Collection: Jørgen Bækmark

Jørgen Bækmark - The Quiet Conscience of Danish Furniture Design

At Deszine Talks, the Jørgen Bækmark collection represents the most principled strand of Danish modernism a tradition in which the designer’s first obligation is not to novelty or self-expression but to the person who will live with the furniture. Bækmark (1920–2003) belongs to a generation of Danish designers who were formed by Kaare Klint’s school at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and who carried Klint’s functionalist values proportion derived from the human body, materials chosen for their intrinsic qualities, construction conceived for longevity into a democratic context: furniture that could be produced at scale, sold at accessible prices, and still be beautiful, durable, and formally resolved.

Born in 1920, Bækmark trained as a cabinetmaker before studying at the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts and subsequently under Kaare Klint at the Royal Danish Academy. Klint’s influence was decisive: it instilled in Bækmark a belief that furniture design was not an art form in which the designer’s personality was the primary subject, but a discipline in which the designer’s personality was most properly expressed through the quality of thinking applied to functional problems. How should a seat be shaped to support the lumbar region? How should a backrest angle to allow the shoulders to relax? How should a frame be jointed to distribute load without redundant material? These were the questions that interested Bækmark, and he spent a career of more than four decades answering them with consistent, undemonstrative brilliance.

His longest and most important association was with FDB Møbler the furniture division of the Danish Consumer Cooperative Society, founded with an explicit mission to bring well-designed furniture to ordinary Danish households at prices they could afford. FDB Møbler had been the context in which Borge Mogensen developed some of his most important early work in the 1940s, and Bækmark continued in the same tradition: designing pieces that were structurally honest, formally coherent, and entirely free of the decorative elaboration that would have added cost without adding value. His FDB pieces were not stripped-down versions of more ambitious designs; they were complete and resolved designs whose ambition was precisely this restraint.

Bækmark’s later work, produced for manufacturers including France & Søn and Erik Ole Jørgensen, extended his formal vocabulary into upholstered territory without sacrificing the structural clarity that characterised his earliest work. His upholstered pieces have the same quality as his wood-frame furniture: every element is there because it needs to be, and its form is the most elegant solution to the problem it addresses. There is nothing superfluous, nothing decorative in the pejorative sense, and nothing that has not been thought through to its conclusion.

Signature Pieces in This Collection

• JB1 Easy Chair - Bækmark’s most celebrated design and one of the most quietly authoritative easy chairs in the Danish modern canon. The JB1 is a study in the minimum: a solid wood frame of precisely calibrated proportions, a seat and backrest upholstered in leather or fabric, and four tapered legs whose geometry distributes the load of the chair with structural logic made visible. There is no decorative element that is not also a structural one; there is no material present that is not earning its place. The seat height, seat depth, backrest angle, and armrest height are all calibrated to the human body with the precision that Bækmark inherited from Klint the result is a chair that is immediately comfortable without any adjustment period and that remains comfortable over hours of sitting. In leather, it develops a patina over years of use that makes each piece a record of the life lived in it.
• JB3 Sofa - The sofa companion to the JB1, sharing the same frame language and upholstery specification at the two- and three-seater scale. The JB3 is one of those rare sofas that achieves genuine visual coherence at all widths the proportions do not become awkward or heavy as the seating surface extends, because the frame geometry and the cushion specification have been worked out from first principles rather than adapted from a single-seat template. The back cushions are removable and reversible for even wear and extended longevity. In a room with the JB1, the two pieces form a complete seating arrangement of entirely consistent formal language one of the most satisfying combinations in the Danish modern tradition.
• FDB M71 Chair - One of Bækmark’s FDB Møbler designs, the M71 is a solid beech dining and occasional chair whose back a gentle horizontal slat supported between two uprights is the most restrained possible version of a supported backrest. The seat is hand-woven in natural paper cord or rush, in the tradition of democratic Danish craft furniture. The M71 was designed to be produced in quantity at affordable cost, and yet it has a formal completeness that many much more expensive chairs do not achieve: every line is in the right place, every dimension correct, and the whole is greater than the sum of its completely ordinary parts.
• FDB M72 Rocking Chair - The rocking chair variant of the M71 family, the M72 adds solid wood rockers to the M71’s frame in a way that is structurally and formally seamless the rockers appear not as an addition but as a natural extension of the chair’s leg geometry. In a natural wood finish, the M72 is one of the warmest and most domestic pieces in the Bækmark catalogue a chair that communicates comfort through its posture before the sitter has made contact with the seat.
• FDB Side & Dining Tables -Bækmark’s table designs for FDB Møbler share the formal vocabulary of his chairs: solid beech or oak frames with tapered legs, tabletops in solid wood or laminate specified for their visual weight relative to the base, and joinery details that are visible and honest rather than concealed and complex. They are designed to be used, repaired, and passed on furniture whose longevity is built into every structural decision.
• Cushions & Accessories - Leather and fabric cushions selected to complement the precise, restrained upholstery geometry of Bækmark’s frames adding warmth and seasonal adaptability without disrupting the formal discipline that each piece embodies.

