This Shape-Shifting Taburet Celebrates “Freewheeling” Creativity

In 2021, Cecilie Manz let the world in on her creative process during the “Needle in a Haystack” exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center. The then-newly minted honoree of the Danmarks Nationalbanks Jubilæumsfonds Hæderspris—or, the Danish national bank’s center for architecture and design—award was invited to showcase her templates, prototypes, references of inspiration, and one-off works. From among the one-offs, her stool caught the attention of Fritz Hansen’s design director, Marie-Louise Høstbo, and the rest was history. This past fall, the Danish furniture brand released Manz’s Taburet, a stool and side table based on the original all-in-one she exhibited at “Needle in a Haystack,” anchored by a “freewheeling approach, working based on her personal preferences rather than a specific design brief,” Høstbo says. 

The stool’s concave form makes it easy to imagine a plethora of uses: as an understated side chair, a resting place for one’s daily read, a nook under which to keep a cozy pair of house shoes, a sturdy perch on which to sit and put them on. The piece owes its versatility to material integrity. Solid wood, for all its structural soundness, is also “alive, forever,” according to Manz. Everything from its dimensions to its joints must be planned and executed with consideration of how they will change over a lifetime of exposure to heat, humidity, and everyday wear and tear.

“It’s always an interesting challenge to transpose a one-off project into a manufacturable piece,” Manz recently told Surface. “It might not work at all.” It was Fritz Hansen’s “skilled craftspeople,” she says, “who managed to keep the core idiom of the design” while still allowing for all of the considerations of producing an item at scale. “Wood is an alive material with quite strong power. This was our technical challenge: how to ‘ease the tension’ and keep the nice details.”

Those details include a visible wood grain seamlessly aligned on every face of the solid pine and cherry variations of Taburet, as well as a subtly convex seat for comfort and seamless joints. “I’m very happy with where it ended,” Manz says. “It should be and look effortless and serene.”