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A limited-edition Japan Series, upholstered for the first time in Sea New York’s hand embroidery, softens Finn Juhl’s sculptural restraint without losing it.
House of Finn Juhl has spent decades guarding the sculptural clarity its founder built into every piece — clean silhouettes, careful proportion, almost no surface decoration. For a limited-edition collaboration with Sea New York, the Danish furniture house loosened that discipline just slightly. Debuted at a pop-up during NYCxDesign in New York and shown more fully during 3daysofdesign in Copenhagen, the project brings Sea New York‘s embroidery to the Japan Series, the 1957 seating collection that remains one of Finn Juhl’s most recognizable designs.
Comprising a lounge chair, footstool, and two- and three-seater sofas, the Japan Series draws its architectural quiet from traditional Japanese temple design, a silhouette Finn Juhl kept deliberately spare so the frame could carry the statement on its own. That spareness is exactly what Sea New York creative director Monica Paolini used as a canvas. The label developed a new textile for the collaboration, Flower Embroidery: a wool-and-cotton weave, produced at Kjellerup Væveri in central Jutland, carrying dense embroidered motifs drawn from the watercolor drawings held in Finn Juhl’s own archive. It comes in four colorways — Raven, Heather, Dusty Mint, and Soft Linen — trading the Japan Series’ traditionally muted palette for something closer to pastel.
Paolini has a personal history with the house. Years earlier, she shot a project inside Finn Juhl‘s own home in Denmark, an experience she has said left her with “such a beautiful sense of movement and ease” toward how he built a room. Founded in 2007 by Paolini and childhood friend Sean Monahan, Sea New York has built its identity on embroidery and handcraft, balancing Paolini’s vintage-leaning eye with Monahan’s cleaner, more contemporary instincts. Turning that instinct toward furniture, rather than clothing, marks a real departure for the label.
The Deviation Is in the Detail
The collaboration anchored an exhibition of the same name at House of Finn Juhl’s Copenhagen showroom, borrowing the phrase Finn Juhl himself used to describe his own process. Staged by architecture studio Mentze Ottenstein, the space used solid cherry-wood screens and plinths built from Harris Tegl brick — materials drawn from Finn Juhl’s own interiors and from Ordrup, the house he built for himself — to frame historic pieces like the Poet Sofa, first shown in 1941, alongside sculpture by Sigurjón Ólafsson and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba and painting by Vilhelm Lundstrøm. It was a fitting setting for a designer who thought more like a sculptor than a cabinetmaker, chasing form and proportion instead of strict function. House of Finn Juhl partner Kathrine Poulsen has described the project as a dialogue between that Danish modernist lineage and a fashion house built on artisanal craft, with Sea New York’s own grounding in embroidery and handwork making it, in her view, a fairly natural match.
