Kvadrat Textiles: Danish Fabric Design for Architecture, Interiors and Export

Most people sit on a piece of Danish design without ever noticing it. The fabric on a theatre seat, the curtain across a stage or the felt panel that quietens a busy room is rarely signed, yet it is chosen with as much care as the chair beneath it. Kvadrat textiles show how a company from a small Jutland town turned colour, durability and close work with architects into an export that reaches concert halls, theatres and opera houses far beyond Denmark. On day five of our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland, the group visits the Kvadrat Mills showroom in Copenhagen, straight after a talk on why design matters in export markets. This article explains what the group will be looking at.

Why a textile maker belongs on a design tour

Scandinavian design is usually told through chairs, lamps and buildings. Textiles sit in between: they are made in mills, but they only come alive when an architect or furniture designer specifies them for a particular room or object. A chair from a maker such as Fritz Hansen, whose production story we tell separately, is not finished until it is upholstered, and an auditorium is not finished until hundreds of identical seats have been covered in a fabric that will survive years of use and still look right under stage lighting.

That is why Kvadrat is a useful case study. Its history touches the three questions the tour returns to again and again: how good design is made in quantity, how it is used in public architecture, and how a small country sells its design to the rest of the world. The day-five visit sits naturally beside the furniture makers, showrooms and museums of Copenhagen that make up the first part of the itinerary.

From Ebeltoft to the world: how Kvadrat began

Kvadrat was founded in 1968 in Ebeltoft, a small harbour town on the east coast of Jutland, by Poul Byriel and Erling Rasmussen. The company’s own account places it firmly in the Scandinavian design tradition, and its name is simply the Danish word for “square”. The company is still based in Ebeltoft, and Poul Byriel’s son, Anders Byriel, later became its chief executive.

From the start the business was built on relationships with designers rather than on an in-house house style. One of the textiles most closely associated with the company is Hallingdal 65, a woven wool upholstery fabric that the Danish designer Nanna Ditzel created in 1965. Kvadrat notes that the fabric became as well known for its durability as for its rich colour palette, and that it is a familiar fixture in public spaces, hospitals, schools and homes. Another long-running partnership was with Finn Sködt, a Danish artist and graphic designer, who designed the wool upholstery textile Divina in 1984 and created upholstery and curtain textiles for Kvadrat from the early 1980s.

Those two names point to the company’s method. Ditzel was a furniture and jewellery designer as well as a textile designer; Sködt was a painter and graphic artist. Neither was a conventional fabric technician. Kvadrat’s role was to translate their ideas into fabrics that could be woven consistently, dyed in long ranges of colour and sold to architects and furniture makers as dependable materials.

Colour as a design discipline

If one idea runs through Kvadrat textiles, it is colour. Sködt’s work for the company shows how seriously that was taken. Kvadrat describes how Divina is first woven and then milled, a finishing process associated with fine tailoring that turns a coarse cloth into a soft, even surface, and how its palettes have drawn on Sködt’s own archive of hand-painted, pigment-based colour samples. For Sködt, colour was something to be experienced directly through pigment and material rather than looked up in a system.

For an architect, a long and carefully balanced colour range is a practical tool. It allows the same textile to be used across a whole building, in quiet neutrals for one space and a strong accent for another, while keeping the same handle, weight and wear. Wool takes dye well, and in a melange cloth the colour comes from fibres of different shades mixed together, which gives depth rather than a flat surface. The result is a material that behaves almost like paint, but that has to last far longer than a coat of paint on a busy public chair.

Performance: what architectural textiles have to do

A fabric for a living room and a fabric for an airport lounge are judged by very different standards. Contract textiles, the fabrics specified for public and commercial buildings, have to withstand constant use, cleaning and fading, and they usually have to meet fire-safety rules as well. Hallingdal 65’s reputation rests on exactly that kind of endurance, and Kvadrat links its long life in public buildings to its physical properties and to the way designers keep finding new uses for it.

Performance also means behaving well on a shape. In Copenhagen’s Royal Playhouse, designed by Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects, the architects chose Kvadrat’s Galla, a velour, for the seating in the main auditorium. According to Kvadrat’s project account, it was developed in a special red colour, and 1,200 metres of it were used to upholster 650 chairs and make a matching curtain. The architect Signe Baadsgaard explained the choice: the chairs’ smooth shapes needed a fabric that would cling to their curves, and Galla’s short, dense pile allowed it to form precisely around them.

Sound is the third test. Soft surfaces absorb noise, and textiles are among the simplest ways to calm a hard modern interior. Kvadrat’s work in this field has ranged from fabric panels to free-standing structures, as the designers’ projects below show.

