Spoiler alert: This article reveals who won yesterday’s challenge on the TV program Denmark’s next design classic.
Last night, the final episode of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s Denmark’s next design classic aired with the theme “masterpiece.” The brief was to create furniture of your own choice, but the piece had to stand out from what is otherwise made within its category and be a future-fit piece made from reused materials. In the program, we followed the five designers’ process as they developed various strong proposals for what a masterpiece in 2025 could be. The winner of the challenge was the high-backed sofa Bau 22, designed by Aarhus-based designer Saskia Hübner, with the reasoning that both the design and the materials told a convincing story of how to work with circular production. The sofa is made of recycled materials, including old tabletops from Holmris B8’s warehouse.
When the final challenge was announced, Saskia Hübner knew she wanted to go into the real world and create a piece of furniture that could be placed in a real-life context and meet an actual need. At the same time, the piece needed to be made with as much focus on sustainability as possible — and preferably from leftover materials from another production or process. That process led to a dialogue with Holmris B8.
Upon seeing hundreds of old desktop panels at our warehouse, curiosity arose. “Because why is it that there’s no longer a need for these large tabletops?” Saskia asks rhetorically.
The tabletops are collected from projects where customers have downsized both the size and quantity of desks. The tabletops had their heyday when computer monitors were bigger, phones were landlines, and archives were physical. In that way, they were an office classic from the 1990s, that needs have since outgrown.
This led Saskia on the path to creating a masterpiece, where the tabletops were repurposed and reused in their existing context — just in a contemporary format. And so Bau 22 came life. “Our workplaces are changing; we need flexible, comfortable, and smaller workspaces,” Saskia says.
Studies show that since 2021 alone, areas in offices designated for individual work such as desks have dropped by 19%, while spaces for collaboration have grown by as much as 44%.¹ Therefore, Saskia chose a high-backed sofa designed for informal 1:1s, coffee meetings, and individual focus time in softer, more shielded surroundings. The sofa is built by slicing the tabletops into strips, thereby making the most out of the material.
About Bau 22, Saskia says: “The desktop panels are the foundation for a comfortable, innovative workspace. They are lacquered, but not repaired, so they retain their original patina and history. This way, every piece gets a unique expression. The padding is made from leftovers from carpet production in Western Jutland, that are pressed into hard and soft boards. The textile is Re-wool, which is based on recycled wool.”
Bau 22’s form is inspired by Saskia’s German background and the Bauhaus period, where a number of designers and architects became known for combining craftsmanship and mass production with the aim of creating functional, simple, and aesthetic everyday objects. At the same time, Bau 22 stands out in the office landscape and — with its red color — is a bold take on how a former office classic can be reimagined and transformed into a new one.
You can experience Bau 22 on May 8, 2025, at Trends & Traditions in Lokomotivværkstedet, where you can also attend a talk with Saskia Hübner and the show’s two judges, Pil Bredahl and Kasper Salto.
1CBRE 2023
Photo: Nicolai Skov
