FabrikantAmerican
Knoll
1 actieve items
Knoll, Inc. was established in New York in 1938 by Hans G. Knoll, a Stuttgart-born entrepreneur whose family had been making furniture in Germany since his grandfather Wilhelm Knoll founded the original workshop in 1865. Hans arrived in the United States with a clear ambition: to bring the rigorous functionalism of European modernism to an American market that had barely encountered it. He incorporated Hans G. Knoll Furniture Inc. in 1939 with a small office on Madison Avenue, and the company began building a client base among architects and forward-thinking institutional buyers.
The company's character shifted fundamentally when Florence Schust joined in 1943 and married Hans in 1946. Florence had been orphaned young, taken in by the Saarinens, trained at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and later studied architecture under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She brought both personal relationships and an exacting design sensibility. Through her, Knoll gained access to Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and eventually Mies van der Rohe himself. In 1953, the company secured exclusive manufacturing and sales rights to the Mies van der Rohe furniture catalogue, including the Barcelona Chair, originally designed with Lilly Reich for the 1929 German Pavilion in Barcelona.
Harry Bertoia joined Knoll in 1950 under an open-ended arrangement that gave him studio space and a stipend in exchange for whatever work emerged from his explorations. The Diamond Chair, introduced in 1952, became one of the most photographed objects of the postwar decade. Florence Knoll also established the Knoll Planning Unit in 1945, an in-house interior design studio that treated corporate spaces as complete environments, coordinating furniture, textiles, graphics, and color under what she called a philosophy of total design.
After Hans Knoll died in a car accident in Cuba in 1955, Florence assumed the presidency and held the company together through its most productive decade. Warren Platner came to Knoll in 1966 with a wire furniture collection he had spent years perfecting, each lounge chair requiring over a thousand individual welds. The Platner Collection became another durable entry in the Knoll catalogue and remains in production today. Florence retired in 1965, but the culture she built around naming designers and paying them royalties remained a defining feature of the company's identity. Knoll was acquired by Herman Miller in 2021 for approximately 1.8 billion USD, and the combined entity now operates as MillerKnoll.
At Nordic auction houses, Knoll furniture appears regularly across 92 lots, with seating dominating the market. The Warren Platner lounge chair has reached 32,130 SEK at auction, while a Gianfranco Frattini coffee table sold for 21,427 EUR and an Afra and Tobia Scarpa sofa brought 19,113 EUR. Stockholms Auktionsverk locations in Germany account for a significant share, reflecting strong collector interest across northern Europe.