Collaboration with architects

The projects Kvadrat publishes about its own work show a consistent pattern: the company offers its existing textiles as a starting point and then adapts colour or pattern for a single building. At the Oslo Opera House, designed by Snøhetta, the architects were invited to design their own pattern and colour based on textiles already in the collection. The 1,300 seats of the main auditorium were covered in Haakon, a FANNYARONSEN fabric in a warm orange-red, with a pattern designed by Snøhetta and a two-tone effect created by the direction of the weave, so that each seat looks slightly different. For the 400-seat auditorium, a fabric called Interferens, with red dots on a black ground, was created specially for the project.

The same approach reached Los Angeles. At the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry and home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the seating is upholstered in a custom textile called Giant Leaves, designed in collaboration with Gehry Partners. Kvadrat explains that the fabric’s three colour settings were cut randomly before upholstery, so that each chair has its own look. The tour itinerary also notes that Kvadrat textiles were used in the Reichstag in Berlin, home of the German Bundestag, which is one reason the company features in the day’s discussion of design and export.

Designers, artists and new materials

Kvadrat has also worked with designers on objects that blur the line between textile and architecture. In 2006 the French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec created North Tiles for Kvadrat’s Stockholm showroom: fabric pieces assembled with a simple folding system to cover walls and transform a room. Kvadrat records that North Tiles were accepted into the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and are in the permanent design collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The brothers followed it with Clouds, a modular system of textile pieces held together with elastic bands, which Dezeen reported in 2009 could be used to divide space and absorb sound.

The company’s experiments extend to what happens when textiles wear out. Really, a brand linked to Kvadrat, turns end-of-life textiles into solid textile boards by milling used fabric into small fibres and binding them, a process Dezeen described in 2017 when the designer Max Lamb made 12 benches from the material for an installation. It is a reminder that questions of durability and material quality can reach beyond the life of the fabric itself.

Kvadrat textiles as a Danish export story

Denmark has long sold design abroad as much as it has used it at home, and textiles show how that works in practice. A furniture classic travels as a single recognisable object. A textile travels quietly, inside other people’s buildings and other makers’ furniture, and its reputation is built project by project with architects. Kvadrat’s published projects in Copenhagen, Oslo and Los Angeles show the same model at three scales: a Danish auditorium, a Norwegian opera house and an American concert hall, each with a fabric adapted for one building.

That is the theme the tour sets up on day five. Our wider guide to Danish design and its everyday modernism explains how craft and function shaped the country’s reputation, and Kvadrat shows the same values at work in a material that is easy to overlook.

What the day-five itinerary reveals

The day is built around export. It opens with a talk on the importance of design in export markets at the Danform Showroom, which the tour itinerary credits to Jørn Utzon. Paustians Hus, Utzon’s waterfront showroom, is visited the day before, and both are covered in our article on Jørn Utzon’s architecture in Denmark. At Kvadrat the same argument becomes concrete: a Danish company whose fabrics reach other countries inside other people’s buildings and furniture. The day ends at the Danish Museum of Art & Design, which records the history behind that reputation, and our guide to Copenhagen’s museums, showrooms and public spaces places the museum in the wider city.

Which day does the tour visit Kvadrat?

Day five, while the group is based in Copenhagen. The itinerary lists the Danform Showroom and its talk on design in export markets first, then the Kvadrat Mills showroom, then the Danish Museum of Art & Design before the return to the hotel. Breakfast is the included meal that day.

Is the Kvadrat visit a factory tour?

No. The itinerary describes a visit to the Kvadrat Mills showroom in Copenhagen, not a tour of a weaving mill. The company’s base is in Ebeltoft in Jutland, which is not on the tour route. If you would like to know more about what the showroom visit covers, our Tour Specialists can tell you what the itinerary includes.

How much walking does the tour involve?

The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate. The tour page asks that participants can carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. The itinerary does not give separate walking figures for day five, so ask our Tour Specialists if you would like the detail.

Where else does the tour look at textiles?

On day eleven, from Gothenburg, the group drives to Borås, approximately an hour away according to the itinerary, to visit the Swedish School of Textiles, the subject of our article on Swedish textiles, Borås and design education. Together with Kvadrat, it gives two different views of Scandinavian textiles: one through a company working with architects, the other through education and research.

Beyond the showroom

Kvadrat is one stop on a much longer route through Danish, Swedish and Finnish design, which our learning-led guide to Scandinavian design follows from Copenhagen to Helsinki. For the long human story behind cloth, from early fibres to the Jacquard loom, see our article on textiles through history, and for practical matters such as language and when to travel, our answers to common questions about Denmark are a good place to start.

It is easy to admire a building and never think about its seats, or to sit in a concert hall without asking who chose the fabric. Kvadrat’s story makes those choices visible. It shows Danish design as a working partnership between artists, architects and makers, carried into public buildings around the world one carefully coloured textile at a time, and the day-five visit in Copenhagen is a chance to see that partnership close up.