In Conversation: Astrid Lindegaard

Astrid Lindegaard's studio occupies the upper floor of a former shipwright's workshop in Copenhagen's Refshaleøen district. When I arrive, she is sanding the edge of an oak prototype, hair tied back, radio playing low Danish jazz. The space smells of linseed oil and sawdust—the olfactory signature of serious craft. At thirty-four, Lindegaard has already secured commissions from Fredericia Furniture and a spot in the permanent collection at Designmuseum Danmark. Her "Gravity" seating collection, launched last year, eschews the familiar tropes of hygge-inflected softness in favor of something harder to articulate: weight made visible, mass made tender.

We spoke over coffee in her studio's small kitchen, surrounded by material samples and rejected sketches.

Elin Sørensen: The "Gravity" collection seems to deliberately contradict the current fashion for lightness—airy frames, cantilevered seats, the visual disappearance of structure. Your pieces look heavy.

Astrid Lindegaard: They are heavy. The lounge chair weighs forty-two kilograms. But heaviness isn't the same as oppression. I became interested in the moment when an object is substantial enough that you stop moving it. You don't rearrange a forty-two-kilogram chair on a whim. It claims territory. It demands commitment from the room and from the person who lives with it.

There's a violence to disposable lightness. The furniture you can lift alone, you can discard alone. I wanted to make something that requires negotiation, collaboration, care. My grandmother had a sideboard that took three men to move. It was the anchor of her house for sixty years. We have lost that relationship with objects—the understanding that permanence requires weight.

ES: You studied architecture before furniture design. Does that training still inform your work?

AL: Architecture taught me to think in section. When you design a building, you cut through it mentally, understanding how forces travel, how spaces stack, how light penetrates. I still draw sections of my furniture. Not elevations—sections. I want to see the density, the internal life of the object.

But architecture also taught me what I didn't want. The scale removes you from material reality. You specify oak, but you never touch the oak. With furniture, I can walk into the forest where the tree grew. I can select the specific trunk. That intimacy matters to me—the resistance of the material, its opinions about what it wants to become.

ES: Your pieces often incorporate what you call "intentional friction"—surfaces that don't glide, joints that require effort.

AL: Yes. The drawers in the "Gravity" cabinet don't have soft-close mechanisms. They stop where you stop pushing. There's a moment of decision, of presence, that we've engineered out of contemporary life. Everything is smoothed, assisted, anticipated. I want to restore some of the negotiation.

But it's not nostalgia for difficulty. It's about maintaining awareness. When you operate a drawer that requires your attention, you remember you have a body. You remember the object has a body. That mutual recognition—between human and thing—is what I'm pursuing.

ES: You've been critical of "Scandinavian design" as a marketing category.

AL: It's become a visual shorthand. Blonde wood, pastel textiles, geometric purity. But the actual tradition is much stranger, more contradictory. Look at Finn Juhl's organic surrealism, or Poul Kjærholm's almost brutal material honesty. They weren't selling a lifestyle. They were solving problems of form and space with incredible seriousness.

When I hear "Scandinavian" now, I hear a promise of ease, of uncomplicated comfort. But life is complicated. The best Danish furniture acknowledges that. Wegner's daybed, Jacobsen's Egg—these are objects that contain tension. They are not easy. They are right.

ES: Your process involves extensive full-scale prototyping, which is unusual in an age of digital rendering.

AL: I build cardboard models, then foam, then wood. Each translation reveals something the previous material concealed. Cardboard shows you proportion but lies about weight. Foam gives you ergonomics but deceives about structure. Only wood tells the truth. But you can't start with wood—you'd waste too much material, too much forest.

The digital models come late in my process, almost as documentation. I know this is inefficient by contemporary standards. But efficiency is a suspect value. It optimizes for speed of production, not quality of thought. My cardboard models fill the loft here—hundreds of them. Failed chairs, rejected cabinets. Each one taught me something I couldn't have learned from a screen.

ES: The "Gravity" lounge chair has an unusual proportion—the seat is quite deep relative to its height.

AL: I designed it for reading in socks. That sounds trivial, but it's specific. The depth accommodates the curled leg, the sideways sit, the pile of books that accumulates beside the hip. Tall chairs force you into a posture of alertness, of readiness to stand. Low, deep chairs permit you to arrive, to settle, to stop performing competence.

The height also relates to light. I wanted the sitter's eye level to align with the bottom third of a typical window. You see the sky, the treetops, but also the room's interior reflected in the glass. That double view—outward and inward—creates a particular psychological state. You're in the world and watching yourself in the world simultaneously.

ES: What's misunderstood about your work?

AL: That it's severe. People see the weight, the lack of upholstery, the visible joinery, and assume austerity. But the pieces are sensual. The oak is sanded to 600 grit, then oiled. The surface is almost alive. And the proportions—I've spent years adjusting by millimeters. A seat depth of 58 centimeters versus 60 changes everything about how your thigh meets the edge, how your hand finds the armrest.

Astrid Lindegaard's "Gravity" collection is available through Fredericia Furniture and select retailers. She will present new work at the Stockholm Furniture Fair in February.