The Story of Knoll International
Furniture Design Co. Famous For Creating Iconic Sculptural Pieces
Florence and Hans Knoll used their love of architectural design and friendships with Bauhaus architects to create one of the world's premier interior design houses.
The company that Florence Knoll Bassett started with her husband, Hans, in 1946, is still one of the most influential design houses in the world, and the third largest manufacturer of custom furniture.
Florence reconfigured the way we think of office space by insisting that functional design should always trump superfluous decoration.
Space Planner Florence Knoll Meets Furniture Designer Hans Knoll
The story of Knoll International is fundamentally a story of architecture. In 1943 when novelist Ayn Rand’s own story of architecture, The Fountainhead, was published, a young woman from Michigan named Florence Schust began working as a part-time interior space planner for a furniture designer and salesman named Hans Knoll.
A native of Stuttgart, Germany, Hans was the son of furniture manufacturer Walter C. Knoll, who made early Bauhaus furniture for Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the same three who ultimately came to play a role in Florence’s development.
Hans broke from his authoritarian father and started his own interior design company in England. After moving to New York, he began the Hans G. Knoll Furniture Company in 1938. Having been influenced not only by his father’s work but by the new wave of German industrial design in general, Knoll knew he wanted to make, as his father had, modern furniture for modern buildings.
The Knolls Create and Expand Knoll Associates
Three years later, the design duo married and incorporated as Knoll Associates. Hans, a charming and relentless salesman, took over the business aspects, opening manufacturing plants in rural Pennsylvania and offices throughout the country and worldwide, while Florence gradually took complete control of every aspect of the design, from the graphics of the company letterhead and business cards to the smallest details of a new client’s offices.
Both had great connections; through their friendship with Howard Meyers, editor of Architectural Forum, for example, they got a commission to design the Rockefeller offices at the top of New York’s Rockefeller Plaza.
Florence Knoll Revolutionizes the Industry
Florence instituted several novelties that seem obvious today but were unheard of at the time. She credited her designers by name and paid them royalties, a degree of respect that owed something to her many personal friendships with designers but more to her staunch philosophy that interiors should be designed rather than decorated.
Numerous artists and architects have at one time or another designed pieces for or ceded exclusive rights to Knoll, including Florence’s former mentors, Breuer, who provided his Wassily chair, and Mies van der Rohe, whose Barcelona chair series has become one of the touchstones of 20th-century seating, as well as Charles Gwathmey, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Robert Venturi, Eero Saarinen and, perhaps most famously, Harry Bertoia.
