Bodil Kjaer, Drawer Unit , 1959

Bodil Kjaer, drawer unit 1959

The drawer unit was designed alongside the seminal desk by Bodil Kjer. The desk and storage elements were produced by E. Pederson & Sons, Denmark through the 1960s and created some notoriety when featured in From Russia with Love and with celebrity owners including Michale Caine and Prine Phillip.

The design was restrained but bold, with strict, box-like carcass and inset drawers. Using selected rosewood veneers, the drawer set is austerely modernist, yet a decorative and functional piece of furniture.

Bodil Kjaer trained as an architect at the AA in London, afterwards working for Arup and setting up studios both Copenhagen and London. She designed furniture for interior projects when she couldn’t find suitable options. “I often ran into problems of finding furniture that would express the same form-ideas as those we employed in the buildings we designed and which would, at the same time, express the ideas of contemporary management. The office furniture I found on the market in 1959, I found to be clumsy and confining, while neither the new architecture nor the new management thinking was the least bit clumsy or confining.”

Dimensions
44w x 61d x 48cmh