Knoll – Florence oval table 198x121

Florence Knoll described her drawings as the pieces of filling in design projects. " I needed the piece for a job and it wasn’t there, so I designed it". The elegant and perfectly proportioned result will be anything but a piece of filling in your office or dining room.

Florence Knoll

Born to a baker and orphaned at the age of twelve, Florence Schust grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. Schust showed an early interest in architecture and enrolled at the Kingswood School for Girls, adjacent to the Cranbrook Academy of Art. While at Kingswood, Florence befriended Eilel Saarinen, with whom she would later study at Cranbrook. Warmly embraced by the Saarinen family, Florence laid the foundations of her incredible design education and pioneering career in Michigan. Florence continued to study under some of the greatest architects of the 20th century, including Gropius, Breuer and Mies. In 1941 Florence moved to New York where she met Hans Knoll who was establishing his furniture company. With Florence's design skills and Hans' business acumen and salesmanship, the pair, who married in 1946, grew the nascent company into an international arbiter of style and design. In creating the revolutionary Knoll Planning Unit, Florence Knoll set the standard for modern corporate interiors in post-war America. After the tragic death of Hans Knoll in 1955, Florence Knoll led the company as president in uncertain times. In 1960 she resigned as president to focus on directing design and development, and in 1965 after pioneering an industry and defining the landscape and aesthetics of the corporate office, Florence Knoll Bassett (she remarried in 1957) retired from the company. Her contributions to Knoll and to the rise of modernism in America are immeasurable.

Knoll

Knoll uses modern design to connect people to their work, to their lives, to their world. Since 1938, it has been internationally recognized for creating furniture for work and residential environments.

For more than 80 years Knoll has remained true to the Bauhaus design philosophy that modern furniture should complement the architectural space. At Knoll, modern design has been the guiding principle and this passion has been shared by customers and design professionals around the world. The founders, Hans and Florence Knoll, embraced the creative genius of the time.  Supported schools were Bauhaus School and Cranbrook Academy of Art to create new types of furniture and workplace environments.

Their approach, where craftsmanship joins technology through the use of design, sets the perspective and shapes the values that live today. 80 years of historical collaborations, with pioneering modernists and daring contemporary designers, define not only the past but the future through active, recent and future collaborations with Antenna Design, Don Chadwick, Formway Design, Jehs & Laub, Joseph D'Urso , David Adjaye and OMA.