furniture designer, born 1962, office in Hamburg

 

“Simple, but not banal!” Justus Kolberg sums up his design aspirations in a motto that is just as reduced as the message it contains. The Schleswig-Holstein native demonstrates what he means by this maxim in his works, for example the new Hookcoat rack series (for Schönbuch) or the Kvaro cabinet system (for Flötotto), a straightforward all-round furniture program based on the square, as successor to the legendary Profilsystem. It was clear as early as 1991 that an unusual career was in the stars for Kolberg when he was named “Design Champion” based on his dissertation. He began by first travelling to Italy, where he saw a well-designed chair in a large series at Castelli and was seized by an urge to try his hand at theultimate design discipline. After a few years working for furniture-maker Tecno and in the Wiege design offices, Kolberg went out on his own in the late 1990s. Today he is creating cutting-edge office furniture with the help of Danish designer Erik Simonsen, and is much prized in professional circles for his pared-down, coherent concepts. The up-and-coming talent is not yet well-known to a wider public, although severalj o u rnalists have already paid him a visit. Kolberg belongs to the school of trouble-shooters. He works away at structural details, engineering and the connections between parts until the optimal solution is attained. These painstaking efforts can usually no longer be seen in the finished chair. His first major hit was the slim-line 08 folding chair (1992, for Tecno). It was followed by the elegant Confair conference furn i t u re (1994, for Wilkhahn), the Verso table program (2000, for Renz) and the Phoenix swivel chair (2002, for Kusch + Co), along with wooden and garden chairs. These works for prestigious international companies in the field of furniture for commercial properties have almost without exception been crowned with designlaurels. The secret behind Kolberg’s success, which he describes as “achieving elegant simplicity by applying sensitive intelligence” once again sounds simple, but nonetheless requires no copyright.