DesignerDanish
Poul Hundevad
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Poul Buch Hundevad was born in 1917 in Vamdrup, a small town in southern Jutland that would shape his work in ways both practical and archaeological. He trained as a carpenter and, in the early 1950s, established Hundevad & Co. in Vamdrup - a cabinetmaking workshop that grew into a fully functioning furniture factory. From the outset, the operation had a dual character: it produced Hundevad's own designs alongside work by a circle of Danish collaborators that included Carlo Jensen, Kay Ingemann Iversen, Harald Plum, Mogens Plum, and Kaj Winding. All output was distributed through Domus Danica, a sales cooperative that gave the factory reach across the Danish market.
The furniture Hundevad produced in the 1950s and 1960s sat comfortably within the Danish modern tradition - teak and rosewood, clean profiles, careful joinery - but it addressed a specific domestic reality. Danish homes of the period were modest in size, and Hundevad built space-saving thinking into his designs as a structural principle rather than a stylistic afterthought. Sideboards and credenzas incorporated fold-down trays. Bookcases were modular. Nesting tables and tray carts offered flexibility without clutter. The N°30 dining chair, produced from 1958, showed that the factory could work at the more sculptural end of the spectrum as well - the model remained in production for years and its solid rosewood construction has kept it appealing on the secondary market.
The design most closely associated with Hundevad's name came not from a drawing board but from an excavation. In 1891, archaeologists had unearthed a three-legged stool from a Bronze Age burial mound just outside Vamdrup. The piece, eventually housed in the National Museum of Denmark, is the oldest preserved item of furniture in Scandinavia, dating to roughly 1400 BC. In 1960, Hundevad worked with the museum to take precise measurements and reproduce the stool in exact form and dimension. The resulting Guldhøj stool - named after the burial mound - could be made in teak, oak, beech, or ash, and became one of the more quietly compelling objects of the Danish midcentury: a functional piece of furniture that was also, without alteration, a three-thousand-year-old design.
Hundevad continued producing furniture through the 1980s and died in 2011 at the age of 93. His work has seen sustained interest from collectors of Scandinavian midcentury design. On Auctionet, 39 items have been catalogued under his name, passing through Danish auction houses including Bidstrup Auktioner and Palsgaard Kunstauktioner as well as Swedish platforms. Top results have included rosewood sideboards reaching over 11,000 EUR, with teak cabinets and nesting table sets regularly achieving 3,000-4,000 EUR. The mix of storage pieces, bookcases, and occasional tables reflects the practical range of the factory's output.