DesignerDanish
Jens Juul Eilersen
3 active items
The Eilersen story begins with wheels, not cushions. In 1895, Niels Eilersen founded a carriage-building workshop in Stensby, Denmark, becoming the first craftsman in the country to use steam to bend wood - a technique that gave the royal hunting carriages of the period their distinctive curves. When the automobile made horse-drawn carriages redundant, the workshop shifted to handcrafted car and bus bodies. Then in 1934, the factory burned to the ground, and the family used the forced pause to redirect entirely: from that point on, Eilersen made upholstered furniture.
Jens Juul Eilersen was born in 1938 into this craft lineage, the fourth generation of a family whose relationship with materials and form had already spanned over four decades of reinvention. He began working in the family workshop at age 22, learning upholstery construction from the inside out - how foam responds to compression over years of use, how a spring system distributes weight, how fabric tensioning affects a silhouette. These weren't abstract design considerations for him; they were technical problems he encountered daily on the workshop floor.
His first sofa design, the Stratos, appeared in 1979, and it announced his sensibility clearly: clean horizontal profiles, visible structural legs, and a refusal to pile on decorative detail. The Alamo and Arizona followed, each developing the same vocabulary of restraint and functional clarity. The Control lounger, adjustable and fitted with castors for easy repositioning, showed his interest in furniture that adapts to the user rather than demanding accommodation. The Zenith sofa, with its low-slung 64 cm profile and precisely proportioned arms, became one of the company's most enduring production pieces.
Eilersen furniture is produced in Denmark using high-grade nozag steel springs with a 20 mm pitch and 40 mm width, foam shaped by hand on individual frames, and fabrics cut and sewn in-house before inspection. The company has collaborated with designers beyond the family - Illum Wikkelsoe and Erik Worts contributed significantly in earlier decades - but Jens Juul Eilersen's designs have remained the backbone of the catalogue. The company received a nomination for the Danish Bo Bedre and Boligmagasinet design award in the category of most innovative presentation at 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen.
At Nordic auction houses, Eilersen sofas appear consistently through Bukowskis Stockholm and Stockholms Auktionsverk, with 30 recorded lots spanning sofas, seating groups, and chairs. The highest result in the database is a four-seater Ash sofa with footstool that achieved 36,000 DKK, followed by a pair of Control chaiselongues at 13,500 DKK. The Zenith, Lift, and Juul 701 models all appear in the Swedish auction record, with prices ranging from 5,000 to 9,500 SEK, confirming steady collector interest in his production from the late 1970s onward.