
[1] Unlike my esteemed colleague, yes I actually read the fucking things (see ‘User Manual’, in Design Reviewed #2).
[2] My father is an ex-military engineer, which probably explains a lot about why both of us are the way we are. I got worried he missed building our toys on Christmas last year, so splashed out on the Lego Technic Land Rover Defender set for him. It came with an instruction manual split into four volumes – delightful.
[3] Goodness knows what kind of abuse you’d have to put it through to reach that stage. Let’s assume an enraged woodcutter came at it with an axe, or a large bear broke into your house and sat on it, reducing it to matchsticks.
[4] Just kidding, I don’t have an arm day to skip. Building furniture is the only workout I require.
[5] Don’t ask.
[6] See ‘What Lies Beneath’ in Disegno #29.
[7] Sensing a viral marketing opportunity no doubt, Roche Bobois’s marketing team reached out to Amanda and confirmed her street Bubble is the genuine article, just an early edition made with a different fabric. They also sent her some cushions and a matching pouf as a gift so she could film an unboxing video in front of the now internet- famous blue couch.
Words India Block
This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #2. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.