The Klint Tradition: Proportion, Function, Longevity

To understand Bækmark’s furniture, it is necessary to understand Kaare Klint the architect and designer who, more than any other individual, shaped the character of Danish furniture design in the 20th century. Klint’s starting point was always the human body: he measured people sitting, standing, reaching, and reclining, and derived from those measurements the dimensional standards that should govern seat heights, back angles, shelf depths, and handle positions. He was, in the most literal sense, an ergonomist before that word existed in design discourse, and he believed that any piece of furniture that was not calibrated to these measurements was not merely impractical but formally incomplete because its proportions were arbitrary rather than derived.

Bækmark absorbed this discipline completely and applied it across every scale of his work, from a dining chair to a sofa to a side table. The result is furniture whose comfort is not accidental it is the output of a systematic investigation of how the human body rests, and it manifests as dimensions that are exactly right rather than approximately right. This is the quality that makes Bækmark’s pieces feel immediately familiar and comfortable to people who have never sat in them before: the body recognises the correctness of the proportions before the mind has time to articulate it.

Klint’s second principle longevity through material honesty is equally present in Bækmark’s work. His wood-frame pieces use solid beech and oak rather than engineered composites, jointed in ways that allow repair and restoration rather than replacement. His upholstered pieces use top-grain leather and durable woven fabrics that age gracefully rather than cheaply. This is furniture conceived not for a five-year product cycle but for a lifetime of use and, where appropriate, a second lifetime in the hands of the next generation.

Why Deszine Talks for Jørgen Bækmark?

How to Style Jørgen Bækmark in Your Interior

The JB1 and JB3 form a complete seating arrangement in the same formal language position them together in an open-plan living area with a Carpet in a natural flatwoven fibre to anchor the composition. The FDB M71 in multiples is ideal around a dining surface or Study Table, where its simple horizontal back and solid wood frame will complement a wide range of tabletop finishes without creating visual conflict.

Layer with Leather Cushions on the JB1 for additional warmth, and add Fabric Cushions to the JB3 for seasonal softness. Place the M72 Rocking Chair beside a window or in a reading corner, where its domestic warmth is most effective. A Mirror on an adjacent wall will amplify the quiet spatial confidence of any Bækmark arrangement, and a Bench in a compatible wood finish will bridge the seating layer with the broader room.

Explore More Danish & Scandinavian Design Icons

Jørgen Bækmark’s Klint-rooted functionalism finds its closest companion in the structural honesty of Børge Mogensen, who worked in the same FDB Møbler tradition before Bækmark and shared the same belief in democratic, enduring design. The handcraft authority of Hans J. Wegner represents the cabinetmaker’s answer to the same functionalist questions. The quiet precision of Erik Magnussen and the organic ambition of Erik Ole Jørgensen offer different resolutions of what Danish modern design can achieve. For the full sweep of what we curate, begin with our Furniture collection, or let our customers lead you through our Best Sellers cohesive, considered, lasting.