Klaus Nienkämper Rules All Things Modern
Our look at the man who started the King East Design District
When Klaus Nienkämper died on October 28 at the age of 84, the global design community – and Toronto, especially – lost one of its biggest patrons. A champion of contemporary furniture for over six decades, Nienkämper brought on international talents to collaborate on pieces that went on to become icons. And he embraced Canadians at the height of their careers and just emerging, often introducing their ingenuity to the world stage. Just as important, Klaus Nienkämper was known for his kindness, charisma and warmth. Here we look back at Pamela Young’s ode to Klaus Nienkämper on the company’s 50th anniversary – and we celebrate 10 iconic designs.
For more than six decades, Klaus Nienkämper (July 22, 1940 – October 28, 2024 ) was a champion of contemporary global design.
He looks and sounds like someone born wearing a well-cut suit. (The voice, still urbanely German in its inflections, is a marvel – the aural equivalent of a fireside brandy savoured within a club chair’s leather-upholstered depths on the coldest night of the year.) But when a 20-year-old Klaus Nienkämper immigrated to Canada in 1960, his first job was at a car wash. He improved his English, and when he wasn’t soaping cars, he was networking with the German cabinetmakers who had arrived in Toronto before him.
Thomas Lamb, best known for his Steamer lounge chair, was appointed Nienkamper’s design director and principal designer in 1982. One of his enduring pieces for the brand is the elegant Sculpted Chair.
Mark Müller, who succeeded Lamb as design director, is the brains behind its wildly successfully and ever-evolving Vox line of conference room furniture, first introduced in 1997. With its deft integration of technology, the table set an industry standard and today it comes in countless permutations.
Like all of Yabu Pushelberg’s designs, the Carlisle Chair – debuted in 1992 – is a timeless classic.
YP’s most recent collaboration with Nienkämper is the Rowan collection, which is just as elegant.
Having worked in his mother’s antique business and apprenticed at the German subsidiary of U.S. design giant Knoll, he already knew furniture—and he knew that he liked it well made and modern in a way that would not pass swiftly out of fashion.
In 1968, he founded Klaus Nienkämper Ltd., the contract furniture company that has been known since 1975 simply as Nienkämper. With his friend Don Wallace, he transformed a dilapidated former grocery, built on King Street East in 1845, into Canada’s first modern furniture showroom. Initially, the company manufactured European modernist furniture under license. But Klaus soon began hiring talented locals to design collections: first Thomas Lamb, and then Tom Deacon, George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg, Mark Müller, Scot Laughton, Karim Rashid and many others.
In 2004, Nienkämper partnered with Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe on HAB, a take on the Muskoka chair that is as light as origami and as well-crafted as a chair gets.
Kloud might be Karim Rashid’s most disciplined design statement. A departure from his blobby tendencies, the 2006 debut is a sophisticated yet expressive collection – and best presented in fire-engine red.
Daniel Libeskind’s ROM addition continues to polarize, but his Spirit House Chair of 2007 is an icon from the era of art-design, and it’s actually comfortable to nest in.
Busk + Hertzog have worked on the Gateway collection with Nienkamper since 2013, originating office furniture with a comfy lounge vibe and the most up to the moment technology capability.
Working with one of the country’s most respected architecture duos – Vancouver’s John and Patricia Patkau – Nienkämper launched the singular Patkau Bench and Patkau Twist Chair in 2020.
An entire design district grew around the King Street showroom. Today, a retail establishment run by scion Klaus Nienkämper Jr.—KLAUS, as it’s now called—carries top residential lines from around the world, as well as contract furniture by Nienkämper. On the 50th anniversary of that company’s founding, it behooves design-loving Canadians to pay homage to Klaus the First. Our nation would be less modern without him, and King Street East would be unrecognizable.